Star Wars: The Force Awakens Review

The brief was restoration, and on those terms the work is excellent. Abrams shot on film with Dan Mindel, built deserts and market stalls and hangars that actors could stand inside, and let John Williams remind everyone what the series sounds like, so the picture has a physical weight the prequels never had. The cost is the structure, which is a scavenger on a desert planet, a droid carrying a map, a cantina, a superweapon with a small vulnerability and a mentor lost on a walkway.

We can see the beat sheet from orbit, and that timidity is the main thing keeping the film out of the top rank. What survives is the casting. Daisy Ridley and John Boyega play their first hour as comedy and relief rather than destiny, Harrison Ford is engaged for the first time in decades, and Adam Driver builds something genuinely new from a villain who is petulant, unfinished and desperate to be feared. The bridge scene is staged and played beautifully. As a handover it did the job, though the story it chose was borrowing against a future the series never wrote.