Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

Few films in recent memory have arrived carrying quite so much weight. When Lucasfilm was acquired by Disney in 2012, the announcement that a new Star Wars trilogy was in the works sent the internet into a frenzy that lasted three years. Star Wars: The Force Awakens, released in December 2015, was the result: the first live-action Star Wars feature since Revenge of the Sith a full decade earlier, and the first not to originate with George Lucas. The pressure on everyone involved was, to put it mildly, considerable.

Disney and Lucasfilm handed the reins to J.J. Abrams, a director whose career had already been built around resurrecting beloved franchises, having previously rebooted the Star Trek series. He would later return to the galaxy far, far away for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, closing out the same trilogy he started here. For The Force Awakens, Abrams and co-writers Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt set the story roughly thirty years after the events of the original trilogy, introducing a new generation of characters into a conflict that feels, in broad strokes, very familiar. The film was produced jointly by Lucasfilm and Abrams' own Bad Robot production company, and its marketing campaign was a masterclass in controlled excitement, parcelling out just enough to keep audiences ravenous without giving much away.

The principal new cast is genuinely worth talking about. Daisy Ridley leads as Rey, a scavenger drawn into galactic conflict almost against her will. It was a largely unknown face to most audiences at the time, and Ridley carries the film with considerable assurance (you can see her in very different territory in We Bury the Dead). Alongside her, John Boyega brings warmth and a certain scrappy energy to Finn, a Stormtrooper questioning everything he has been told. Oscar Isaac, already established as a serious screen presence, turns up as the roguish X-wing pilot Poe Dameron, and Adam Driver plays the film's antagonist, Kylo Ren, with an unsettling volatility that sets him apart from more straightforwardly theatrical villains. Then there are the returning faces: Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and others, brought back to offer a bridge between the saga's past and its supposed future. For audiences who grew up with the original trilogy, that bridge carried enormous emotional freight. It is also, of course, where the film's central tension lies, as an adventure film reviewed here alongside others like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Transformers, between playing it safe and pushing forward into something new.

The Episode 4 remake. I remember really enjoying this when I first watched it. It had the magic, the spectacle, and I went to the midnight screening FULL of hope. When I saw Han and Chewie arrive on the the Falcon, I won’t lie, I teared up. But let’s be honest: it’s basically a direct remake of A New Hope. Beat for beat. And while that nostalgia worked at the time, in hindsight, it feels... safe. It doesn't take risks, it doesn’t add anything really to the saga, and knowing where the sequel trilogy ultimately went (yikes), it’s hard to look back on this without a sense of disappointment and wasted opportunity. That said, my 10-year-old daughter absolutely loves this movie, and maybe that says something. For a new generation, it works. But for me? It’s just fine. Nothing terrible, nothing special.

And that tension is really what stays with me. Sitting in that midnight screening, I genuinely believed we were at the start of something special, something that would build on those foundations rather than simply replicate them. The craft on display is polished but unremarkable precisely because it never trusts itself to do more than remind you of something you already loved. In hindsight, the decisions made here set the tone for a trilogy that never quite found its own identity. My daughter's enthusiasm for it is real, and I would never want to take that away from her, but enthusiasm and nostalgia are not the same thing as a film earning its place in a saga. Sometimes a film that works for the moment is enough. Sometimes it isn't.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2015  | Watched: 2015-12-04

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) on YouTube

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
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