Star Wars: An Old Hope

Rating: 5/10 (25 December 2015)

I liked The Force Awakens well enough. Nonetheless I can now shake my head and say "I knew it" remembering how I was cursing the day someone decided JarJar Abrams, who should at the very least NEVER, and for any reason, be allowed to write scripts to science fiction films, was the guy for the job. And if I wasn't a star wars fan, I'd rate it a star less for sure. The movie is salvaged by the nostalgia brought on by the ol' gang, and because it's an inferior remake of A New Hope. Which still makes for a decent film, because it's very difficult to screw up such a faithful remake of star wars beyond salvation.
But, seriously, JarJar Abrams has copied the first Star Wars film from start to finish. The plot is the same. The characters have just swapped positions. The settings are the same (why does this galaxy have so many inhabited desert planets?). The resolutions are the same. There are a few things where the minor differences make all the difference for the worse: instead of a hugely impractical, yet ultimately plausible Death Star, we get its Michael Bay version. The supergun equivalent of Hitler's V-3 cannon if it was designed to fire at London from Alpha Centauri, a supergun that makes Iron Sky's Gotterdamerung seem like a decently realistic contraption. A starkiller (a lot of thought went in the name) that pretty much turns off the sun without that affecting life on the planet it's based on. Yes, that's right. It sucks the sun and then shoots it at planets light years away. Instantaneously. It probably costs one quadrillion gazillion gazillion tons of gold diamonds and can only fire twice. WHAT AN IDEA. Thank you for that, scientifically illiterate mr Abrams. You just put in Star Wars what US senators think solar energy does. GOOD JOB. I mean, "put explosives on a few columns of the installation and....the planet...will...explode" is really just about the saddest excuse for a kaboom ever devised.
So, what we get is Star Wars: An Old Hope. Old Han Solo, old Princess Leia, old but apparently immortal Chewbacca. And it's an old hope we can cling to, because the rest of the cast fits in pretty well. The force-girl, ball r2d2, the stormtrooper who can apparently aim right once he leaves the stormtroopers, a fairly interesting bad guy in the form of ugly Anakin Kylo Ren, and a not yet fully convincing but let's see where that goes evil mastermind. Although one can't help but remember how it used to take training to master the Force. Now, anyone can do it when it's convenient, and using a lightsaber competently only requires having one. No need to carry a 900 year old frog around on your back to learn a little telekinesis. Let's just jump to mind tricks without knowing the first thing about the Force. As for the duels, hell, General Grievous would slaughter these people without blinking a robotic eye.
The simple and doubtless fact of the matter is, George Lucas would have done it better. Not just because he actually did it better, since he made the same film, but at the very least because he would try to bring something new. Yes, sometimes that backfired. But it was ultimately enriching. He bloody tried. JJ Abrams is oblivious to the concept. He would play it safe even if...I don't know, even if there was no reason to do so at all. He is half-good at copying things and making them more shiny. He did it for Star Trek, it kinda worked the first time, not really on the second. Here, he doesn't even try to add anything. How some see this as a freshening up of the franchise is entirely beyond me.