He’s clearly battle-shocked in his first taste of combat, and even in armour his body-language howls his terror and moral uncertainty. Finn is the most rounded, with Boyega retaining all the charisma he displayed in Attack The Block but upping his humour levels considerably. The new characters don’t all get quite as much development as they should to match the existing titans. Here too there’s a sense of decades passed and battles lost and won, of old arguments half-healed and old love still simmering.
There’s a sense of weight to those relationships that is impossible to fake because the audience is part of the love - to cite a rival franchise, it’s the difference between the emotional heft of The Wrath Of Khan and the emotionless waft of Star Trek Into Darkness. It is unbelievably good to see Han (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) back together again - and later rejoin Leia (Carrie Fisher), C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) and the rest. Luckily there’s a “garbage” old Corellian YT model freighter nearby that they can use to escape - and soon its old owner comes to check out its familiar flight signature. But when their ship crashes back on Jakku he’s forced to work with Rey instead, while enemy forces close in on BB-8. FN-2187, soon rechristened Finn (John Boyega), sees an opportunity in this battered pilot and with his help hopes to escape the First Order Star Destroyer on which he serves. Meanwhile, a stormtrooper involved in the attack where Poe was captured is having a crisis of conscience. BB-8 soon meets scavenger Rey (Daisy Ridley), stranded on the planet as an infant and still waiting for her parents to return for her. But Poe’s mission is interrupted by First Order forces led by Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and Poe is taken prisoner - though not before he hides the necessary information inside his BB-8 unit, which duly escapes into the desert. Luke is, at first, the MacGuffin of this movie, the lure that gets everyone else moving. The story begins with Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), “General Organa’s most daring pilot”, sent to recover a clue to the whereabouts of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) on the desert planet of Jakku. By the end, it’s given us a reason to be excited about Star Wars’ future as well. From the biggest - dark versus light side, dogfights, mystical powers - to the smallest - mouse robots, turbo lasers, absurd alien Cantina music - this glories in reminding us what we all loved about this universe. Abrams’ wake-up call to this sleeping giant of a franchise. If you were to make a list of the essential ingredients of a Star Wars film, you would find almost all in J.J.
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