20
Dec
Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: 7, abrams, awakens, bb8, episode, Film, finn, force, han, jedi, jj, kylo, leia, lightsaber, luke, Movie, part, peeta, ren, Review, rey, seven, sith, star, wars. Leave a comment
It’s a bit difficult to review a movie with this much weight riding on it, so soon after seeing it. The gap between the midnight screenings and the ideal start time for my year-end countdown posts is mere days, so I had to get cracking. But believe me, I’ve been mulling this movie over in my mind almost every second of that short time.
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Starring: Harrison Ford, Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac
Director: JJ Abrams (Star Trek, Super 8)
Rating: M
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Say whatever you want about 2015 in movies – If Star Wars was good, the year was always going to be remembered fondly. In fact you might even argue that it didn’t have to be good, only better than those endlessly panned prequel films. The carefully timed, Disney engineered hype cycle for Star Wars: The Force Awakens has been lengthy, intense and omnipresent, and the, ahem, force of that hype has been looming over the movie, waiting to crush it like it did The Phantom Menace way back in 1999.
Within that unenviable context, what director/superfan JJ Abrams has done with this mega-franchise is astounding.
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16
May
Posted by vagrantesque in Movies. Tagged: abrams, darkness, Film, into, jj, Review, star, trek. Leave a comment
I did something very similar to my The Expendables experience to accommodate this blockbuster release; I only watched the first Star Trek film the night before seeing its sequel.
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Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Benedict Cumberbatch
Director: JJ Abrams (Mission: Impossible 3, Super 8)
Rating: M
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At the start of this week I held the same position on Star Trek as I always had: I couldn’t care less. I had always been a Star Wars fan first and foremost and anything that Trek did was in my mind vastly inferior. It couldn’t possibly hope to match the excitement and grand operatic scale of George Lucas‘ brainchild franchise, and no matter how iconic the characters of Trek had become over time, they didn’t hold a candle to the likes of Darth Vader, Yoda and the like. But, like many other Star Wars fans the world over, my attention was forcibly grabbed recently by the news that JJ Abrams, the director of the Star Trek reboot of 2009, would be in charge of Disney’s upcoming Star Wars trilogy. So I watched the 2009 movie on Blu-Ray, was promptly stunned by its quality, then went to see its freshly released sequel in theatres the very next day. And boy, do I think Star Wars is in good hands now.
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