Though it has been widely praised for giving the Star Wars series the kick up the kick up the arse that it needed after the prequel trilogy, The Force Awakens has also been criticised by some for a plot that hews too closely to the original film A New Hope.
In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, director J.J. Abrams came at this head-on, saying that he is well aware of the similarities, and it was “obviously a wildly important thing” for the series to go backwards as well as forwards.
“Ultimately the structure of Star Wars itself is as classic and tried and true as you can get,” he said, before continuing:
“The story of history repeating itself was – I believe – an obvious and intentional thing, and the structure of meeting a character who comes from a nowhere desert and discovers that she has a power within her, where the bad guys have a weapon that is destructive but that ends up being destroyed – those simple tenets are by far the least important aspects of this movie, and they provide bones that were well-proven long before they were used in Star Wars.”
Meanwhile, over the weekend, The Force Awakens opened to a record-breaking $US 53M in China, and has now surpassed Jurassic World to become the third-highest grossing movie internationally of all time.
Story: The Independent
Photo: ChinaFotoPress / Getty
