Restoring the magic of a faded franchise
Watching the ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ feels a bit like walking through a familiar old house with its new inhabitants, writes Robbie Collin
‘THIS will begin to make things right,” mutters Max von Sydow in the first earthbound scene of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
The Swedish actor plays Lor San Tekka, a gnarled sage living on a far-flung junk pile of a planet called Jakku, and the item in question is a star-map that reveals the whereabouts of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), the last of the Jedi and the only soul who anyone believes can put things right.
The line immediately sets the tone of crisis that rolls through JJ Abrams’s film in ever-heightening waves.
In The Force Awakens, Abrams, his cast, crew and cowriters have taken a slightly tattered franchise and restored its sense of magic and myth.
Unlike the prequel trilogy, this is no bewildering sci-fi opus, but a punchy, personal fantasy adventure that connects to the three original films.
Watching it feels like walking through a familiar old house with its new inhabitants — and something that seems to propel the film forward is the pointed youthfulness of its leads. Rey (Daisy Ridley) is a young scavenger who is eking out a living on Jakku when the star-map happens to roll across her path in the storage drawer of BB-8 (an adorable droid that speaks R2-D2-ese).
Then there’s Finn (John Boyega), also known as Stormtrooper FN-2187, a green First Order conscript who absconds after witnessing his fellow troops put an entire desert village to death.
The massacre is initiated, incidentally, by another relative youngster, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) — a hot-headed radicalised Dark Side jihadi, whose red lightsabre splutters and crackles as violently as his temper, and who treats the twisted remains of Darth Vader’s mask as an occult relic.
To describe Kylo Ren as this film’s Vader would be accurate in a sense (black cloak, polished headgear, husky voice), but it would also be to undersell the ingenuity with which the character has been crafted and the reservoirs of emotional tumult Driver brings to his performance.
As far as the returning characters are concerned, Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) qualify as honest-to-goodness leads, while General Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Luke are more there in a torch-passing capacity.
But Ford is terrific, and gives Solo a sardonic, rough-chinned world-weariness that’s perhaps not entirely acting, but brilliantly cuts across Boyega’s (very funny) half-brave, half-anxious, would-be-hero schtick.
It’s stuff like this that sends The Force Awakens rushing through your capillaries and straight to your heart: even more so than the beautifully styled planets (I loved the mossdraped, sylvan idyll of Takodana) or rubbery monsters, the measured pacing (characters talk to each other!), or the heavy dusting of nostalgia, in which old-favourite props and catch phrases dutifully reappear.
I’ll admit to crying three times during The Force Awakens: once during the escape from Jakku, when I realised that Star Wars was in safe hands; again during a certain Kylo Ren scene I’ve gone out of my way not to describe; and also during the film’s climactic lightsabre battle, which I suspect, on an initial watch, might be the very best the series has yet produced.
The choreography isn’t exactly snazzy, but the emotional stakes for both combatants are dizzying — and if you’ve been reading between the lines, perhaps even more so than either realises. — © The Daily Telegraph, London
MAJOR ISSUES: Adam Driver plays Kylo Ren, a hot-headed, radicalised Dark Side fighter whose lightsabre — and character — crackle with menace
DEUS EX MACHINA: Daisy Ridley as Rey with the droid BB-8, which holds a secret
WOOKIE HERE: Finn (John Boyega) and Han Solo (Harrison Ford) flank Chewbacca