A Thank-You to 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' (no-spoilers!)

            So often with movies these days, we often hype up the blockbuster experience so high with expectation that there is no possibility that those expectations could be met. I saw it happen "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace," "The Avengers: Age of Ultron," "The Dark Knight Rises," "The Hobbit," and many other films.  The marketing behind these motion pictures promise us an epic, life changing, dark, complex, and emotion filled experience even better than the well-received film it's the sequel/prequel to.  Amongst this, I find that once we hype a movie up so much and it clearly fails to meet our expectations, we take two routes. On one hand, some take the path where they bring it to the lowest common level and use such expressions like "the dumbest film ever made," "terrible," or my personal favorite, "it ruined my childhood."  On the other side, the path I tend to take is defending the movie to an unrealistic extent. We get so hyped for a film that once it comes out the anticipation is so high, we defend it no matter how bad the product is. It HAS to be great. 

            This weekend came "Star Wars: The Force Awakens."  It's by far the most anticipated film in my life so far and amongst all the hype, promise, anticipation, and disappointment films of this caliber tend to lead to, in a mighty two-hour format, Star Wars was able to make itself known as a cinematic experience that devoured whatever anticipation I had mustered up.  Yes, I'm saying it now. 'The Force Awakens' did what very few films so anticipated have been able to do and exceeded my expectations.

            I honestly had the best theatre experience of my life.  From the moment "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away..." went on the screen (and that itself was worth 20 bucks), I wasn't in a theatre, I was in Star Wars.  All the theories, speculation, and even anticipation were thrown out the window as soon as the film started and I couldn't keep my eyes off it from beginning to end.  The theatre was a rock and roll concert.  Energy filled the room.  Everyone cheered in the moments of triumph, and you felt the air taken out of the theatre at the moments of shock or despair.  It was simply amazing.  When I went to the bathroom after the film was over, I looked in the mirror to see tears flowing down my face that I didn't know were there.  The tears certainly weren’t there out of sadness, but because I had just sat through what made me fall in love with the universe as a younger child.  I fell in love with ALL the new characters.  The villain Kylo Ren was my personal favorite.  Without spoilers, he truly wasn't Vader 2.0, he was a character with motivations behind what he was doing and I couldn't help but feel sympathy for him.  Director J.J. Abrams has very heavily talked about going back to the use of practical-effects like the original trilogy.  Though I'm not the first person to point out the practical-effects, that decision truly brought this film to a new visual level.  When you are wandering around the desert planet of Jakku, you are actually looking at a real desert not a green-screen.  When you see these amazing creatures, droids, and aliens living in the universe of Star Wars, nine times out of ten you are looking at real, tangible, objects. There is certainly CGI in the film, and I’m definitely not against the use of it to enhance scenes, but they did a great job at using it as a tool to enhance the practical objects they already built.  Believe it or not, my biggest issue with the movie is that there is one segment in particular that did rely a tad too heavily on CGI, but besides that sequence, they used it amazingly.
            Looking back, there were clearly some minor flaws I could pick apart from the film here and there but overall, for the first time since 1983, Star Wars is back and better than ever.  This is why I love going to the movies.  This is why film is my favorite form of story-telling to ever exist.  This is why I want to tell stories of my own one-day.  Here's a big thank-you to everyone involved with bringing this film to life.   For those of you who weren't too sold on seeing this film, go see it.  You will not be disappointed.