MOVIE REVIEW
movie review :
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
T
he big news about Star Wars: The Force Awakens is - spoiler alert - that it's good! Despite the
prerelease hype, it won't save the world, not even
Hollywood, but it seamlessly balances cozy favorites Harrison Ford, ladies and gentlemen - and new kinetic
wows along with some of the niceties that went missing
as the series grew into a phenomenon, most crucially a
scale and a sensibility that is rooted in the human. It has
the usual toy-store-ready gizmos and critters, but it also
has appealingly imperfect men and women whose blunders and victories, decency and goofiness remind you
that a pop mythology like Star Wars needs more than
old gods to sustain it. J J Abrams, the director of The
Force Awakens, may not have the makings of a god or
an empire builder like George Lucas, but he turns out to
be what this stagnant franchise needs: a Star Wars superfan and pop culture savant. Given that the fans have
been doing much of the heavy lifting for a while, holding
up the franchise even as the filmmakers let them down
with some titanic clunkers (Attack of the Clones - why,
George, why?), it seems fitting that the new film was directed by one of their own. Abrams was 11 when he saw
the original Star Wars back in 1977; by the time he was
a teenager, he had a gig cleaning Steven Spielberg's old
student movies. You could call Abrams a love child of
Lucas and Spielberg, born to the blockbuster world they
helped make. At its best, that world taps into the wonder
that can come with new visions and realms, sending you
into raptures with earthly delights or those in galaxies
far away. Too often, though, this world gives privilege
to special effects and anonymity over story, character,
directorial vision or just a little creative intelligence. Instead, moviemakers bludgeon viewers, numbing them
into quiescence with pictorial monotony punctuated by
apocalyptic clamor, with the same repetitive story beats,
explosions, close shaves and grindingly unsurprising
saves. In these pictures, good invariably triumphs over
every evil except moviemaking formula. Abrams becam HH