Star Wars – 40 years of awakening The Force and captivating the generations
George Lucas was so sure his film was going to be a flop that he went on holiday rather than attend the premiere – but instead it was the seed from which a vast franchise grew, with the latest instalment due this week
The new instalment in the Star Wars film saga opens in cinemas on Thursday against a formidable force: the galactic hopes of devoted fans who have waited a decade to revisit their beloved universe of Jedi, droids and lightsabres.
Can The Force Awakens, the seventh episode in the celebrated sci-fi series, meet those expectations when it debuts? “No,” says director J.J. Abrams. “How can anything live up to any expectation like that?”
What the movie will offer, Abrams says, is great performances and visual effects, music “that breaks your heart and soars”, plus a story, characters and creatures that are new, but feel like they fit in the universe created by George Lucas in the original 1977 film.
“George was creating a world that we wanted to go back to in order to tell a story we’d never seen yet,” Abrams says. “In a way, we were going backward to go forward.”
Lucas bowed out of Star Wars after he sold his film studio to Disney in 2012 for US$4 billion.
“There’s no way that I can imagine anything touching the magic of what he did,” says Abrams, whose resumé includes a successful reboot of the Star Trek series and the cult TV series Lost. “Yet we all did the best we could to make that happen.”