It is exhausting to imagine that it has been ten years for the reason that Star Wars sequel trilogy kicked off with 2015’s The Drive Awakens. It signifies that 11-year-olds who have been sitting within the theater, doubtless watching a Star Wars movie for the primary time, at the moment are 21.
Though there was a whole lot of criticism that The Drive Awakens was too just like A New Hope, the 2015 movie was a juggernaut on the field workplace and created an internet frenzy as everybody debated Rey’s origins and the thriller surrounding Luke’s disappearance.
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Sadly, issues took a little bit of a tumble with 2017’s The Final Jedi. Rian Johnson took an bold swing by specializing in the Drive connection between Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), delegating former Stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega) and Resistance pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) to minor subplots that hardly served the story.
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‘Star Wars: The Drive Awakens’ Got here Out In December 2015
Though Johnson seemingly arrange Kylo Ren to turn out to be the villain within the remaining installment of the trilogy, Emperor Palpatine’s shock return utterly walked again Ren’s descent to the darkish facet. After a confrontation with Rey, he returned because the redeemed Ben Solo to tackle Palpatine. He handed away on the finish of the movie, utilizing the final of his energy to resurrect Rey, and seemingly pale into the Drive.
Sadly, as the one son of Han Solo and Leia Organa, this meant that the Solo/Skywalker bloodline has seemingly disappeared. Though Rey was revealed to be born from a clone of Emperor Palpatine, she makes use of the title “Rey Skywalker” on the finish of the movie, stirring extra controversy amongst followers.
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However this is not about The Rise of Skywalker, which was truly the final Star Wars movie to seem in theaters approach again in 2019. On the tenth anniversary of The Drive Awakens, followers had one factor on their minds: hope.
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The Sequel Trilogy Proved To Be Extraordinarily Controversial
In the course of the six-year run of the prequel trilogy, followers highlighted a justifiable share of disappointment and controversy. Whether or not it was Jar Jar Binks and a examine of how excessive taxes and unchecked company energy led to the Galactic Empire in The Phantom Menace, to the melodramatic traces and unpolished CGI sequences panned within the seven years following Revenge of the Sith, there have been many missteps followers hoped to neglect.
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Followers have been feeling hopeful about the way forward for the franchise when Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012, and the announcement of the sequel trilogy had them wanting to see extra Star Wars on the massive display screen and see what occurred to Luke, Leia, and Han after the Battle of Endor. Sadly, the sequel trilogy in the end fell flat because of the lack of a cohesive imaginative and prescient and completely no define for the place the story would go after three movies.
That being mentioned, The Drive Awakens began off robust. John Williams’ iconic rating and the parallel beats of A New Hope definitely helped the story really feel like Star Wars, whereas introducing a brand new era to a brand new band of heroes to root for. The characters are attention-grabbing sufficient, and Oscar Isaac’s Poe does an ideal job bringing the humor early on to stability out the truth that the sequel trilogy mainly opened with a bloodbath. It’s not overly violent, although, and is definitely extra attention-grabbing than beginning a film with a debate about commerce coverage.
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John Boyega’s Finn Ought to Have Performed A Greater Position In The Sequel Trilogy
Finn later frees Poe from the First Order, and so they crash on Jakku. It’s right here that Finn runs into Rey, and the story actually begins. Though Finn and Rey spend a good period of time collectively, Rey by no means meets Poe till the very finish of the movie, and even then, it is only a fast introduction. Followers hoping for a brand new “trio” have been shortly disenchanted, as Rey heads off to search out Luke and so they aren’t united once more till the tip of The Final Jedi. It makes their scenes collectively within the remaining movie really feel extra pressured than earned, because the viewers barely had any time to see their chemistry develop on-screen.
John Boyega will get a lot to do within the first movie, the place he even wields a lightsaber in opposition to Kylo Ren. Whereas it will have been poetic to see a former Stormtrooper turn out to be a Jedi to take down the First Order, Rian Johnson relegated Finn to a facet character, and his Drive sensitivity was handled as a working joke that by no means landed the punchline within the remaining movie.
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‘Star Wars: The Drive Awakens’ Gave Followers One thing To Discuss About
Likewise, Kylo Ren makes a positive villain, if that is what he is purported to be. It might need been extra dramatic if he hadn’t proven his face so early on within the trilogy, as it will have allowed the story to play with the thriller of his origins a bit longer.
Nonetheless, The Drive Awakens did give followers a lot to speak about, and though most weren’t pleased with the path that the trilogy took, it did introduce a brand new era to a solid of attention-grabbing characters that might have informed a very compelling story with a unified narrative imaginative and prescient.
Now, ten years later, it is clear that the movie arrange the right combination of hope, humor, and motion that followers have come to count on from a Star Wars film. Taken by itself, it’s nonetheless a great movie… so long as you do not focus an excessive amount of on how the trilogy ends.
