Kritiken

Like J. J. Abrams's Star Trek reboots, his new Star Wars seems crowdsourced and easy to forget, an app you just closed. Kylo Ren's mask sticks in my mind because he doesn't need it and wears it anyway. He's not a disfigured monster like Darth Vader, he's handsome Adam Driver dressing up as grandpa on Halloween, preprogrammed for redemption. He's not evil, he's just young.

What can you say about a movie that was discussed to death months in advance of its release date? How about this: it's weighed down by the unwieldy structure of a new piece designed to fit into a preexisting whole. For roughly the first third of its run time, it's a nifty space chase carried by fresh faces. As soon as they run into Han Solo, though, the plot starts acting as if it has obligations to meet.

It's tighter than it has been given credit for. The problem — the problem that most reviewers have had with it, the problem that its defenders have had to shunt aside — is that the resonances with earlier versions are far too strong. These are not nifty callbacks for dedicated fans or the marks of a well-told tale. This movie is, in more ways than it should be, assembled out of the pieces and parts of the earlier ones, especially the first one, the one now called Episode IV: A New Hope.

No filmmaker but J.J. Abrams could have made this seventh episode of STAR WARS, a film of lofty ease and mischievous fluidity. Although released in a commercial context verging on the grotesque, the ‘most awaited blockbuster in the history of cinema' has the merit of immediately going back to the essential. It is a space opera of such purity of writing that it is somehow comparable to the simple, elementary cocoon of childhood once evoked by George Lucas in his original saga.

For my first watch, on opening night amongst a boisterous crowd in Brooklyn, almost everything came off as calculated, corporately determined. A second viewing a week later, among a muted Christmas Eve crowd in suburban New Jersey, went much better. Such that those three last lines resonated beyond the borders of the "Star Wars Universe"—a considerable feat in light of the craft and effort put into establishing a brand-managed echo chamber.

What can I say? Only this. The Force Awakens is here (a week later than in most of the world), it's really good and – for better or worse – it's Star Wars. Never mind the hype: if the previous films didn't do it for you, this one won't either. On the other hand, even non-fans must admit that it moves well for such a long movie, and the acting and dialogue are snappier than they've been in years – certainly snappier than in Parts I-III, the much-derided trilogy made in the early 00s.

The lack of exposition is a welcome change from the norm, and a great way to cede every possible second of screen time to the new, vibrant cast... Things start to fall apart once the action picks up, at which point the film shifts away from development to a series of carefully timed reveals of old characters and objects that each receive an extended pause of dead air, as if Abrams programmed in applause breaks worthy of Kramer sliding through Jerry Seinfeld's apartment door.

The closeness with which The Force Awakens follows the template of A New Hope can be explained away as less a failure of nerve than a structural illustration of the basic premise of the Star Wars universe... The déjà vu of Abrams's film suits a universe wherein Jedi and the Dark Side are locked in continual and eternal combat, a perpetual Star Wars for perpetual Star Peace.

It takes a very smart storyteller to come up with the very simple idea that makes this movie work so well. J.J. Abrams understood the only way to unfuck the franchise—or the myth, if you really believe it's a myth—was to go back to First Principles. So he remade Star Wars, or, A New Hope if you're like that. And did a damn good job of it.

...As with so much about this enjoyable, fast-paced, incomplete movie, it's a dynamic that's set up but left unresolved.

The movie can't sustain its playfulness—or its tension, either. Abrams is too busy trying to roll the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back into one two-hour-and-15-minute movie. He combines the world building (and world destroying) of the first film, its Second World War–like aerial combat and anti-fascist derring-do, with the psychodynamics of the second one.

The film delivers mainly on a promise to be fun, although some new viewers will certainly be marked by this new iteration in much the same profound way as many have been by previous ones. It's full of fan-service details and familiar characters upon which any present emotional resonance hangs... It's a Star Wars movie made in 2015, almost exactly what you'd expect for better or worse, and a pretty good one.