The SBP Archives - Your less than frequent dose of SBP!

A complaint I heard before seeing The Force Awakens on the night before the official Friday opening, was that this movie isn't breaking new ground.  If you compare the plot and characters from this movie to the one that started it all (Episode IV - A New Hope) new audiences might be hard pressed to tell them apart.  Is my Star Wars bias not allowing me to confront this "truth" and dismiss this entry in the series?  Maybe, but look at it this way: Martin Scorsese made a groundbreaking gangster film called Goodfellas; some say perhaps the best mob movie ever made.  A few years later, he directed Casino.  Was it as good as Goodfellas?  Was it oozing with originality?  Perhaps not, but in my mind, the execution of the story was so good, I could forgive the apparent "homage" to the previous gangster entry.  Keep me entertained and/or engaged, and I can overlook these issues.

The prequels for the most part were a disappointment (although I did enjoy Episode III) and my expectations for The Force Awakens was to be better than those.  No one is expecting another Empire Strikes Back necessarily, considered the Holy Grail of the films, but at the very least the spirit of the original trilogy needed to be captured again.  And in my opinion, director J.J. Abrams' did that in spades, with tremendous action scenes, strong visual effects that looked real and not CGI-ish (not always, but most of the time) and great characters.  The two new additions to the saga that look to be the centerpiece of the story moving forward, a young scavenger girl named Rey and a disenchanted defector named Finn, seamlessly blended in with the established likes of Han Solo and General Leia, and I imagine will be revered by fans forever once this new trilogy reaches its conclusion.

The new villain, the masked Kylo Ren, is a bit of a quagmire for me.  While establishing his evil ways effectively at the start of the film, by the end of it I was wondering if there was a missed opportunity to make him appear more iconic like Darth Vader.  The decision to have his mask removed for a handful of scenes (not a spoiler, press release photos showed Adam Driver sans mask) I think was a mistake, removing some of the mystique this character could bring.  Out of all the new major characters, I felt Ren was the weakest of the lot.

When the movie was over, you know it hits a home run when you think to yourself, "Damn, I'm going to have wait until 2017 to see what happens next!"  Several unresolved plot points that should be answered as the movies are released were laid out to digest, and much like in Empire Strikes Back where you wondered if Darth Vader was telling the truth when he revealed to Luke he was his father, they can be debated with fellow Star Wars enthusiasts until the next one provides you with answers.  Myself, I can't wait.  The first movie of the new trilogy looked, sounded like and felt like the Star Wars we grew up with, and I can only hope the remaining two entries will be as good, or better, than The Force Awakens.