Happy Holidays - The Force Awakens (2015)

What the hell is this? You ask.  A blog post? Yep, so I'm going to try to resurrect this.

Yes, but "The Force Awakens".  Yep.  I found myself reading back through my old posts, and it was really enjoyable to read back on some of my thoughts on books I read (and humorous to read all my typos and lack of editing).  Really enjoyable.  So even if I have no readership, it still seems valuable, cathartic, and good for nostalgia a couple of years down the road.  And I'm going to write about all kinds of popular art...so movies, records, and of course books.  No memes, unless I'm drawn to the dark side.

Which brings us to Star Wars.  It's a good, fun movie.  Much like the original.

In fact, it's really a retelling of the original with handfuls of Empire pulled in for extra Star Wars goodies.  Now, I would guess that some cranky "fans" will point this out as a pitfall of the movie.  "It's not original!"  Actually, I don't have to guess, I've already seen it on the world wide internets.

Here's the problem with these types of proclamations...

The original Star Wars isn't "original", either.  It is a retelling of the most popular story in the history of man-kind.  I don't think that's a criticism.  I just point that out to temper any of the finger pointing of this being a rip-off.  The reason the original Star Wars story was compelling was not "originality" it was that it did a good job of telling the Hero's Journey story.  And it ported it to a space opera, which gave it  a modern/cool element.  The"originality" of Star Wars came in the form of the effects, which were masterful.

And where does that leave me?

I liked the movie.  Because I liked Star Wars (and loved Empire Strikes Back), and because I am ok with them grabbing from those movies with huge handfuls to create what amounts to a love letter to them.  And I like the female Luke character.  Good strong female characters are always a nice find IMO.

One complaint...I am in fact done with huge, mass destruction weapons shaped like planets.