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 The timing is probably right for a new female superhero, now
that Jennifer Lawrence has wound up her stint as the archer
Katniss Everdeen in "The Hunger Games" movies.
Enter little known British actress Daisy Ridley as the loner Rey,
ekeing out a subsistence living as a scavenger of spaceship
parts on the planet Jakku.
An invasion by a squad of Stormtroopers, loyal to the
militaristic "New Order" that has replaced the Empire of yore,
suddenly puts her on a new career path: getting off the planet
as fast as possible.
She does this in tandem with fellow British actor John Boyega,
who plays Finn, a Stormtrooper who deserts when he is sickened
by the carnage of the film's opening military assault on a
desert village.
They are two of the three new main characters. The other one is
a new Darth Vader-esque masked villain named Kylo Ren, played by
Adam Driver.
The torch is thus passed to a younger generation in a new
trilogy of the franchise that started in 1977 with George
Lucas's first "Star Wars" and which the Walt Disney Co <DIS.N>
acquired in 2012 for $4 billion.
But loyal fans also are going to love this for everything that
is not new, from the return of Harrison Ford as Han Solo, his
sidekick the Wookie Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew), the robots C-3PO
and R2-D2, plus a cute new roly-poly one called BB-8, familiar
spaceships and the plot line that sets up yet another Oedipal
conflict between father and son.
Some dialogue from the original films that critics called flat
but which has seeped into the world's collective consciousness
is reprised word for word - getting laughs from a screening
audience.
"We've got company," one of the characters says when the
Stormtroopers invade Jakku, looking for a map that everyone,
from the New Order to the Resistance led by Carrie Fisher's
character, promoted to General Leia, wants to get their hands
on.
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The possessor of that map will know how to find the missing Jedi
Knight Luke Skywalker - Mark Hamill's character - but to say more of
that would be a spoiler of the First Order.
What is not a spoiler - and is no doubt what the Disney people would
like everyone to know - is that this is a "Star Wars" that is not
afraid to shed tears - those being Rey's. But she is also a woman
who can fix a spaceship condenser (or whatever) in no time flat, and
seems to catch on to using a lightsaber a lot faster than Skywalker
did way back when.
Lupita Nyong'o plays the goggle-eyed Maz Kanata, a dispenser of
Yoda-like wisdom who runs a souped-up version of the famous Wild
West galactic bar in the first "Star Wars."
There is even a female Darth Vader-like character played by
Gwendoline Christie of "Game of Thrones" fame, whose blond hair just
peeps out from under her mask-like helmet.
"A woman always figures out the truth - always," Solo confides to
Finn early in the film. In this feminized "Star Wars" universe, even
the Wookie Chewbacca, who took a strong dislike to the young
Princess Leia almost 40 years ago, sees a place at the spaceship
controls for Rey.
(Michael Roddy is the Entertainment Editor for Reuters in Europe.
The views expressed are his own.)
(Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
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