Solid movie as expected

Rating: 10/10 (16 January 2016)

(This review is a rough script of a review video so it isn't structured to be read as a review and has been cut down to allow for the 1000 word IMDb limit but still gets the point across.You can see the video version that this was originally intended for here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=babmKS6NJS8)
Star wars the force awakens is the 7th episode in the star wars series taking place 30 years after return of the Jedi Cast John Boyega could be the new Douglas Bubbletrousers he was that good. Hes a really versatile actor too, he was great in the action sequences, the more emotional parts and even had his share of comedy, I'm not sure what it was about the joke he had on Star Killer Base near the end but I was pissing myself laughing. His facial expressions and everything man, he really made that end scene with Kylo Ren with the emotion and passion he puts into his performance, really 10/10. Speaking of Kylo Ren, he was played by Adam Driver and again, he was done really well. The character himself is a really solid character. For a reason that is revealed in the movie but I won't mention here for spoiler sake, he has a bit of a confliction between the light and the dark and that is portrayed really well. You can feel that he really is in some turmoil and to be honest he seems like a bit of a psychopath, excluding the fact he's part of a band of murders trying to take over the galaxy, most star wars villains have some kind of composure about them but it's clear that Ren still has a lot to learn from his random outbursts and draw to the good and will progress as a bad guy and force user as the trilogy goes on. There is also a really interesting story behind him that will hopefully be further explained and elaborated in the coming movies about his training with Luke and what it was that made him go bad. The Force Awakens also saw Harrison Ford reprise his role of Han Solo and as expected, he was great. No real need to talk about Ford as an actor because we all know how good he is but I can talk about Solo. He had a much more central role than I expected him to and was pretty much in the whole movie. Pretty much the same with Carrie Fisher as Leia, she had a bigger role than expected but played the character the way we all expected her to play it. Last but not least for the main cast is Daisy Ridley as Rey, who is the pretty much the main protagonist of the film. Ridley has pretty much 0 experience with movie acting and definitely no experience with a movie on this scale and of this complexity but she was really, really good considering. Now Rey starts as a scavenger on Jakku, she encounters Finn and that's how she got involved. There is a bit of mystery about her as she mentions she is waiting for her family, which has been speculated to be Luke Skywalker as her dad, but let's face it, even if he isn't "though he probably is", it's a Star Wars movie and she will almost definitely be connected to the known characters somehow. There was Andy Serkis as Snoke which I thought was cool, we now have a major star wars villain who is also Gollum, King Kong AND Caesar from planet of the apes "what a voice that man has". Poe Dameron played by Oscar Isaac as well, he is the resistances best pilot and just a guy you really want to have a pint with. He is a witty guy, seems pretty fearless too, openly mocking and having a joke with Kylo Ren after he's just told his goons to kill a town of people and murdered a guy to get something that Poe himself now has. I hope we get to see more of him in the coming movies. Max Von Sydow popped up right at the start too which was kinda cool, the crawl referred to him as 'an old ally' and I was expecting someone I knew to appear but it was just Lor San Tekka who to my knowledge has never been mentioned in any of the 6 other episodes which I thought was a bit strange. The visual effects are obviously really good, you could easily think they actually built all the ships and actually filmed it all in space. The best big of cinematography is in my mind the lightsaber fight at the end. In my opinion, this was probably the best lightsaber sequence in all of the star wars movies. It was the perfect mix of realistic and CGI, a lot less CGI than the prequels and far more realistic than any. The way it wasn't perfectly choreographed and the way they cut into the trees and used the environment, it was really gritty and real feeling, the whole scene just comes together perfectly. the scenes right at the start on Jakku with the old Star Destroyer, that was amazing. It looked great. there's also the scene where Rey sits down to eat and the camera jumps out and it shows that she's sitting on a broken Imperial Walker and it's just such a brilliant shot. Well, I've got to HAN-d it to the creators, when it was FINN-ished ,it REN-dered me speechless, i was like damn-ERON you should have seen the Luke on my face. It was g-REY-t. It was so good that i had to LEIA down when i got home, a BOBA_erly FETT-ing end to a great day, really, it was WINDU-rful. OK enough of all these SNOKES