by A number of people have noticed my lack of commentary in review over the similarity of ‘The Force Awakens’ to ‘A New Hope’. I maintain the new film did almost everything it needed to. It could have drawn from some of the best of the Expanded Universe novels but to do so would have required a recasting of Luke, Leia and Han which would not have been an acceptable outcome. it could not in the wake of the prequels do anything other than hark back to its roots.
Two relevant links:
Enough about Star Wars, I’m keen to get back to my book and I have more drawing to do prior. I’m trying to knock out the first complete terrain card. Probably not going to make it tonight.
It’s been another stinking hot day, greatly limiting what can be accomplished during the heat of the day. Some paving done this afternoon, that slab is all but done.
L starts a 10 day class course of swimming lessons tomorrow with me as the parent helper.
After reading and hearing so many good reviews Chris and I went to see The Force Awakens, still with low expectations which were, I’m afraid, duly fulfilled. The film was fun to watch while it was going on but hardly bears reflection being nothing more than a cobbled together collection of scenes from the first three, except slightly bigger. I get the sense that the general approval given the film comes in two strands; firstly, relief that it wasn’t any of the prequels and, secondly, that it appealed to a deep sense of nostalgia carried forward from childhood about the franchise, playing to that with familiar scenes and characters.
But really the film offered us nothing new (except for a female lead, now that was a good choice, but even she does nothing new, she just recycles Luke’s journey but in a girl’s body), every scene was as if picked from one of the first three films and inserted into the story, often without any credible narrative link: the vast desert space with the dead starships, the cute droid with the essential message, the return of the millennium falcon, I won’t even go to the arrival of Han Solo, but then, whoah! Here’s Darth Vader again, or someone dressed just like him (even though he doesn’t need to cover himself up in a mask to disguise some hideous disfigurement) who, wow, wants to blow up whole star systems from a death star which is exactly the same as the other one except, wait for it, it’s bigger, and, wow, he does blow up star systems, billions, as you said in your blog the other day, dead for no reason except to try to show us that he’s nasty, I mean to say, what do we do next to up the level of evil? Destroy the universe? And, and, no, don’t go there, okay, I can’t resist, he has father problems, in fact this whole universe wide drama is actually a very small story about killing dad and finding the force within. Next episode will have the female star learning to use the force on an island off the coast of Ireland and the structure of it will be very similar to what Yoda did with Luke all those years ago.
Maybe you get my drift… what I’m saying is that there’s no new story-telling going on here. It’s forty years on but all the characters or their new iterations are locked into the same situations, even the same damn machines (no technological innovation in this world, just better graphics). I know that there are ‘no new stories’ in the world, but there’s a lot of variations in those that exist, several billion in fact and it would be possible to make an interesting sc-fi film with these characters and their struggles, it’s just this one wasn’t it.