Nothing new under several suns

Rating: 6/10 (20 January 2016)

Spoiler warning (of a kind) - this is a fairly spectacular film... And it offers a salutary lesson in the fact that, these days at least, we out here in audience-land are expecting far more than just that. To the best of my knowledge, my dictionary has separate entries under the terms "pay homage" and repeat", yet the makers of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" don't seem to realise that, or at least they are very confused as regards what they want to achieve. A long time ago in a galaxy far away some rebellious types were attacking a lethal weapon being manned by some pretty fascist-type rotters, and here we are again doing the (self-) same thing again 38 years later. The plot would be predictable and nuance-free even for those who weren't around to fill cinema seats in 1977, but this is a copy even to the extent that the good-guy pilots enter that structural groove in the surface of the rotters' planet-cum-vessel, except that this time they do it very briefly and far less spectacularly than they did all that time ago! It's as if the makers felt embarrassed to really do this, but just could not help themselves. The real joys of the original "Star Wars" were 1) the ramshackle, Heath Robinson look of anything not in the hands of the bad guys, 2) the panoply of robots, machine-like creatures, creature-like machines and creatures and 3) the imagined planets, be they the deserty one, the frozen one, the jungle one and so on. Happily, all three of these features are present once again, but - although effects have obviously moved on - it is hard to say that the achievement is greater in 2016. Certainly the new "weird creatures in the bar" effort does not better the "Cantina Band" scene of old, which was also interesting musically. In turn, the dull and at times wearisome message of the original Star Wars - that new technology is bad, while old-fashioned mysterious powers are divine, and cobbled-together stuff is OK, has sadly not been diluted by the passing of the decades. And, while Max von Sydow has the clout to satisfy our unassuaged appetite for the late, great Alec Guinness, he has far too little to say or do in this movie (another mistaken piece of homage-paying). The new Vader-types are not a patch on the original, and the chief rotters do not have the power to charm and repel at one and the same time that Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin had back then, irrespective of how few lines he actually got to utter. Otherwise, the scenes from within the enemy's control room are the spitting image of those from 1977. And this brings us to the last suite of wrong assumptions made in this film. When the late and lamented Leonard Nimoy as Spock pulled down his hood and revealed his identity in a new Star Trek movie, we the audience mostly had a genuine lump in our throats, for ST inspires, not just some kind of a shallow teen crush, but genuine love and devoted affection. In contrast, when Luke Skywalker pulls back his hood in this movie, the underwhelming nature of the revelation is palpable, and made all the more so by the fact that the character cannot even bring himself to say anything! With the best will in the world, Mark Hamill was not a titan of the screen, nor Carrie Fisher, for that matter. So bringing them back so we can all say "aaah" does not work as effectively as the makers would like to hope. Harrison Ford's Han Solo was the sarcastic and unwilling one who went around scowling with a kind of walking fireside rug as a sidekick - and all of those things remain true, but Ford at least has a degree of magnetism that allows him to dominate certain scenes - and in a few ways the personality of his character HAS modified a bit. Our two new heroes who both get to "feel the Force" are actually interesting enough, and display a degree of chemistry, so all credit to Brits John Boyega and Daisy Ridley for giving us something new to deal with, and a modicum of interesting storyline given his change of heart and side and her reluctance to get involved overwhelmed by the need to do so. They are easy on the eye also, and many parts of the film are of course good to look at - at times even truly exquisite! But then, nobody ever (in 1977 or 2016) accused the Star Wars series of being short on clever design ideas. A hint of new plot would be nice, though.