‘Force’ regains original power

FRANCHISE ICONS HERALD NEW RELEASE: Stormtroopers attend the European premiere of ’Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ in London on Wednesday Picture: GETTY IMAGES
FRANCHISE ICONS HERALD NEW RELEASE: Stormtroopers attend the European premiere of ’Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ in London on Wednesday Picture: GETTY IMAGES
“This will begin to make things right,” mutters Max von Sydow gravely – and you cast Von Sydow knowing that’s exactly how he’ll mutter – in the first earthbound scene of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which opened in EL this week.

The venerable Swedish actor plays Lor San Tekka, a gnarled sage living on a far-flung junk pile of a planet called Jakku, and the item in question is a star-map that reveals the whereabouts of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), the last of the Jedi and the only soul whom anyone believes can put things right.

The line immediately sets the tone of crisis that rolls through JJ Abrams’s film in ever-heightening waves. But it’s also plainly Disney’s own hope for their newly purchased $4.5-billion (R66-billion) franchise: that this film will be a dose of blockbuster Gaviscon, easing the generation of Star Wars fans who for the last decade and a half have been afflicted by a grim condition that might be called “prequel bloat”.

The immediately tension-easing news is that it’s hard to imagine how The Force Awakens could have done this any more delightfully: Abrams, his cast, crew and co-writers have taken a slightly tattered franchise and restored its sense of magic and myth. Unlike George Lucas’s own prequel trilogy, this is no bewildering science-fiction opus, but a punchy, personal fantasy adventure that connects to the three original films in much the same way as, say, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader does to CS Lewis’s original The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe combo.

Watching it feels like walking through a familiar old house with its new inhabitants – and something that seems to propel the film forward is the pointed youthfulness of its leads.

Rey (Daisy Ridley) is a young scavenger who’s eking out a living on Jakku when the star-map happens to roll across her path in the storage drawer of BB-8 (an adorable android who speaks R2-D2-ese).

Then there’s Finn (John Boyega), aka Stormtrooper FN-2187, a green First Order conscript who absconds after witnessing his fellow troops put an entire desert village to death.

The massacre is initiated, incidentally, by another relative youngster, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) – a hot-headed radicalised Dark Side jedi, whose red lightsaber splutters and crackles as violently as his temper, and who treats the twisted remains of Darth Vader’s mask as an occult relic.

To describe Kylo Ren as this film’s Vader would be accurate in a sense (black cloak, polished headgear, husky voice) – but it would also be to undersell the ingenuity with which the character has been crafted and also the reservoirs of emotional tumult Driver brings to his performance.

As far as the returning characters are concerned, Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) qualify as honest-to-goodness leads, while General Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Luke himself are more there in a torch-passing capacity.

But Ford is terrific, and gives Solo a sardonic, rough-chinned world-weariness that’s perhaps not entirely acting, but brilliantly cuts across Boyega’s (very funny) half-brave, half-anxious, would-be-hero schtick.

It’s stuff like this that sends The Force Awakens rushing through your capillaries and straight to your heart: even more so than the beautifully styled planets (I loved the moss-draped, sylvan idyll of Takodana) or rubbery monsters, the measured pacing (characters actually talk to each other!), or the heavy dusting of nostalgia, in which old-favourite props and catchphrases dutifully reappear.

I’ll admit to crying three times during The Force Awakens: once during the escape from Jakku, when I realised that Star Wars was in safe hands; again during a certain Kylo Ren scene I’ve gone out of my way not to describe; and also during the film’s climactic lightsaber battle, which I suspect, on an initial watch, might be the very best the series has yet produced.

The choreography isn’t exactly snazzy, but the emotional stakes for both combatants are dizzying – and if you’ve been reading between the lines, perhaps even more so than either realises.

The Force, thank goodness, is strong with this one indeed. — The Daily Telegraph

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