Star Wars: The Force Awakens - 12 Reasons It Lives Up To The Hype

4. It Has The Right Blend Of Old And New

This film, much more so than the subsequent releases in the years to come, had an extremely difficult task. Not only did it have this enormous hype behind it, but it had to be respectful to what had came before, avoid falling into the soulless trap of the prequels, and of course point towards the future. For that reason, it seemed J.J. Abrams was the best possible director for this film, and that has turned out to be the case. He's a huge Star Wars fanboy, but also an excellent filmmaker, and he deftly shows off both sides here. The film features similar structural beats to the others, in particular Star Wars (A New Hope), right from the opening shot in space and continues apace throughout the film. People may point and say it's retreading old ground or too derivative, but that's exactly the point of Star Wars. "It rhymes." That might sound weird and clunky, especially when George Lucas is the one saying it and it's a phrase from during the making of The Phantom Menace, but it's true. The stories mirror each other, so of course that's what they do here. You've got the new hero, the wise-old-man training them and eventually dying, the family ties, the Dark Side and the Light. What's important is that it balances those elements with enough new ones, and that's what The Force Awakens does. For all the familiar beats and nods to the past ("14 parsecs" and all the rest), it also showed that these movies are in an excellent position moving forward. There are new creations, new worlds. Heck, the new heroes are a black Stormtrooper and a female Jedi. That doesn't sound too derivative to me.