- UK release: December 2015
- Director: J. J. Abrams · Writers: Lawrence Kasdan, J. J. Abrams, Michael Arndt
- Studio / distributor: Lucasfilm; Walt Disney Studios
- Genre: Space opera / science fiction adventure · Runtime: 136 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Daisy Ridley as Rey; John Boyega (Attack the Block) as Finn; Harrison Ford (Star Wars, Blade Runner) as Han Solo; Adam Driver (Inside Llewyn Davis) as Kylo Ren
- IMDb: 7.7 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 93% critics / 84% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
It has been ten years since Revenge of the Sith, and the better part of a generation since anyone walked out of a Star Wars film grinning rather than apologising. The prequels left the brand technically dazzling and emotionally inert, all trade negotiations and green-screen senate chambers. So the job handed to J. J. Abrams, fresh from rebooting Star Trek for people who had given up on it, was less to make a great film than to make the franchise feel loved again. He has done that. He has done it by giving us, almost beat for beat, the film we already adored in 1977, and the surprising thing is how little I minded.
The setup
Thirty years after the fall of the Empire, the galaxy has not settled into peace so much as into a new shape of the same fight. The First Order has risen from the ashes, the Resistance opposes it, and Luke Skywalker has vanished. Into that gap fall three strangers: Rey (Daisy Ridley), a scavenger eking out a living on a desert world; Finn (John Boyega), a stormtrooper who decides he wants no further part in the killing; and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), the best pilot the Resistance has. A small droid carrying a map nobody can afford to lose pulls them together, and the chase is on. If that scaffolding sounds familiar, that is the point of friction I will come back to, because it is the film’s boldest gamble and its most obvious flaw at the same time.
The cast
The new faces are where the film earns its keep. Ridley is a genuine find, carrying long stretches almost alone and giving Rey a watchful, capable energy that never tips into the blankness the prequel leads kept defaulting to. Boyega plays Finn with a nervy, comic openness, a man improvising his own decency in real time, and the chemistry between the two is the warmest thing here. Adam Driver, so good as a coiled presence in Inside Llewyn Davis, makes Kylo Ren a different kind of villain: petulant, unstable, frightening precisely because he cannot master himself. And then there is Harrison Ford, easing back into Han Solo with a weariness that suits the years, generous enough to let the newcomers take the screen while reminding everyone why this part made him a star. The hand-off from old to new is managed with real care.
The craft
Abrams shoots it like someone who loves the original trilogy and resents the prequels on our behalf. Real deserts, real snow, practical creatures and physical sets give the thing a weight and grain the digital prequels never had, and Dan Mindel’s photography keeps the action legible even when the screen is full. The dogfights are fast and readable, the lightsaber duels closer and uglier than the balletic prequel bouts, and the pacing rarely lets up. John Williams returns to score it, threading the old themes through new ones, and the moment those first familiar cues land is worth the ticket on its own. It is a handsome, confident, briskly entertaining piece of film-making that knows exactly what its audience came for.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is A New Hope, and the film invites it almost recklessly: a desert orphan with hidden gifts, a droid carrying vital data, a masked enforcer, a planet-killing superweapon with a fatal flaw. This is closer to a remake than a sequel in places, and your tolerance for that will decide how much you love it. The smarter comparison is Abrams’s own Star Trek (2009), which pulled the same trick of reviving a tired franchise by leaning hard into nostalgia and casting it well. He knows how to make the old feel new without actually risking anything new, and that is both his gift and his ceiling.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been generous, sitting around 93%, with audiences a little cooler at 84%, and the split is telling. The praise is for the energy, the humour and the cast; the reservation, even among admirers, is the heavy debt to the 1977 film. That is exactly the right reservation. Nobody is calling this original, and the people grumbling that it plays safe are not wrong. But after the cold competence of the prequels, safe and warm beats bold and lifeless, and most of the audience seems to feel the relief as keenly as I do.
Verdict
This is a film that chooses reassurance over ambition, and on its own terms it succeeds almost completely. The new cast is excellent, the craft is confident, the score still works its magic, and it is enormously rewatchable in the way the prequels never were. What keeps it off the top shelf is honesty: it leans so hard on A New Hope that it never quite becomes its own thing, and a franchise this rich should eventually risk more than a loving cover version. As a reintroduction, though, it is hard to fault. It made me want to come back, which is more than I have felt about this saga in a long time. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth seeing on the largest screen you can find, in IMAX if you have the option.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the trilogy it opened, The Last Jedi (2017) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019), proved far more divisive than this confident start, and a good deal of the argument about whether the sequels squandered their setup traces back to how safely The Force Awakens played its hand. Its reputation has settled as the most broadly liked of the three, the easy crowd-pleaser before the fights began. It is now on disc and digital, and streams on Disney+.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence, threat. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There are frequent scenes of moderate violence, including the use of blasters and lightsabers, and dogfights between spaceships. Sight of blood and injury detail is limited and brief.
Threat: Occasional scenes of moderate threat include characters being interrogated using ‘the Force’, which it is implied causes them pain, and characters being held at lightsaber-point.
Language: There is infrequent use of very mild bad language (‘hell’, ‘damn’).
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
