Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens – Was It Worth The Wait?

“There’s been an awakening…” and if you haven’t felt it yet, you were probably sleeping. Yeah Star Wars VII – The Force Awakens is finally here after months of teasers, trailers, TV spots, crazy theories…and so on. But was the waiting worth it? Well yes and no.

Let’s start with the good points because there are definitely good point. The Force Awakens is absolutely not the disaster we all fear when Disney bought the franchise. The film is not too cheesy nor is it too peaceful. It has everything we’re expecting from an awesome blockbuster. It’s full of action with incredible battles and tons of explosions that will stuck you in your seat, there are amazing light sabers combats. It’s also really fun with little sarcasm and jokes here and there. To be brief you are definitely entertained.

Kudos to J.J Abrams! For ONCE in his life, he is not overusing his famous lens flares, which is quite a miracle considering how much he loves them. He did an incredible job in filming all those scenes, there are no useless scenes or shots and he succeeded in recreating the same visual atmosphere of the first trilogy.

As for the story, if you take it like a stand-alone film, it’s pretty good. It mixes drama, romance, science-fiction, action…and have quite a lot of surprises. There have been lots of theories on the internet and some of the craziest ones happen to be true. Abrams succeeds completely in creating a consistent story that follows perfectly what Lucas created back in the 80’s. While the prequels were a mix of non-sense, here we actually find an interesting sequel that plays with the nostalgia…but maybe too much.

As much as we are entertained, there is a BIG thing missing at the end: originality.

Where is the risk? Except for one detail – that surely will break the heart of many fans – J.J Abrams didn’t take any risk in creating an original story with its own identity. The more we watch the film, the more it feels like we are just watching A New Hope. It has the same organization, the same background story…just the character’s names are different. The film triggers a new trilogy and a new generation but sadly their story is just too much alike the one of the old generation. The story follows the same path than the episode 4 to such a point, you can’t call it an homage but a copy-paste. It’s as if Abrams just directed a remake.

In a sense it’s good, because it brings you back to the first trilogy and it feels really good to see how faithful Abrams is to the original trilogy, using the same tricks that all made us love those films at the same it’s a huge disappointment to see that there’s not a big originality in this one. You end up thinking “all this excitement for this?!”

Yes we’re sort of back to our childhood when we discovered Star Wars and heard for the first time about the Jedi…but damn it, it was time to do something completely new. At the end, all the excitement, all the hope we had are not fulfilled. Maybe they’re keeping it for the next 2 episodes. As for the Force Awakens, it leaves with feeling of incompleteness.

Star Wars VII : The Force Awakens hits theaters on December 18th.