Consider me conquered

por Marc Kermode para The Guardian

I have always been the wrong age for Star Wars. When the first trilogy began back in the late 70s, I was old enough to be wedded to the darker, moodier sci-fi of Solaris, Silent Running and Soylent Green, and young enough to believe that gave me the right to dismiss this latterday Buck Rogers nonsense out of hand. When the prequels began at the end of the 90s, I was still young enough to be working for Radio 1 (the station that had overwhelmingly voted Star Wars the greatest movie of all time) but old enough to know that this new series had little of the timeless charm of the originals, about which I remained agnostic.

Now, as Episode VII rolls around, ushering in a new generation of sequels, I find myself at an age so out of whack with the film’s target demographic that what I think about it matters not a jot. Ironic, then, that watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I found myself feeling like a 12-year-old, reading for the first time the words: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”, hearing John Williams’s fanfare theme and discovering what all the fuss was about.
With a film whose existence is rooted in fan culture, describing the movie is perilous; even revealing the cast list runs the risk of providing potential plot spoilers. Suffice to say that the action takes place some years after the events of Return of the Jedi, and involves scavenger Rey (Daisy Ridley) teaming up with renegade “First Order” Stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega) and globular droid BB-8. The opening scroll sets up an ongoing battle between the forces of good and evil and lays the groundwork for a quasi-mythical quest that will reunite friends old and new, and allow a grizzled Harrison Ford to deliver the line that turned the teaser trailers into something akin to an announcement of the second coming: “Chewie, we’re home…”

That sense of coming home runs throughout The Force Awakens, director JJ Abrams working the same regenerative miracle with the Star Wars franchise that he previously pulled off with his Star Trek movies – taking the series back to its roots while giving it a rocket-fuelled, 21st-century twist. As always with this director, the film feels very physical, scenes of dog-fighting TIE fighters and a relaunched Millennium Falcon crashing through trees possessing the kind of heft so sorely lacking from George Lucas’s over-digitised prequels. The battle scenes are breathtakingly immersive (I saw the film in 2D Imax and felt no need for stereoscopy), but also impressively joyous – the sight of a fleet of X-wings hurtling toward us over watery terrain brought a lump to my throat and a tear to my eye – just one of several occasions when I found myself welling up with unexpected emotion. (The jokes were a surprise, too, provoking the kind of laughter many comedies fail to muster.) Elsewhere, the sand dune landscapes have a touch of Lawrence of Arabia majesty, vindicating Abrams’s long-standing dedication to shooting on film rather than digital, cinematographer Dan Mindel augmenting the 35mm stock with some lush 65mm Imax footage. Having co-written the series’s previous high-water mark, The Empire Strikes Back, Lawrence Kasdan here shares credits with Abrams and Michael Arndt on a screenplay that is steeped in the dark lineages of the originals (and does not sidestep moments of genuine tragedy), but which subtly realigns its gender dynamics with Rey’s proudly punchy, post-Hunger Games heroine. The spectre of Vader may live on in Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren, but it’s Rey in whom the film’s true force resides, likable newcomer Daisy Ridley channelling Carrie Fisher’s Leia and carrying the heavily-mantled weight of the new series with aplomb. Plaudits, too, to John Boyega, who brings credibility and humour to the almost accidentally heroic role of Finn.What’s most striking about Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the fact that this multimillion dollar franchise blockbuster has real heart and soul. Abrams has always been a fan first, and there’s a palpable affection in his staging of scenes that recall the varied alien wildlife of Tatooine’s Mos Eisley Cantina. Just as he proved himself a worthy successor to Spielberg with Super 8, so Abrams here breathes new life into Lucas’s epochal creations in a manner that deftly looks back to the future. And it’s a future that works. Watching the film in a packed auditorium with an audience almost incandescent with expectation, I found myself listening to a chorus of spontaneous gasps, cheers, laughs, whoops and even occasional cries of anguish.
What’s really surprising is that many of them were coming from me.