![]() This is one area where trading on the audience's affection for the franchise feels more friendly than exploitative, although Carrie Fisher's appearance as General Leia, still commanding that Rebel army, is also well handled. ![]() ![]() And the real Han is nicely integrated into the story, with Ford happily winking away at a knowing audience. Boyega successfully plays her Han – that is to say, her brash yet more uncertain sidekick. Refreshingly, this is a sci-fi action movie in which the main character, Rey, is a woman and Ridley makes her a person of both grit and gravity. A director has to earn his Nazi iconography. Despite a fine performance from the always admirable Adam Driver as one of the villains, the baddies feel under-written and when Abrams whips up a Nuremberg-style rally of storm troopers complete with red-and-black banners, a critic must cry foul. Here, elements of that story are repeated, but the new one turns out to be a pale imitation of the original, while his overlord is downright laughable. To be fair to Revenge of the Sith, the third and least noxious instalment in Lucas's cash-grabbing prequel trilogy of the early 2000s, it contained a rather complex backstory for the emergence of Darth Vader, showing an unusual attention to motivation in a genre where most bad guys just are. First of all, the movie simply winds back the clock: A power that looks and sounds just like the old Empire has somehow emerged the Rebels are fighting it again and the Republic they restored now seems invisible. Abrams and his fellow scriptwriters, Michael Arndt and Lawrence Kasdan (who also co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi), struggle most of all to find a plausible explanation for the existence of evil. Like many a Christian philosopher before them, director J.J. Rey and Finn soon meet up with the famed Han Solo and Chewbacca, still out there flying around the galaxy – Harrison Ford and Peter Mayhew reprise those roles – and so a familiar team of idealists and opportunists is assembled. When a spherical droid named BB-8 (the app-enabled toy is already on sale) and a deserting storm trooper named Finn (John Boyega) land in her lap, she is drawn into a mysterious quest and enlisted in a battle against an evil organization called the First Order that is run by a guy in a black mask. The movie begins once again with an isolated hero on a desert planet: This time, she's Rey (Daisy Ridley), a plucky orphan who makes her living scavenging scrap.
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