star wars the force awakens movie shawnee

This isn’t a shallow, sideshow tactic to arouse a response where none is required.

And to highlight a single directorial masterstroke in The Force Awakens, it’s that Abrams achieves this sustained sense of pulsing wistfulness by calibrating all the performances to make it look as if the actors have either just been crying, or are on the verge of tears. Sad is an emotion you’d find fugging up the initial cycle of Star Wars movies. Maybe ‘sad’ is the wrong word, as that seems too broad a term to associate with the specific, textured dynamics of this film. While George Lucas and his erstwhile collaborators (directorial avatars?) diligently packaged this theme within their respective “episodes”, JJ Abrams is the first to understand and demonstrate how horrendously sad that realisation can be. And if you try, it’s highly likely that you’ll damage what you have. Carve away the bulbous politicking, and it’s essentially humanist in its outlook: you can build a spaceship to strict specifications and you can fix it up when it breaks, but you can’t do the same to a person. Star Wars is a franchise whose central theme is that your child may not grow up to be the person you want him or her to be. I suddenly realised that it wasn’t the space nerd who was convulsing with wonderment. What a lovely thing that is.’ But then something strange happened. I looked at this man and thought, ‘ahh, a space nerd on the cusp of public orgasm. He had a dummy’s grin slapped across his yap, apparently oblivious to the violent sway of the scrum.

I could feel him physically shaking with excitement. My arm was pressed against the arm of a young blonde man stood directly next to me. I waited in the midst of this huddle, idly allowing the film to percolate in the mind. A mass of bodies, still moist from the rain outside and pressed against one another, quickly formed in the lobby, with each individual squeezing to the front towards the big table of phones. Flash forward 136 minutes, and as the silky blue Franklin Gothic typeface of the closing credits crashed on to the screen (accompanied with hearty applause), a mad dash to the exit ensued.

Star wars the force awakens movie shawnee