A whale of a tale
It may be a minnow compared with Star Wars, but this Moby Dick epic is well worth catching even if it’s far from flawless. Hemsworth’s character is maybe 30 per cent too heroic; Thor with oars. and Howard tries to squeeze too much narrative into his 122 minutes: the film segues a little uneasily from a story about a personality clash (between Pollard and Chase) to a story about a whale, to a tale of survival. nonetheless, I recommend it.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens doesn’t really need recommendations; it already has a thunderous momentum of its own.
I saw it in full IMaX glory, aptly enough in leicester Square’s empire cinema, and needless to say, it’s a film that demands the biggest screen available.
director and co-writer J.J. abrams, who already has two Star Trek movies in his sci-fi locker, certainly knows how to put on a show.
and unlike the last three films in this crazily lucrative franchise, George lucas’s cumbersome so-called prequel trilogy, The Force awakens rekindles the spirit of lucas’s own original films.
It takes place a generation after the events chronicled in Return Of The Jedi (1983), which means a welcome and loudly trumpeted return for both Harrison Ford’s interstellar wide boy Han Solo, and his old flame, Carrie Fisher’s Princess leia, she of the funky, cinnamon-whirl hair buns.
But leia is now respectfully known as General Organa, an elder stateswoman leading the noble Resistance to the latest incarnation of the dark Side, the First Order. The buns, too, have aged graceful ly. ‘ you’ve changed your hair,’ notes Solo, wryly.
To which, at the screening I attended, there was a knowing cheer. The film is full of sly in-jokes.
The surprise — and this is not a spoiler — is that Ford’s Solo and his old mucker Chewbacca get so much screen time, and that they’re in full action-hero mode. Getting rather less screen time is Mark Hamill as a now-grizzled luke Skywalker, the last remaining Jedi knight, but nevertheless his character looms large.
He is the last hope for the Resistance, but also the last obstacle confronting the evil First Order in its bid to take over the galaxy. Consequently, everyone is looking for him, and the clue to his secret location lies within a cute little Michelin Man of a droid called BB-8. Particularly keen to find him is a terrific new villain in Kylo Ren ( adam driver), the fiendish yet also emotionally vulnerable heir to darth Vader, prone to hilarious temper tantrums with his lightsaber. at the core of this film, however, are a pair of hitherto little-known British actors.
John Boyega is splendid as repentant lapsed stormtrooper Finn, but the real star of the show — a show which makes rather a point of championing women’ s strength over men — is Keira Knightley lookalike daisy Ridley, whose career will surely now lift into orbit. Resourceful and sexy, like the principal boy in a pantomime, she plays the heroic Rey, a scavenger from the arid planet Jakku, now leading the search for luke.
despite all the excellent battle sequences, one of the most tense confrontations is a psychological showdown between her and Ren.
It’s wonderful immersive stuff; proper escapism, just as Star Wars was in the old days.
So why four stars rather than the full complement of five?
Were I able, I’d have bestowed it with four and a half, but I couldn’t entirely shrug off the feeling that abrams has adhered slightly too rigidly to the formula established by the original trilogy.
There are so many stark parallels (what is BB-8 but a re-boot of R2-d2?) that it all seems precisely calculated to delight the huge and now mostly middle-aged fan-base, rather than to attract a new one. It’s safe, in other words. But by heavens, it’s also spectacular.