star wars movie the force awakens full movie

When the film clicks, it’s derivative and zesty.

(The data comes from Max von Sydow, in a role so brief it seems concocted simply to include an actor as formidable and sage as the original trilogy’s Alec Guinness.)

General Leia (Carrie Fisher)-that is, the general formerly known as Princess-dispatches her cockiest Resistance fighter jock, Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), to secure information about Luke’s whereabouts. It hinges on the search for Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), whose abrupt retirement from training a next generation of Jedi, followed by his sudden disappearance, helped create a new surge in the Dark Side and the rise of the First Order. Written by Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan (who also wrote The Empire Strikes Back), based on earlier work by Michael Arndt ( Toy Story 3), the movie is shrewdly if prosaically constructed to bridge the series’ past and future. Later, when the cagy, wizened pirate queen Maz Kanata (Lupita Nyong’o, captivating but unrecognizable in a digital part), advises her to look ahead, not back, she’s already leaning forward. Abandoned on the desert planet of Jakku at age 5, she’s waited for her family’s return ever since, scratching each passing day on her wall like a prisoner marking time in a cell. Like everyone else in this sequel (episode seven in the series, set three decades past Return of the Jedi), Rey arrives on the scene with a ton of baggage, but she carries hers lightly. No one can best her at life-or-death games of “who blinks first.” As the movie powers its way across another galaxy-spanning spasm in the balance of Good and Evil, Ridley responds to the cosmic fascism of the First Order and the stirring heroics of the Resistance with scintillating intensity. It’s no spoiler to say that the Force is strong within her, and it’s no disrespect to her cast-mates to say that her presence elevates the movie. Abrams, puts a vast, diverse ensemble through Tilt-A-Whirl combinations of centrifugal and gravitational force. Her fresh, go-get-’em character gives audiences an emotional focus while the movie’s director, J.J. She supplies the heady new wine for a bottled-up, 38-year-old franchise. As the desert scavenger Rey, British actress Daisy Ridley unleashes a talent that flashes like a beacon amid the enjoyable clatter of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Star wars movie the force awakens full movie