My Movie Review of Star Wars: The Force Awakens

The newest episode of Star Wars brought back childhood memories. It was really good to see Han Solo and Chewbacca again with Princess Leia. Han Solo didn’t change much and of course, Chewbacca looked as if he didn’t age since the late 70s. Princess Leia did changed a lot and so was Luke Skywalker.

The Plot: A repeat of a prior episode. The story was quite a “mirror” of Star Wars: A New Hope with just some changes. Let’s do a comparison…

… A droid holds an information sought after by both the Empire/First Order and the Rebel Alliance/Resistance. In New Hope or 4, the droid (R2D2) had the technical data of the Death Star while in The Force Awakens or 7, BB8 has the incomplete map of Luke Skywalker’s location.

… The droid landed in a sandy desert planet. In 4, it was called Tattoine while in 7, it was called Jakku. Instead of C3PO, the droid called BB8 was with Finn, a renegade Stormtrooper.

… The new caretakers of the droid, Rey and Finn, need a fast spacecraft to bring the droid back to the rebels. Both used the Millennium Falcon to evade the Empire/First Order.

… The Empire had the Death Star in 4 that can destroy a planet while the First Order had a whole planet called the Starkiller as its Death Star with a capacity to destroy an entire planetary system.

… The Resistance have to destroy the “power generator” of the First Order’s Starkiller similar to how the Rebel Alliance destroyed the Empire’s Death Star.

And of course, the only story worth knowing is the adventure of Rey who later turned out to have the Force inside her just waiting to be awakened and thus, having power over Luke’s lightsaber and giving her the strength to fight Kylo Ren. Darth Vader was replaced by Kylo Ren who is the son of Han Solo and Princess Leia. Unfortunately, Han was killed by his own son. As soon as the Resistance were able to destroy the Starkiller, they were able to complete the map pointing to the location of Luke with the help of R2D2. Rey, together with Chewbacca aboard the Millennium Falcon, went to Luke’s planet. The movie ends with Rey handing over the lightsaber to Luke.

The action scenes and the CGI effects are astounding and appeared more realistic compared to the “cartoony” CGI effects of Star Wars episode 1 to 3. Finn’s turnaround from being a Stormtrooper to becoming a part of Resistance is quite surprising because Stormtroopers were bred since childhood to have an unquestioning loyalty to the First Order, as what General Hux explained to Kylo Ren. Finn is a character whose other purpose is to become Rey’s comic sidekick, like what almost all Disney movies have for their hero.

To sum it up, Star Wars: The Force Awakens succeeded in bringing back the saga alive in terms of its realistic high speed and breath taking actions but failed to introduce a totally new plot that can leave the audience hanging in suspense while watching the movie.

In a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being the highest, I rate Star Wars: The Force Awakens as 3!