Where to begin?!

Rating: 5/10 (12 June 2016)

Unlike many moviegoers, I couldn't care less about the STAR WARS franchise these days. Sure, I grew up with the original trilogy, which I still know and love, but George Lucas single-handedly destroyed the goodwill surrounding those movies with his mishandling of the prequels. The good news is that THE FORCE AWAKENS - a genuine sequel to RETURN OF THE JEDI - is better than the prequels, but only just. Because this is a deeply flawed movie that gets ten things wrong for everything it gets right. While it's a delight to see Harrison Ford effortlessly breezing back into one of his most iconic roles, the rest of the production is a mixed bag of good and bad, of the woeful and the wonderful.
Inevitably, the special effects are one of the strongest things here. The copious use of the CGI looks better than ever, and the alien planets involved in the story are all well realised. You can't fault the large-scale action sequences, which look great in high definition, and as a whole the film is a visual treat. A shame, then, that the story is so weak and a virtual retread of the first STAR WARS film, A NEW HOPE, made all those years ago. The new villains are laughable and Adam Driver's attempts at an iconic baddie along the lines of Darth Vader are quite pitiful. The starkiller stuff is as predictable as it gets, and you wonder why they couldn't go in a fresh and new direction instead of simply regurgitating what has come previously.
The new characters don't fare very well either. John Boyega, who was so good in ATTACK THE BLOCK, struggles with a put-on American accent that rings hollow. Daisy Ridley is even worse: this newcomer seems to have overdosed on Keira Knightley performances, copying Knightley's style of acting throughout and feeling completely artificial as a result. All of her lines sound cheesy and wooden, and frankly I felt embarrassed watching her attempting to act alongside the more seasoned actors. It says something that the droid, BB-8, was my favourite of the new characters, given that his high 'cuteness' factor is a shamelessly manipulative attempt to endear him to audiences. Add in a non-ending of a film that merely opens the door for the next inevitable instalment, and you have an oddly hollow film that looks nice but falls apart as soon as you start picking at it.