RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — Star Wars is back! The Force Awakens picks up 30 years after the final battle in “Return of the Jedi.” Daisy Ridley is Rey, a scavenger who comes into contact with a droid that has vital information for the resistance. Oscar Isaac is a downed X-Wing pilot, John Boyega a disillusioned storm trooper. Han, Chewie, Leia, Luke, R2D2, and C3PO are all back. They are facing a new enemy: Kylo Ren, played by Adam Driver, the leader of the first order as it rises to take over the universe with a superweapon that makes Vader’s old Death Star look like a toy gun.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is like leaving for college and coming home to find your parents have remodeled the house. It’s familiar but all new too. It’s perfectly imperfect. Honestly, its the closest anyone has gotten to recapturing the spirit of episode four. And it is very careful to pay both very obvious and very subtle homages to that film. It’s nice to see so many of the original characters on screen again, even if it is a bit disappointing that they do get a little shortchanged on screen time. (And, I loved that J.J. Abrams created, or recreated, a world filled with clanky, beat up, dinged up, old school technology. They look like items that have taken a beating from daily use for decades.)
John Boyega, Daisy Ridley and Oscar Isaac are welcome additions to the galaxy far, far away. Kylo Ren is appropriately creepy until he takes his mask off, then the film starts to suffer just a bit. The film flies the highest during the intense aerial sequences. Most of them planet bound battles between X-Wings, Tie Fighters, and the Millennium Falcon. Those are the moments that awoke the kid in me that remembered the thrill of seeing the original movie nearly four decades ago as a wide eyed six-year-old. Star Wars: The Force Awakens earns a B+.
