Okay just seen the film.
It’s Okay.
Generally speaking everyone gives a good performance, Leia doesn’t do much. Max Von might as well be someone else. Artoo does next to nothing but sleep (maybe Artoo is the Force). But in terms of general cast performances it’s better than Jedi.
What this film lacks in performances is a power house like the relationship between Luke and Palpatine to lift it above ROTJ.
When the Emperor reveals his trap to Luke we get a genuine sense of peril. There is also a ripple of excitement when Luke ignites his saber. This film has whole worlds destroyed (was that really Coruscant they blew up there?) and kills off a beloved major character and I didn’t feel it.
Well not enough.
Stylistically this film lacks the grasp of visual language that the first film had in spades. The opening shot of Star Wars told us all we needed to know about the world we were entering. It was the Jaws poster with spaceships. The Empire is the shark, the good guys are being eaten alive. The Death Star battle had amazingly designed stages to it leading to that trench which focused us to the target. The same is true of the Hoth battle and The Asteroid Chase in ESB. This film had very little of that. Only the escape through the guts of a super-ISD had something of that level design.
Plot… see ANH same story different faces. I have no real problem with that as such but I feel that some the problem I have connecting to this film is it’s constructed in a very cynical way but in a more skilled cynical way than the PT or even ROTJ
It is designed to milk my nostalgia teets and I want to be romanced first. I felt the death of Obi-Wan far more than the death of Han and Han was my childhood hero while Ben, I’d only just met.
I love the new characters, they work so much better than the old ones do in this film that I can’t help but suspect the film would be better off reducing all the OT appearances to even less and just have Luke as the main returning player. I certainly would have seen more of Max Von Sydow and would have sacrificed a bit of Carrie’s screen time to do it. The look on Luke’s face was astonishing. Holding back on Hamill was a mistake but it’s not going to harm the box office of this film.
The new cast are equal to the original cast in terms of performances (BB8 is the star of course) but they deserved to appear in a better film than this one. Hopefully the rest of the trilogy will give them more to do. They deserve the success that Harrison Ford achieved in later life.
My hopes are that in new films, new plots that aren’t just a list of references to the other films are made so if the next one opens with a resistance base being attacked by the First Order looking for Ray who is being taught by Luke who had to leave to save her friends. I will be pissed off beyond words so watch this space. The Knights of Ren and Kylo’s Master are interesting. We only see a supersized hologram so really anyone could be behind this. I notice Kylo gets a scar to match his mentor. Could there be time travel in the Star Wars universe? Could he be corrupting himself by visiting the past? Still pissed it’s not Leia. She would be so much better as a villain than as a General.