In short order, we meet the film's other new leads: Rey (Ridley), an orphaned scrap-metal scavenger, and the ex-Stormtrooper Finn (Boyega), a conscientious objector who went AWOL after watching Ren and his storm trooper armada carry out a My Lai-style massacre while searching for BB-8 and his map. Then Rey, Finn and BB-8 escape a strafing run by TIE fighters by piling into Han’s old ship, the Millennium Falcon, which just happens to be owned by one of Rey’s scrap metal customers, and get captured by a freighter that just happens to be piloted by Han and Chewie, who just happen to be searching for the Falcon in that part of space. As in every “Star Wars” film, this one leans on chance meetings and coincidences, and you just have to accept them as the sort of things that would happen in a fairy tale or opera—or at the very least, as proof that the galaxy is smaller than it looks. The Starkiller Base is ten times the size of the last Death Star, but key characters cross paths inside of it so regularly that it might as well be a U-boat.
Lucas' prequels balanced light with gathering darkness, and rhymed scenes, situations and shots with the original trilogy's, to create a sense of history repeating and inverting itself. Abrams and company have done something similar in “The Force Awakens,” but at the level of characterization and scene-building. This is a subtler way to revise (or recycle) elements in a popular franchise while finding something new in them, and it explains why this film feels more fully realized than any "Star Wars" movie since "The Empire Strikes Back"—it's certainly warmer than the prequels, which often failed at characterization and plot even as they served up intricate sequences and haunting images.
The map hidden inside BB-8 is this film's equivalent of the Death Star plans hidden in R2-D2 in "A New Hope"; Jakku is basically Tatooine; other planets evoke icy Hoth from "The Empire Strikes Back" and the tropical moons of "A New Hope" and "Return of the Jedi." Wrecked star destroyers poke up through sand dunes; a leathery-skinned reptilian pachyderm jams its snout into a watering hole; TIE fighters loom against boiling sunsets; a thousand-year old temple crumbles beneath an onslaught of laser bolts. This stuff might seem like fan fiction illustrated by calendar art if Abrams didn't balance spectacle with feeling. Rey is the new Luke, but also the new Han, while Finn is a combination of Luke, Han Solo and a C-3PO worrywart. ("Stay calm," Finn says during a tense walk alongside Poe. "I am calm," Poe snarls. "I'm talking to myself," Finn explains.) But even though Finn is the film's funniest character, the script never goes so far as to turn him into mere comic relief. Nor does it permit Rey to become a glorified ingenue. Finn and Rey are tormented by believable personal demons and wield their blasters and lightsabers with fervor. You believe they could hold their own against Ren, who can stop blaster bolts in mid-air and spelunk inside prisoners’ minds. And you believe in the reality of CGI'd supporting characters as well, including Andy Serkis' Supreme Leader Snoke, a gollum-esque dictator with a hideous puckered mouth whose hologram image is the size of the Lincoln Memorial, and Lupita Nyong'o's Maz Kanata, a diminutive, ancient pirate whose goggled eyes can see into people's souls.
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