Star Wars Film Review

Today I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens directed by JJ Abrams and starring Daisy Ridley, John Boyega and Oscar Isaac. I found the film very enjoyable and overall a fantastic film, which managed to keep faithful to the tone of the original films but at the same time introduce new and in-depth characters.

The music is such an integral part of Star Wars that I found myself getting shivers as the film opened with the main theme, other people in the cinema whooped. Obviously this reminded me of how carefully we are going to have to chose our music when creating our film opening.

The film uses a lot of different shot types but most notable were probably the epic establishing shots of spaceships and new planets and the tracking shots and fast cuts of action sequences as well as the obvious high and low key lighting used to portray the Light and Dark sides.

In my opinion, Abrams managed to balance the funny, tragic, and bitter-sweet moments of the film perfectly, giving the audience the right amount of time to wipe away the tears before leaping into another space battle. The old characters felt like they had in the first films, and the new characters like Finn, Poe, and Rey, felt like they belonged. Abrams has been criticised in the past for his arguably excessive use of lens flares when directing the Star Trek reboots, but for this film, the cinematography and overall tone really fit with the original films so it just felt like them, but modern, which I thought was really effective. The film ends with quite the clliffhanger, meaning I will definitely be going back to see Episode VIII in 2017.