I’ll bet five dollars that J.J. Abrams has watched the original Star Wars trilogy at least as much as I have, which is about 50,000 times, almost all when I was a kid. Another five bucks says that Abrams also disliked George Lucas’s prequels. He avoids their mistakes here, going easy on the CGI, keeping the cute stuff to a minimum and understanding that nobody cares about political intrigue in Lucas’s nonsense fantasy land. After the impact of the great special effects wears off, what keeps us coming back to the original trilogy are the characters, however simple they may be. They were perfectly cast and drawn with such economy that we don’t even need to understand their language (R2-D2’s beeps, Chewbacca’s howls) to like them. They made an adventure story full of old ideas and ancient archetypes feel fresh. Fans of the films want to follow them forward. We don’t need to know their backstories (nothing inherently wrong with telling their backstories, but Lucas isn’t a strong enough writer for it). Abrams gets all of that, too. This film goes full-speed ahead. He grants the familiar characters here poignant entrances, with just enough space for theater audiences to applaud, and gives us new characters who fit right in, the next generation of rag-tags just getting started in their conflict with the black hats.
Is this a pandering film? Abso-fucking-lutely. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more severe case in my life. When Abrams isn’t paying sly homage to Star Wars ’77, he re-stages it outright. This even has a rehash of the classic cantina scene. We don’t get a new vision here as much as we get a restoration of the old one, like Coca-Cola going back to their original formula (old guy reference, kids). For that, it’s hard to call this great. Man, does it taste good, though.