For better and worse, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is a work of directorial authorship. J. J. Abrams has long been channelling the spirit of Steven Spielberg, and here he splices the Spielbergian gene into George Lucas’s mythology. That’s not an inherently bad thing—if it’s done by Steven Spielberg. A movie fanatic, Spielberg is himself a master of the graft—especially grafting the mythic memory of the cinema onto a child-like sensibility formed by television.
Abrams stands at an extra remove from the source—one step down from Spielberg’s worship of a world of images to the modern worship of a world of stories. That makes Abrams just the person to plug the newest ready-made pre-fab blocks of quasi-Biblical legend into the template left by Lucas, and Abrams does so with a vigorously responsible enthusiasm joined with a palpable wonder at his contact with the venerated text. The result is a movie that’s awestruck, warmhearted, good-humored—and conspicuously prefabricated, without a jolt of spontaneity or reckless impulse anywhere in its sealed-up universe.
http://www.ted.com/profiles/5298085
The setup—and it’s giving almost nothing away to mention it, since it’s outlined in an opening crawl of text—involves the quest for Luke Skywalker, who’s in hiding. The universe is dominated by an evil successor to the Empire, called the First Order, and its overlords are trying to find and kill Luke, who is the last of the Jedi. There is, however, a group working to thwart the First Order, called the Resistance, and its virtuous fighters want to find Luke first, both to save him and to harness the Force to their own cause. Here, too, there’s secret information that gets hidden in a little robot, and there’s the crucial decoding of that information to insure the success of a mission.
The new script, which Abrams co-wrote with Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt, brings along a host of new characters who are incarnated by an extraordinary troupe of young actors. Yet these newcomers mirror familiar presences with the eerie air of an eternal return. There’s a gifted pilot (Oscar Isaac); a fiercely martial young woman pursued by villains (Daisy Ridley, a nearly new cinematic presence); an independent-minded soldier on the run (John Boyega); a passionate military mastermind (Adam Driver). All these characters are quickly imprinted with their narrative identities in the course of the action; the movie is nothing if not efficient.
The efficiency, however, is no favor to the actors. Their talent often blazes through the screen, their presences are vital, but the spare rendering of character and the tight mechanism of the plot allow them few chances to shine. Boyega renders a keen declamation of proud anger, and Driver momentarily surpasses the story in a fiery Shakespearean outburst, but for the most part the cast appears mainly as symbols of their own youth, a new generation of cinematic faces transplanted onto the revered corpus of legend. On the other hand, some venerable faces are back as well, attached to familiar characters (if you want to be surprised, don’t click on this IMDb page that names the actors and their roles). Abrams plays the nostalgia factor to the very hilt of his lightsaber, and the stagy entrances with which he reintroduces beloved performers is among the most identifiable elements of his direction.
Abrams is a deft manager who balances tones and plots on the tips of his fingers, but he isn’t a director of images. He beams every gesture and every gag, every sigh and every whoop, to the virtual balcony, and some grand plot twists can be seen coming around the corner. His spectacle and its meticulous design are something to see, but his direction doesn’t shape the elements stylistically—it doesn’t provide anything to look at. The carefully crafted objects and the thoughtfully chosen settings never rise, by means of visual composition, to symbolic significance.
From the start, Abrams confirms the movie’s own identity as a fast-moving action thriller that, like Lucas’s first installment, mixes its frames of reference, combining science fiction and Westerns, “Lawrence of Arabia” and prehistoric fantasies. Abrams brings the blend up to date with a whiff of Gothic medievalism and a touch of dystopian adolescent survivalism. But the director seems to resist allowing any of the elements to depart from the confines of the action to take on free-floating, loose-ended cinematic identities of their own—no thought is meant to escape from the airtight channel of meaning.
This taut calculation of emotional effect has a specific and unfortunate impact on the viewing experience. The movie is fast-moving—featuring rapid action within the frame, rapid camera movements, and rapid cutting from shot to shot—yet it feels sluggish throughout, because the speed of thought is slow. Abrams delivers exactly what he wants to deliver, no more and no less. There’s no element of mystery, nothing to capture the eye or pique the mind (whether in active thought or subconscious resonance) between packets of plot information, jolts of martial energy, and waves of sentiment.
“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is a good movie—one that’s good with a star-sized asterisk. The craft with which the plot is constructed is a model of emotional science (even if, at crucial times, events follow each other with mere chronology and no inner necessity) and the artistry that went into the vertiginous digital effects concentrates a host of skills that, when put together, still fall short of art. This work of stunning, shock-and-awe digital contrivance is so weighed down by reverence for the franchise and calculation of effect that it plays less like an experience than like a summary of itself. Its intentions and its realizations are so closely matched that it can as well be viewed in capsule form. Even the mightiest of catastrophes and most clamorous of battles never reach the actual thrill of experience; they stand outside themselves and await the feedback of admiration, like the cinematic equivalent of a flashing applause sign.
http://www.studiopress.com/forums/users/backlinksor/
The reason to describe the plot in only the hedgiest and dodgiest of terms isn’t so much to avoid spoilers as to avoid giving away the only thing the movie’s got. I wouldn’t have wanted to know the great twists of “Psycho” before seeing it for the first time, but, even after having once seen it and knowing all of the script’s tricks, the pleasure of watching it again (and again and again) is nonetheless undiminished, and possibly even enriched. The hearty sentiment and the breathlessly clever plotting of “The Force Awakens” are delights, but narrowly limited delights. There’s pleasure within measure, but no uninhibited joy or terror, no ecstasy, no unmanaged passion. The secrets of the movie are the secrets of its plot; the mysteries are purely narrative, not at all visual, symbolic, metaphorical, or experiential. Nothing of the true force of the cinema.
Abrams stands at an extra remove from the source—one step down from Spielberg’s worship of a world of images to the modern worship of a world of stories. That makes Abrams just the person to plug the newest ready-made pre-fab blocks of quasi-Biblical legend into the template left by Lucas, and Abrams does so with a vigorously responsible enthusiasm joined with a palpable wonder at his contact with the venerated text. The result is a movie that’s awestruck, warmhearted, good-humored—and conspicuously prefabricated, without a jolt of spontaneity or reckless impulse anywhere in its sealed-up universe.
http://www.ted.com/profiles/5298085
The setup—and it’s giving almost nothing away to mention it, since it’s outlined in an opening crawl of text—involves the quest for Luke Skywalker, who’s in hiding. The universe is dominated by an evil successor to the Empire, called the First Order, and its overlords are trying to find and kill Luke, who is the last of the Jedi. There is, however, a group working to thwart the First Order, called the Resistance, and its virtuous fighters want to find Luke first, both to save him and to harness the Force to their own cause. Here, too, there’s secret information that gets hidden in a little robot, and there’s the crucial decoding of that information to insure the success of a mission.
The new script, which Abrams co-wrote with Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt, brings along a host of new characters who are incarnated by an extraordinary troupe of young actors. Yet these newcomers mirror familiar presences with the eerie air of an eternal return. There’s a gifted pilot (Oscar Isaac); a fiercely martial young woman pursued by villains (Daisy Ridley, a nearly new cinematic presence); an independent-minded soldier on the run (John Boyega); a passionate military mastermind (Adam Driver). All these characters are quickly imprinted with their narrative identities in the course of the action; the movie is nothing if not efficient.
The efficiency, however, is no favor to the actors. Their talent often blazes through the screen, their presences are vital, but the spare rendering of character and the tight mechanism of the plot allow them few chances to shine. Boyega renders a keen declamation of proud anger, and Driver momentarily surpasses the story in a fiery Shakespearean outburst, but for the most part the cast appears mainly as symbols of their own youth, a new generation of cinematic faces transplanted onto the revered corpus of legend. On the other hand, some venerable faces are back as well, attached to familiar characters (if you want to be surprised, don’t click on this IMDb page that names the actors and their roles). Abrams plays the nostalgia factor to the very hilt of his lightsaber, and the stagy entrances with which he reintroduces beloved performers is among the most identifiable elements of his direction.
Abrams is a deft manager who balances tones and plots on the tips of his fingers, but he isn’t a director of images. He beams every gesture and every gag, every sigh and every whoop, to the virtual balcony, and some grand plot twists can be seen coming around the corner. His spectacle and its meticulous design are something to see, but his direction doesn’t shape the elements stylistically—it doesn’t provide anything to look at. The carefully crafted objects and the thoughtfully chosen settings never rise, by means of visual composition, to symbolic significance.
From the start, Abrams confirms the movie’s own identity as a fast-moving action thriller that, like Lucas’s first installment, mixes its frames of reference, combining science fiction and Westerns, “Lawrence of Arabia” and prehistoric fantasies. Abrams brings the blend up to date with a whiff of Gothic medievalism and a touch of dystopian adolescent survivalism. But the director seems to resist allowing any of the elements to depart from the confines of the action to take on free-floating, loose-ended cinematic identities of their own—no thought is meant to escape from the airtight channel of meaning.
This taut calculation of emotional effect has a specific and unfortunate impact on the viewing experience. The movie is fast-moving—featuring rapid action within the frame, rapid camera movements, and rapid cutting from shot to shot—yet it feels sluggish throughout, because the speed of thought is slow. Abrams delivers exactly what he wants to deliver, no more and no less. There’s no element of mystery, nothing to capture the eye or pique the mind (whether in active thought or subconscious resonance) between packets of plot information, jolts of martial energy, and waves of sentiment.
“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is a good movie—one that’s good with a star-sized asterisk. The craft with which the plot is constructed is a model of emotional science (even if, at crucial times, events follow each other with mere chronology and no inner necessity) and the artistry that went into the vertiginous digital effects concentrates a host of skills that, when put together, still fall short of art. This work of stunning, shock-and-awe digital contrivance is so weighed down by reverence for the franchise and calculation of effect that it plays less like an experience than like a summary of itself. Its intentions and its realizations are so closely matched that it can as well be viewed in capsule form. Even the mightiest of catastrophes and most clamorous of battles never reach the actual thrill of experience; they stand outside themselves and await the feedback of admiration, like the cinematic equivalent of a flashing applause sign.
http://www.studiopress.com/forums/users/backlinksor/
The reason to describe the plot in only the hedgiest and dodgiest of terms isn’t so much to avoid spoilers as to avoid giving away the only thing the movie’s got. I wouldn’t have wanted to know the great twists of “Psycho” before seeing it for the first time, but, even after having once seen it and knowing all of the script’s tricks, the pleasure of watching it again (and again and again) is nonetheless undiminished, and possibly even enriched. The hearty sentiment and the breathlessly clever plotting of “The Force Awakens” are delights, but narrowly limited delights. There’s pleasure within measure, but no uninhibited joy or terror, no ecstasy, no unmanaged passion. The secrets of the movie are the secrets of its plot; the mysteries are purely narrative, not at all visual, symbolic, metaphorical, or experiential. Nothing of the true force of the cinema.
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