Twice now, Abrams has been lucky enough to show up for franchise rebooting purposes at perhaps the last possible moment when the original players are not too old to return for duty: first with Leonard Nimoy’s genuinely affecting appearance in Star Tre k, and now with the previously announced returning group of Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, C-3PO, R2-D2 and Chewbacca, whose surprisingly expressive roaring is still funny. He has a few signature shots - a woozy tilt into a canted angle at moments of mass chaos and explosions is a recurring tic - but all those lazy jokes about endless lens flare don’t apply any longer, as they’re gone. When people shoot at each other, you can keep track of who’s running where and where gunfire is coming from this is not to be taken for granted, even if the formulas of each chase and dogfight are so familiar from previous installments that they’re more pleasantly soothing than actually exciting. Like fellow celluloid Luddite Christopher Nolan in Interstellar, he uses practical effects rather than cruddy CG whenever possible, and you can also tell. In a friend’s post-screening words, Abrams’ task was to “unfuck” the franchise, and he’s done precisely that.Ībrams shoots on film, and you can tell. This might not be such a big deal if more people were competent at delivering spatially coherent, reasonably exciting action franchise installments, but there aren’t, so I’m all for it: these trains are going to run anyway, so they might as well run on time. He’s not the guy who designs the car, he’s the mechanic who tinkers with the engine for a little while and makes it run eight miles faster. Abrams does: rather than coming up with his own material, he takes a sturdy foundation ( Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, the Amblin Films corpus) and, like Lord-Miller with a (mostly) straight face, reworks it a bit.
OK, maybe one thing you need to know: The Force Awakens is effectively a remake of the first Star Wars, a smooth repurposing and reconfiguring of some very familiar beats rather than a whole new direction.
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When confirming RSVPs for the one and only Episode VII press screening in NYC, Disney’s email included some more-severe-than-usual boilerplate about spoilers and embargoes: “ In order to give audiences around the world the opportunity to enjoy Star Wars: The Force Awakens to its fullest and allow them to discover its surprises and plot twists in the cinema, we respectfully ask that you as press continue to be our partners on this journey, and we ask that you refrain from revealing spoilers and detailed story points in your coverage, including on social media.” This is a little corporate-slimy (I’m a partner now? Do I get revenue points?), but then I realized I hate writing synopses, so I’m perfectly fine with not explaining anything that happens in this movie at all.
Abrams, Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
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