New droid BB-8, adorable as he is, wasn't enough. It's just fresh enough, and above all just cool enough, to squeak onto the right side of nostalgia.īut it's not enough to change the saga's signature space dogfights to ground attacks or give us Harrison Ford grinning. The Force Awakens had to be more than a new paint job for the Star Wars saga.įrom its opening with a Force-sensitive dreamer on a hardscrabble desert world to an alien-packed cantina, ice planet and climactic space battle, Awakens is like a greatest hits of Star Wars.Ībrams and his fellow filmmakers manage to strike a balance between the old and the new, deftly presenting remastered iconography like the streamlined Stormtroopers, crashed Star Destroyer and TIE fighters coming out of the sun. Abrams had just run the classic movies through a thesaurus.Īnd it's true that a good portion of The Force Awakens is essentially A New Hope re-awakened and rebooted. Despite being defeated at the end of Return of the Jedi, the Empire is still hanging around causing trouble for the Rebel Alliance, only now they're called the First Order and the Resistance.
And, yeah, it was a lot like the old status quo. The opening text crawl established the new status quo in the galaxy far, far away. There was a lot riding on it, as it had to bring closure to the beloved original characters and lay the foundations for a new era. The Force Awakens moved the story forward. The prequel trilogy had only looked backward, based on familiar backstory.
THE FORCE AWAKENS LUKE SKYWALKER MOVIE
The Force Awakens was the first Star Wars movie in over a decade, but it was more than that. Let's take a look back at the movie that kickstarted the trilogy. Abrams closes this chapter of the Star Wars story in The Rise of Skywalker. The saga continued in 2017's divisive The Last Jedi. was back.īut that was 2015, when The Force Awakens arrived, and a few long years have passed since then. When the famous fanfare blared across the crowded theater, everybody cheered. I got goosebumps when the lights went down.