Star Wars: The Force Awakens - 10 Ways It's A Remake Of A New Hope
5. The Death Star/Starkiller Base Parallel
There's no use pretending that the Starkiller Base is anything other than a Death Star surrogate, is there? Star Wars has long embraced the idea of giant evil bases, but the Starkiller Base takes things to a whole new level. And size. It's freakin' huge. Yes, the biggest threat to the heroes in the movie, aside from that of Kylo Ren and the evil Supreme Leader Snoke, is this planet-sized base mounted with a canon that is able to destroy multiple planets in a single bast. It's essentially the Death Star III. The Resistance have no choice but to set out to stop it from destroying them, just like in A New Hope when the Rebels - using plans stolen from the Empire - mount an attack on the Death Star. When you think about it, it was a bold move on J.J. Abrams' part to include yet another "big bad" base - one even larger than a moon this time around - because Return Of The Jedi already did the whole "there's another Death Star" thing... and yet here we are again. And that's not all: Episode VII also mimics Episode IV during the sequence that sees our heroes running around the Starkiller Base; it's almost exactly the same as the one that occurs in the Death Star in A New Hope, as Luke, Han and Chewie board the Death Star to rescue Princess Leia. In The Force Awakens, Finn, Han and Chewbacca infiltrate the Starkiller Base to find Rey, and both scenes are very aesthetically and tonally similar.
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.