Star Wars: The Force Awakens review - J J Abrams enhances iconic film series but Daisy Ridley disappoints

Has ever so much ridden on a casting decision? In 2012, George Lucas sold Lucasfilm, along with the rights to make more Star Wars films, in succession to both his original trilogy (1977-1983) and the subsequent, less adored three prequels, (1999-2005), to Disney for $4.05 billion.
Disney appointed the wizard fanboy J.J. Abrams (Star Trek Into Darkness, Mission Impossible: III) to direct this first sequel, the seventh iteration of the franchise, and although the movie is trademarked Lucasfilm, it's his baby.
You have to admire the shamelessness and proficiency with which he has not just maintained the product continuity but actually enhanced its quality.
Abrams doesn't so much make free-wheeling additions to the canons of the movies he admires as the most loving and attentive revisions of them, improving where he can.

The Force Awakens completely recapitulates the plot of Return of the Jedi.
An evil empire, this time called the First Order, commanded by a shadowy evil giant, Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis plus effects, looking like Voldemort writ large), and his Darth Vader-like lieutenant, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) are out to destroy the freedom-loving Resistance, blasting their planets to bits from a new Death Star, a whole planet this time the Starkiller Base.
But the baddies are still worried as to where in the galaxy Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) might still be.

Abrams has brought back as much of the original Star Wars cast as the passage of nearly 40 years since its first production allows: grizzled, lined, but effortlessly charismatic Harrison Ford re-appears as Hans Solo, once more at the controls of the Millennium Falcon, emerging as still functional junk from under a tarpaulin.
Carrie Fisher, having lost a lot of weight and those awful bobs of hair, returns not as Princess Leia but now General Leia Organa in charge of the Resistance.
John Williams provides the awful blasting score again - and, of course, there's no problem bringing back Chewie, that much fur hiding any number of wrinkles, more endearing than ever, or the droids, including C3-PO, adding to them a new one, a cutie, with a rollerball body and an expressive head.

All the technology is there too: glistening white plastic stormtroopers a-plenty with remarkably poor aim, and those H (evil) and X (good) fighters, whizzing round the sky, blasting away at each other indecipherably, even doing that thing of chasing through ever narrower canyons of vast installations.
But what Abrams has also done is completely re-juvenated his heroes, as he must at this distance in time (it's vaguely 30 years after Return of the Jedi).

So a whole middle-aged generation has been passed over, to make this a film with appeal to teenagers.
Our juvenile leads are, as luck will have it, in this galaxy far, far away, both young Londoners.
John Boyega from Peckham, 23, (Attack the Block) plays Finn, brought up as a Stormtrooper but rebelling and turning to the good, as the trailers hinted, easily holds his own: big-jawed, big-hearted, busking it in a new world for him: a proper guy.

But Daisy Ridley, also 23, from Westminster, is the total heroine of the film, beginning as an obscure "scavenger" on a remote planet, dressed in stylishly beige sackcloth and bandaging, but then becoming the one in whom the Force awakens, called upon to take a role she had never dreamed of, ultimately fighting a gigantic light-saber duel with the new streamlined Darth Vader lookalike, Kylo Ren.
Abrams is a more dynamic, kinetic film-maker than George Lucas ever was - and The Force Awakens is a much more involving, dramatic proposition than the originals when re-seen now.

He's done a good job.
But the movie has a major problem in this central character.
Ridley, previously little known, seems a genuinely sweet girl and is quite pretty - but can barely act at all.
Her facial expressions are limited and repetitive, her interactions with her fellow stars unconvincing, her physical repertoire - running, fighting, shooting -  awkward.
You start thinking: give her time, she'll loosen up, it'll get better. It never does. And she's the heroine, the very heart of the film.
So that doesn't work. How different the ride would have been with Alicia Vikander, say, or Saoirse Ronan, or even, whisper it, Jennifer Lawrence, in the part.