Star Wars: The Liberal Cribbing From The Books Awakens

So. I loved the new Star Wars movie even though it had a few problems. And it had a few problems. One of the problems that I didn't have but a friend did was that it kept cribbing from the Star Wars movies.

And, yeah, it did. But it was like GoldenEye; cribbing from Ye Olde Bygone Better Days to lure people back for three awful sequels and then a recast and reboot that similarly schizophrenically tried to be "the same but different" and wound up stuck up its own bunghole with a truly shit villain and no plot save for a mishmash of homages to previous entries and...

...oh.

But, no, I'm willing to give The Force Awakens a pass for its liberal cribbing of the earlier films. It was reassuring. What was annoying was how it threw out the old book canon... and then kept cribbing from it.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens: The Spoiler-Free Version

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens is the GoldenEye of Star Wars films. It hits a lot of familiar beats, but it does this in the name of dragging the franchise out of the shadow of recent failures and reigniting it for easy public consumption. There are a lot of spoilery nitpicky problems with it, starting with the fact that I can't decide whether Adam Driver was horribly miscast or the best casting decision in the film, but that's for the VERY SPOILER HEAVY post.

Oh, and speaking of Bond/Star Wars comparisons, Daniel Craig has a hilarious cameo in it.

All right, on to as much substance as I can give you without giving any major plot points away. I love the fact that, right after the title crawl, the camera pans down to a Star Destroyer. None of this ships-that-aren't-Star-Destroyers nonsense that we had to suffer through in the prequels.

The Force Awakes: Spoilers Everywhere Version

The Dalton Dilemma
There's a phenomenon in movies that I call the "Dalton Dilemma." A review of The Living Daylights, starring Timothy Dalton as James Bond, complains that Dalton's impatience with the script seeps through his performance, causing him to stomp about in permascowl mode because the whole proceeding is completely beneath him. I thought that this more accurately summed up James Bond the character rather than Timothy Dalton the actor.

What does this have to do with The Force Awakens? Well...

SPOILERS