The much-hyped film lived up to expectations and was just flat-out fun.
First, a little background on me and Star Wars. I enjoyed the original trilogy, particularly The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. I was "eh" on The Phantom Menace, never saw Attack of the Clones, and really liked Revenge of the Sith. I think it's fair to say I'm a casual fan of the series.
Still, even though I've never been head-over-heels crazy about Star Wars, I absolutely got chills during the opening credits. The beginning notes of the familiar theme music really hit me with a gigantic sense of "WOW!", and for the first time, I began to understand what a truly major event this film was. This story was set in motion about 38 years ago with the intent of setting up a nine-episode saga. Think about that. 38 years. That's well older than I am. We're not quite talking about a situation in which each of the most recent three generations gets their own Star Wars trilogy to call their own, but there's probably been plenty of eight year-olds sitting in the theater, experiencing the saga for the first time along with their grandparents who at one point in their lives thought A New Hope was the damn coolest thing they'd ever seen on the big screen. This is a really big deal.
As implied by the title of the post, I don't want to give anything away related to the plot, but there's plenty of great things to say about the series' new primary triumvirate of characters, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), Rey (Daisy Ridley), and Finn (John Boyega). I guess Driver's on Girls or something, but by and large, this is a trio of relatively unknown actors, all of whom delivered exceptional performances, particularly Boyega. While I found Finn the most compelling, Rey gave the primarily male-dominated Star Wars saga a much-needed female heroine, and she was nothing short of a badass.
As one might expect, there's plenty of nods and winks to the previous trilogies and some neat easter eggs as well (amusingly, Daniel Craig voices a storm trooper with code name JB 007). And of course, they brought back old characters from Episodes IV - VI, most prominently Han Solo and Chewbacca. Harrison Ford may be an old dude at this point, but he still has excellent screen presence and it was a delight to watch him reprise his role.
One of the biggest criticisms of the Episodes I - III trilogy was the rigid, humorless dialogue. There's pretty much no denying that the screenplay of the first three movies (or at least the two of them that I saw) was nothing short of a dumpster fire. The writing for The Force Awakens has a lot more life to it, and although there's more of a flavor of "modern American dialect", at least it no longer sounds like a bunch of stodgy wealthy people from the 1800s drawling their way through actionless scenes.
Then again, maybe the constant action in the movie (compared to its predecessors) helped in this regard. The Force Awakens is a real speed rap of an adventure and there's a relative lack of scenes that need to be carried by people simply speaking to one another in a calm setting. The film does a good job of "showing, not telling" to develop the characters for the audience. If that was a conscious decision, it was a good one.
Overall, the movie was a great experience and a worthy sequel to one of the greatest film sagas of all time. I suppose at this point it's pretty worthless to suggest that people should see this film because I'm the one who's late to the party. Sure, there was the occasional bit I didn't like, but to discuss the movie's imperfections at any length in this summary would be a disservice to something that should rightfully be considered a rousing success.
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