Star Wars: The Force Awakens - because I completely forgot to write about it a month ago

Like every curious person on this planet, it was my duty to go see this new Star Wars. Bloody Star Wars. Weeks, or should I say, MONTHS before it came out, I really couldn't bear the hype. I am all for sci-fi in every form and I would have been so excited for this movie if it didn't have the name Star Wars attached to it. Because of this, my whole Facebook feed was an unstoppable stream of Star Wars news and videos and interviews and images. At that point, I think I would have punched R2D2 if he rolled up to me (and I LOVE him).

I guess I wasn't as excited by the prospect of a new Star Wars and all the pre-movie buzz because I was never really a Star Wars fan. I was born way after the first movies and my dad was a lot more into Die Hard type movies than Star Wars to take the time to show me the originals. I think I stumbled upon them on TV at some point but found them so very cheesy. However, I fell in love with the Ewoks and I watched all the Ewoks adventures through their TV movie and their cartoons. Loved that stuff when I was a kid. The movies just were too intricate for me at that age. Then came the sequels when I was a teenager. My taste in movies was not fully fledged and I kinda enjoyed these new stories.

To be fair, at 14, I totally adored Anakin (Hayden's version) so I watched them all several times and imagined myself as Padme, of course. I think I watched them again in my 20s and I noticed how terrible they were and how cliche and cheesy and how the dialogue was meant for 10 year olds. Seriously. So really, I dived in this new iteration with super low expectations and a lot of irritation. The saving grace was JJ. This dude!! Sitting down in the theater and starting to watch this monster of a movie, I found myself laughing about 2 minutes in. And that was it. I knew I was in for a very good ride. It was clever. That's everything I wanted from a film set in this epic universe.

The Star Wars universe always very much intrigued me and I love everything about it. Jedis, chosen ones, epic battles, robots, intergalactic travels, awesome ships, interesting races and mythology. These were always great. However, I always felt like nobody took advantage of it. To me, the best piece of content ever to come out of this world is "The Old Republic" from Bioware. That's what I wanted to experience in this universe. I now feel like the movie side has caught up to this. The visuals were stunning and totally propelled you back in the great adventure that Star Wars is. Thanks to new technology but also brilliant vision, the universe came to life in an effortless way. I really wanted to live and experience that world and be a part of it.

Setting and universe aside, the characters brought life to a very good story. Even though we are just repeating a winning formula, I don't see anything wrong with that. To me, Avatar repeated a winning story but did it so well that it didn't bother me in the slightest. How many romantic comedies that have the exact same plot have been released since 1980? To me that's not even a point to make. The movie is continuing the epic story that was started before, adding some side plots that are very relevant and giving this one movie a villain to defeat. I love that they stayed consistent with the originals and are going to keep Kylo Ren long term. I really do not like the "villain of the day" format that movies serve us most of the time. That's why I really like Hydra in the Marvel universe and do not care for the interchangeable villains they give us in the individual movies. Apart from the evolving villain that we seem to have in this new Star Wars, the heroes and supporting characters were also awesome. And my favorite one was BB8, There is no way BB8 is not everybody's favorite character. I thought R2D2 was cute and awesome but BB8 was designed to overload this movie with cuteness and comic relief. I am not sure how many times the whole movie theater went "awwwwww" when he was rolling around. This thing is genius. Giving life and soul to voiceless characters has always been Star Wars' strength but they climbed to a very different level here. Chewy's conversations with Han were also brilliant. I feel like I am going to gloss over Rey and Finn but to me they were just part of a bigger ensemble that worked really well.

Of course, they're great actors, did an awesome job and Rey is now probably many girls' role model. And thank god for that. I am so glad that we now have a strong female Jedi at the center of this universe, this obviously makes it so much more appealing to me.
All in all, I have to say that Star Wars was my favorite movie this year and one of my favorite movie ever. I am quite saddened JJ is not going to come back for the sequel but I have hopes they now have a good idea of what Star Wars needs to be for fans and franchise newbies alike.

I didn't do a cat rating video on this one but if I did, it would get a 5/5 cats.