The Next Generation: STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS

The only way to properly enjoy Star Wars is to be in a mindset with a precisely proportioned combination of deep engaged reverence and light distracted escapism. It's both the greatest of all modern myths, and, per Todd Hanson’s affectionate but sharp assessment, "a big dumb movie about space wizards." Consider its sources: The Hero with a Thousand Faces and Flash Gordon; Akira Kurosawa samurai films and B-movie WWII pictures; epic fantasy and Poverty Row Westerns. More than the sum of its parts, the magic of Star Wars is in its cohesive combination. But if its high-low synthesis is responsible for this space opera's wide-ranging popularity, its staying power is in the details. Creator George Lucas is a great fantasy filmmaker: a sharp visual storyteller and a nonchalant conjurer of fantabulous jargon, densely packing these films with robots, aliens, planets, cultures, vehicles, weapons, and gadgets, suggesting a world far beyond the frame. Put him on the shortlist with the likes of Baum, Tolkien, Roddenberry, and Rowling, creators of popular fantasy worlds with their own internal logic, striking design, and unshakable pull. Their creations are lasting for their narratives, but even more for the places they allow us to visit.

The famous opening text tells us Star Wars takes place in a galaxy far far away, and the images that follow live up to its promised scope and history. Through six films, Lucas used dazzling special effects, energetic action, quasi-mystical spirituality, and sweeping pseudo-historical fantasy worldbuilding to inhabit massive striking artificial vistas with, in the classic original trilogy (1977-1983), a triumphant hero's journey, and, in the unfairly maligned prequels (1999-2005), a tragedy of political machination and curdled idealism. His saga contained an entire ecosystem of the imagination, rich soil on which fans and writers – from little kids playing with action figures to sci-fi writers tapped for tie-in novels – grew new stories.

Now Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens is the first real test of whether this galaxy can survive on the big screen beyond its creator's eccentric and brilliant vision. The answer is a resounding “mostly.” Director J.J. Abrams (with Mission: Impossible III and two Star Treks, no stranger to franchise caretaking) takes over from Lucas and creates an energetic entertainment. He’s not inspired by the series’ inspirations, but by the series itself. Thus it lacks the velocity in and personality of Lucas’s imaginative imagery and ideas (identifiably his all the way), but creates a piece of skilled imitation, sure to please the crowds. Abrams is an expert blockbuster craftsman, and here proves himself a talented mimic as well, recreating the feeling and sensations of Star Wars past while finding new characters on which to focus.

From the opening blasts of John Williams’s score to the slow pan to a distant planet stalked by a massive Star Destroyer, it’s clear we’re back in a recognizable space. For those of us whose Proustian madeleines are the snap-hiss of lightsabers, and for whom the Doppler-effect howls of TIE fighters and X-Wings are guaranteed to instantly activate inner 9-year-olds, the familiarity will be instantly transporting. It feels and swells and sounds like Star Wars, a factor of Abrams’s hard work, and the continuity represented by several series’ staples (like concept artists Iain McCaig and Doug Chiang, sound designers Ben Burtt and Gary Rydstrom) in the crew. Full of echoes to previous installments, we’re on a desert planet where a young person (this time a resourceful scavenger named Rey (Daisy Ridley, a newcomer in a star-making turn)) is about to be drawn into galactic-wide conflict with a dramatic call to adventure.

Working with screenwriters Michael Arndt (Toy Story 3) and Lawrence Kasdan (a co-writer on Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi), Abrams has a story set 30 years after Episode VI that recombines ideas, lines, images, and plot points from previous entries. They’ve cannily (and maybe a smidge calculatingly) positioned the movie precisely between crowd-pleasing fan fiction and a rousing new heroes’ journey, both a loose remake of the original set-up and an introduction to (commendably diverse) new people. Wisely starting fresh before getting derivative, the movie opens with Rey, and others in a set of dramatic original characters: a conflicted soldier (John Boyega); a scheming masked villain of the Dark Side (Adam Driver); a brave fighter pilot (Oscar Isaac); and an instantly loveable ball-droid named BB-8. They fit in with the matinee adventure spirit, and the convincingly lived-in world, projecting happiness simply to be in one of these movies. Their awe is contagious.

It’s the galaxy far far away as we know it, but a generation removed from those stories, full of new people living lives we can be excited to discover as we don’t leave their perspective. While the plot blasts along, it picks up welcome characters, like Han Solo (Harrison Ford), and ships, like his Millennium Falcon, bringing old and new together in a race to prevent new bad guys from blowing up the galaxy. Abrams creates instantly compelling fresh characters with a talented cast – Ridley, Boyega, and Isaac are great likable heroes; Driver is a terrifically complicated villain – while leaning on nostalgia for sights and sounds and faces from earlier movies. Each classic character gets to make an impressive re-entrance, none better than Leia (Carrie Fisher), as tough and charming as ever. It’s nice to see them, even if the movie is occasionally too much like what we’ve seen before.

Abrams is clearly energized by moments that thrill him as a fan, playing with uniquely Star Wars images and ideas borrowed (reunions of long-lost icons, rhymes with other episodes) and invented (a tiny ancient pirate (Lupita Nyong'o), a shadowy villain (Andy Serkis), a stormtrooper with a flamethrower). It doesn’t always pop, a few sequences erring on the side of choppiness or overfamiliar beats, the action on the whole merely proficient, and the entire thing moving so quickly it can’t linger on unusual details like Lucas did. But cinematographer Dan Mindel (John Carter) brings filmic widescreen framing, finding some of the original trilogy’s visual flavor as he photographs displays of evocative lights, picturesque landscapes, and massive explosions in granular reality, bringing an unreal place to something like convincing life. When the film is showing us original contributions – mild redesigns, unfamiliar beasts, new-fangled weapons – its far more interesting and involving than when remaking previous plot in new packaging. Even its surprises aren’t too surprising as it goes.

In some ways a rather cautious extension of the brand, leaning on plot points and emotional beats we’ve seen before in this series – and a few too many times those connections are heavily underlined (a line about a trash compactor will irritate me for days) – The Force Awakens is nonetheless alive with possibility of new storytelling in this galaxy. Allowing the fresh faces center stage while giving returning characters supporting roles without feeling too much like a passing of the torch, it sets the groundwork for future success. Call it The Fandom Awakens, especially since it’s almost scientifically calibrated to tickle acolyte’s pleasure centers while remaining open enough for a younger generation of fans to fit right in, like an exuberant greatest hits remix from the best cover band in the world.

It’s nakedly manipulative and terrifically exciting Hollywood filmmaking of incredible competence. Platoons of talented artisans, animators, and puppeteers create remarkably tactile locations, dogfights, laser battles, and lightsaber clashes, swooping and stirring in all their fantastical glory. It’s big, energized, and enjoyable, making most of its competition look like Padawans. Without Lucas it’s removed from the spark of novelty it once had, but, as an attempt to find fresh characters through which to make old stories new again, it’s a fun admirable effort. Made with more love than cynicism, it’s happy to start another cycle of galactic history repeating itself, The Force forever seeking its balance. There’s nothing quite like Star Wars. It’s enough to have space wizards, interplanetary dive bars, and ginormous superweapons for a new generation. Even if it has to over-deliver on what it thinks old fans want, it's plenty entertaining for everyone.

Horse Sense: WAR HORSE

Steven Spielberg’s War Horse starts as a pastoral, an ode to living off the land that’s soured under bad economics.  In the opening shots a horse is born as a farmer’s son (Jeremy Irvine) watches. We know right away that this will be one special horse, if for no other reason than that the boy loves him. But he doesn’t own the horse yet. His father (Peter Mullan) buys the animal at auction despite the fact that money is tight and what he spends would have been better off going to pay the rent to their condescending landlord (David Thewlis). The farmer’s wife (Emily Watson, sweet and tough) expresses dismay. This horse better help them plow a new field so they can have even a small chance to make some kind of rent payment. The boy stares at the creature with such wonder, what Matt Patches calls “the Spielberg face,” that the immediate connection between boy and horse is made clear with merely a shot and a reverse-shot.

On a certain level, this is a film about looking, about the power of the reaction shot. Not only is this used to create a sense of an animal’s emotions – as the boy trains the horse, we see them growing closer, growing in trust and friendship – but characters come to care about the horse, and we about the characters, in the space of an edit. Spielberg knows the power of images and the even greater effect in juxtaposing powerful visuals. There’s may be no more iconic image in all of cinema than that of a galloping horse, from Muybridge’s experiments to westerns and period pieces, from National Velvet to The Black Stallion. Engaged with this history, War Horse is a film that’s an epic of Fordian fields and Lean landscapes mixed with intimate close ups and stunning sequences of the kind that by now can certainly be called Spielbergian.

It’s also a film that’s literally about looking at the effects of war. Under all the intensely sympathetic human detail that opens the film, the Great War is looming. The farmer, much to his son’s dismay, sells their horse to the army after which the animal is sent along to help the war effort. The script by Lee Hall and Richard Cutris (from the novel by Michael Morpurgo) has us follow the horse. As we do, we get to know the many varied people who come into contact with him. There’s, among others, the brave and honorable British officer (Tom Hiddleston), two German brothers (Leonhard Carow and David Kross), and a French farmer (Niels Arestrup) and his granddaughter (Celine Buckens). It becomes a knockout of a film that gallops across World War I, catching glimpses of its effect on all lives the conflict intersects, no matter the age, no matter the social station, no matter the nationality.

Through the horse’s path we see the devastation of this war for civilians and soldiers alike. Spielberg stages the horror of trench warfare as a PG-13 Saving Private Ryan, grim and overwhelming. When he moves away from the front lines, there’s a terrific patience given over to the brief respites of uncertain solitude, the booming cannonade that can be heard from miles away intruding upon the hesitant daily lives of people desperately trying to avoid trouble if it can be helped. The fleeing soldiers who try to hide from the fight, the brief return to pastoral setting on the French farm, these are moments away from the front that feel nearly, if not just as devastating as the battles themselves. The horror of war may not always be foregrounded, but it’s always encroaching, booming off in the distance.

This is a film with emotion quivering right on the surface in John Williams moving, memorable, and rich score, in the painterly cinematography of deep red Hollywood sunsets, rolling green hills, and muddy gray trenches, in the scenes capable of evoking great warmth and great horror that Janusz Kaminski so handsomely photographs and that Spielberg arranges to play like a sympathy of empathy. Is this manipulative? Yes, in that Spielberg has the audience held captive by his ability to evoke any emotion, to trigger sympathy for any character. That’s hardly a bad thing. Getting a film to work on such a high level is hardly cheap and easy. This is a deliriously accomplished film of powerful emotion. An early battle scene features the cavalry charging a line of enemy machine guns. We hear the roar of the brave men as they ride their horses forward, and then cut to riderless horses leaping over enemy lines to only the sounds of gunfire. With elegant, devastating editing of sounds and shots, just one of many such examples that could be singled out, Spielberg creates a memorable and striking moment of deep emotional impact.

This film is epic Hollywood filmmaking on a scale that’s sure to satisfy those who grumble “they don’t make them like they used to.” While it’s a bit of a throwback in that regard – at times it plays almost like a new classic – it’s hardly old-fashioned or stuffy. It’s a lively, tremendously modern work. Only today’s effects and techniques could build its period piece world in such a visually accomplished way. This is no studio backlot. But what really works in the film, what marks it as neither old nor new, but timeless, is its deep, pure humanistic expression. Each and every character we meet becomes a fully fleshed human being.  We learn their hopes and fears and then plunge with them into awful war-torn circumstances. Spielberg and his uniformly excellent cast have us fall in love with these characters in order to better break our hearts.

War Horse is stirring and moving and unabashedly sentimental in ways that never feel forced. So strongly thematically engaged – and with the horse as such a strong visual and emotional anchor – that what could easily have been episodic and clunky is rendered powerfully, elegantly unified. By the end, which has brought back some of the previously left behind characters in rewarding, sometimes surprising, ways, there’s the feeling of having had a filmgoing experience so completely full and fulfilling, a rare complete and total satisfaction. Spielberg is a master filmmaker, capable of marshalling the best techniques of the past to give us thrilling and moving new examples of filmmaking at its best. Moments like the final shots of a deeply heartfelt reunion silhouetted against a gorgeous sunset, accompanied by Williams’s soaring main theme, could be straight out of a Hollywood epic of any era.  This is terrific, earnest, empathetic filmmaking that cuts straight to the heart with strong, direct emotion. It’s a film that’s involving, upsetting, and in the end somehow uplifting, that thrills and moves and lingers.

Franchise Flashback: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

With Chris Columbus leaving the Harry Potter series, Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón stepped into the void creating Prisoner of Azkaban as a weird and wonderful installment, besting the first two installments in nearly every way, not by smashing expectations, but by taking the great work and expanding and prodding it into better and more daring places. With this movie, the series is officially not exclusively kids’ stuff. Cuarón has a restless camera that gazes about this darker plot as it shakes and slides and shimmies up and down the corridors of Hogwarts, the streets of small communities of wizards and even the dull suburban streets where Harry spends his summers.

The film opens there with a delightful scene of macabre humor as Potter, in anger, expands his Muggle-aunt like a balloon (she had it coming). Then we’re off to Hogwarts where the students are all atwitter about the escaped killer, Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), who is widely assumed to be hunting Harry. As a result of this new threat (more real-world than the more conceptual, fantasy threats of the first two stories) totally creepy guards known as Dementors, sucking all cheer and warmth from the characters – and the screen – with their very arrival, keep careful watch, casting a chill and setting the tone for fresher menace in this outing.

The kids’ skills have grown once again with the central trio of Radcliffe, Watson and Grint getting more talented as well as slimmer, taller, leaner, older. The adult cast continues to satisfy, each installment adding more and more perfectly cast character actors. This time, in addition to Oldman, who brings intensity to his several nice moments in the climax, there are Emma Thompson, as a greatly loony divination professor, Julie Christie as a weary tavern proprietor, and Timothy Spall, who has one scene and makes the most of it, turning his face into a ball of ticks and twitches.

But the new cast member who stands out the most is David Thewlis as the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher (the school seems to have that position open every year). Thewlis has a warm, easy emotional relationship with Radcliffe. In their character’s conversations there’s a sense of real connection, a building relationship of trust that starts as mentor-student and turns into something closer to father-son. They form the emotional bedrock of the film.

Between films, Richard Harris, the man who so skillfully inhabited Dumbledore, passed away. He is replaced by Michael Gambon, an equally skilled but also very different actor. He brings to Dumbledore a slightly different spin but doesn’t stray too far from the conception of the character originated by Harris. I do not envy him having to walk the thin line between creating his own character and replicating what has already worked for the series, but Gambon is up to the task.

As with the cast and casting, the score, design, and costuming continues to be top of the line (John Williams even uses the occasion to write the single best theme ever composed for a Potter movie), but what makes this installment so distinctive and compelling is Cuarón’s direction. He and screenwriter Steve Kloves realize they are making an adaptation, not an illustration. They are not supplanting the book, merely telling the same basic story in a different medium. The plot is tweaked and condensed to become a more cinematic rendering even if it crashes through plot points at times. And through it all is Cuarón’s relentless specificity.

This is a deliriously detailed and tactile picture, packed with background information and scrupulous attention to every corner of the screen with grace notes of whimsy, like a tree shaking snow off of its branches, an aunt appearing in the background sky, and the camera floating (symbolically) twice through the gears of a clock. Cuarón allows the camera a fluid grace to glide through the world which is just as magical but has a greater realism in feeling and tone. This movie gets under my skin. The fantastical realism extends to the feelings of awakening adolescence within the young characters. Cuarón understands the yearning, the mystery, of aging and depicts the vivid mental states by understanding that magic does not make these kids any less like kids. One of the best scenes, and one of the simplest, involves a group of boys eating candy and joking with each other in a way any group of 13-year-olds might. The best effect of the film is the sound-effect accompanying a very satisfying punch thrown in the face of a bully.

Cuarón makes the fantasy a wild extrapolation on the characters' uneasy, awkward steps towards adulthood, finding the intrinsic link between basic human experiences and the phantasmagorical tales we tell that is the hallmark of all great fantasy from Grimm to Rowling to Pan’s Labyrinth. This Potter is the first of the franchise to not just delight and entertain, but to sting and resonate as well.

Franchise Flashback: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)

The second Harry Potter film, Chamber of Secrets, once again directed by Chris Columbus and adapted by Steve Kloves, is an interesting film, poised on the brink of the maturity the films would develop while still keeping a foot firmly in the kid-friendly zone. Darkness is starting to creep around the edges but this is still very much a kids’ film, broad and accessible with only teases of the direction the franchise will go. This is a film that simmers with an underlying creepiness, an uneasy sense of danger, but it never explodes into full-blown terror. The students at Hogwarts are threatened by a mysterious menace and the creaky camera angles and slow pans down dark hallways help to close the danger in on the characters.

It’s fun to see the kids (Radcliffe, Watson, and Grint) start to grow in the craft of acting. The first film found them naturalistic with the kind of easy presence that child actors can have where they seem to be barely aware of the artifice of it all. Here, the untrained magic is gone. They’re miniature professionals by now, but it’s astonishing how skilled they are this early in their careers. The adult cast is, once again, uniformly excellent with the added bonus of the welcome addition of Kenneth Branagh playing the delightfully loopy Professor Gilderoy Lockheart. Branagh delivers hilarious line readings made even funnier by his pauses, his shifting eyes, and his easy, lopsided grin. He provides a vibrant lightheartedness matched only by the kids’ naturally buoyant and quick-witted dispositions. Together, the four of them do much to ward off the darkness of the plot that could easily have slipped the whole film into ponderousness.

Once again, the score from John Williams is superb, as is the production design. The effects work is a little sharper this time around, more easily convincing than the often clunky sequences the first time around. The artisans behind the franchise have gained confidence from their work in the first film and seem to be using the confidence to great effect here, allowing themselves to push their crafts further than before. In general, the look and sound of the picture is even sharper and more refined than before (listen to those spiders in the forest, especially in surround sound), expanding with the expanding needs of Rowling’s plot.

Despite that expanding plot, the adaptation by Kloves makes slightly better sense of what to cut and what to keep when pruning the plot from book to film. The film plunges into the plot proper and moves much quicker than the first film. The puzzle-solving climax of the first has been replaced with a more satisfying action beat. These were the books’ climaxes too, but this one translates better to film. Unfortunately the movie then takes too long a time to finally end, stalling through a slightly unnecessary dialogue scene and then dribbling into a puddle of sentimentality that doesn’t quite fit by excessively applauding a character (charming though he may be) that has been pushed to the sidelines for most of the plot.

But no matter, the film is still an entertaining experience, faster, funnier, and creepier than the first, if ultimately a smidge less satisfying. Even though it repeats some mistakes and makes new ones, there is an admirable sense of growth and change shifting within the filmmaking, rare within franchises of this magnitude, fixing what was barely broken to begin with. This is an attitude that will serve the franchise well. The craftsmen behind the undertaking realized they did a great job the first time and, instead of growing complacent looking at the box office numbers and patting themselves on the back, decided to best themselves. If it didn't kill its momentum in its last few scenes - and was a bit more streamlined throughout - the movie as a whole would be up to the task of besting its predecessor.

Franchise Flashback: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001)

With this Wednesday's release of the sixth Harry Potter film, it's the perfect time to revisit the franchise from the beginning to see how it holds up and to chart how it has grown.

By 2001, the Harry Potter books were a full blown cultural phenomenon, with four books published and three more on the way, each published book setting records on the bestseller lists. And they were good, too. Critics, children and parents adored author J.K. Rowling’s imaginative look at a young boy, Harry Potter, and his experiences at Hogwarts, a magical British boarding school, and the deft mixing of Dahl-like macabre with the swift thrills of a modern blockbuster. So it was only inevitable that the books would become modern blockbusters. The first, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, was released in the fall of 2001 and quickly became one of the biggest hits of the post-9/11 weeks.

Now, eight years later, I returned to this movie, wondering what I would find. The movie is older and so am I. Which one of us has changed? Despite my trepidation, the movie holds up remarkably well. Director Chris Columbus directs with a crisp, storybook style that’s rather unremarkable but has the benefit of showing off the resplendent production design by Stuart Craig. The walls of Hogwarts are vibrant and wondrous with floating props (and ghosts), shifting stairs, and a vast population of moving artwork. There’s a real feeling of magic here, awfully entertaining, but is capable of being awfully generic. More inventiveness went into designing the costumes and sets than finding ways to film them.

But this is, after all, an introduction. We, as the filmmakers themselves, are getting our bearings in the cinematic world that is being spun from Rowling’s words. This is the first time we heard the notes of the tremendous score by John Williams, a work of cinematic scoring that equals his great themes for the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Superman series. This is the first time we’ve seen the charming child actors who are the leads. Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson are almost impossibly charming – and cute – little actors, fully capable of the task before them: holding their own against a solid cast of British character actors. Richard Harris (Dumbledore), Maggie Smith (McGonagall), and Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid) are the lead adults inhabiting their literary characters with warmth and perfection. (Speaking of perfection, there’s Alan Rickman as Professor Severus Snape. In a perfectly cast film, he’s the most perfect). Among all the cast the lines are performed with perfection, tripping across the tongues in melodious British flavor. Between the score and the cast, this would be a movie great just to listen to if the visuals weren’t so strong.

This is the first time the camera has shown us the accoutrements of this world, a vivid and imaginative world that has rightfully taken its place among the greatest fantasy settings in cinema history, the kind of settings that cause reverence and awe among filmgoers both young and old. This film has a childlike sense of wonder at its world, and also a more kid-friendly tone. As such, the story is slighter than the others to date; the pacing is a little awkward. What works in the book doesn’t always work on the screen. The filmmakers would gain confidence in later movies to bend and condense more than they did here. Scenes of exposition drag and the finale is a bit too puzzle-like to be truly engaging.

But still, I was enchanted with the imagination of the proceedings, the red-blooded adventure, the charm of the visuals (even the few effects that now – already – feel dated), and even the nostalgia that is already settling around the film, cloaking it with a protective layer of memory. There’s real magic here, though, in the way little moments charm and big moments cause the heart to swell. It doesn’t always work moment to moment (every so often it looks like a movie about people in funny hats) but it settles satisfyingly in the end. It’s a solid start to what has shaped up to be a great franchise.

Stay tuned to this very blog for further posts on previous Potters which should pop up like clockwork through the new release, culminating with a review of the new film late next week.