And her male counterparts are this film’s joint Leia surrogates: a pilot, Poe Dameron (Oscar Issac), who’s taken prisoner by the First Order (formerly the Empire), and a rogue stormtrooper-with-a-conscience, Finn (John Boyega), who frees him.Ī series of divine coincidences leads three of these four characters (Poe is estranged from the rest of the cast for much of the film) aboard the Millennium Falcon, which leads, like a homing beacon, to the smuggling freighter of its former owners, Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) and Han Solo (Harrison Ford). This time it’s a female protagonist, Rey (Daisy Ridley), who’s winnowing her life away on some desert planet until the arrival of a messenger droid (a cute tag-along, BB-8, that’s more WALL-E than R2D2) sets her on a mission to deliver a map with Luke Skywalker’s whereabouts.
The plot here is a basic inversion of 1977’s A New Hope. There’s a new crop of heroes and villains here, but they’re all directed to seek counsel from the old ones, a tact that both serves to elegantly fill in some narrative gaps in the 30 years that have elapsed since 1983’s Return of the Jedi, and form an extended metaphor for Abrams’s own earnest recycling of the story structure and dramatic beats of George Lucas’s original film. The Force Awakens is another of Abram’s competent, reverential, and blessedly humorous reconstitutions of an established fantasy world, this time with an added benefit of the inherent, deep-seated emotional attachment many have to this particular constellation of characters and milieus. Abrams has established a framework from which to construct the inaugural entry of this new trilogy: a search for the past that allows for liberal borrowing from its extant mythology’s proven strengths. “Luke Skywalker has vanished” read the first words of the iconic yellow-text scroll we’ve come to expect from each new entry in the Star Wars franchise, and with them J.J.
0 kommentar(er)
