Von Sydow isn’t on screen for very long—one might assume that Abrams cast the great Swedish thespian to instill from the outset an air of seriousness and gravity, similar to what Alec Guinness brought to Lucas’s original Star Wars (1977)—but it’s enough to establish the film’s fundamental stakes, which involve the need to locate Luke Skywalker, the only remaining Jedi in the universe, who has disappeared and gone into hiding. Those familiar with Star Wars and its heralded follow-up The Empire Strikes Back (1980) will quickly recognize that The Force Awakens is built on a similar structure, essentially borrowing the various plot points and narrative beats from Star Wars while grafting onto it Empire’s Freudian emphasis on father-son conflicts and generational divides.

See if this plot sounds familiar: There is an intergalactic conflict between a fascistic would-be empire that wants to control the galaxy and a rag-tag band of rebels fighting to save the republic. A small, weirdly expressive droid is entrusted with important information by a leader in the rebellion, and that droid eventually falls into the hands of a scrappy orphan just on the cusp of full maturity living a frustrating existence on a desert planet. That orphan ends up leaving said planet behind, joining forces with a rakish smuggler and his Wookie companion to get the droid where it needs to go. Standing in the way is the aforementioned evil empire, which has at its disposal a massive weapon that can destroy entire planets and a menacing, helmeted leader who can tap into the Dark Side of the Force. The orphan discovers a heretofore-unrealized connection to the Force, as well, and along the way there are revelations about paternity, numerous fights and tight escapes, light-saber duels, and a small, wizened sage who has been around for at least 1,000 years.

Basically, what we have is the plot from Star Wars, and The Force Awakens matches it beat for beat. However, Abrams constantly tweaks the formula, sometimes in ways decidedly radical (like making the protagonist a woman, something virtually unthinkable in the largely male-dominated Star Wars movie universe), sometimes in ways profound (without giving away too much, I’ll say that the Luke-Vader son/father conflict is functionally reversed, with a father begging his son to step away from the Dark Side), and sometimes in ways that are just clever or amusing (numerous lines of dialogue from the previous films are repeated here, but almost always with some kind of twist).

Abrams rightly recognized that the return of familiar characters like Harrison Ford’s Han Solo, Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker, Carrie Fisher’s Leia, and Peter Mayhew’s Chewbacca carries with it an intense nostalgia factor, and to his credit he embraces it rather than trying to hide it (“We’re home, Chewie,” Solo says as he and the Wookie step into the fabled Millennium Falcon for the first time in years, another line of dialogue that works both within the narrative and as extracinematic commentary). There are plenty of direct parallels between Abrams’s film and Lucas’s original: the desert planet Jakku is a dead-ringer for Tatooine; the Empire has been replaced by the First Order, which is functionally the same as the predecessor from whose ashes it arose; rather than having the Death Star, a moon-sized space station capable of destroying an entire planet, we now have the Starkiller, an actual planet with a massive space station and weapon built into its core that is capable of destroying multiple planets simultaneously; and of course the return of the Millennium Falcon, Star Destroyers, TIE fighters, X-wing fighters, and the like. But, Abrams makes it all feel (as it should) like an extension of the previous films, so the nostalgic chills we get come across as organic, rather than forced. This is particularly true when he stages action against the backdrop of detritus from previous films, including the metal carcass of a massive Star Destroyer slowly rotting away in the dunes and a fallen AT-AT lying on its side like roadkill.

The film’s sense of nostalgia inflects it on all levels, including the technological. Although there are plenty of digital pyrotechnics on display, Abrams sought to bring the film’s sense of physicality much closer to the original Star Wars than the prequels, which entailed shooting on actual 35mm celluloid, relying heavily on physical sets and locations, and using latex and animatronics and miniatures as much as possible. That commitment pays off, as The Force Awakens has a physical sense of presence that the prequels often lacked. Furthermore, it encourages Abrams to avoid crowding the frame with objects and movement just because he can, a temptation that Lucas could never resist in either his prequels or his revised versions of the original trilogy. Compared to, for example, Attack of the Clones, The Force Awakens feels positively sparse in its mise-en-scène, even when Abrams takes us into his version of the Mos Eisley Cantina.

However, for all that feels familiar, where The Force Awakens comes into its own is through its cast of new characters, many of whom are played by unknowns. Chief among these are Rey (Daisy Ridley), the previously mentioned desert-planet-dwelling orphan; Finn (John Boyega), a stormtrooper who has a moral crisis during a village massacre and deserts the First Order; and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), the new masked villain who keeps Darth Vader’s semi-melted helmet as a totem and wields a particularly nasty red light-saber. Rey and Finn end up working together to return BB-8, an amusing new droid that looks like a small ball perched atop a larger ball, to the rebels, who are led by now-General Leia. Along the way Han Solo and Chewbacca stumble into their mission and join it, thus connecting old and new generations of rebel fortitude. Other new faces include Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron, the rebels’ best pilot, and two who are hidden beneath digital bodies: Andy Serkis as Supreme Leader Snoke, a gnarled-faced Emperor replacement, and recent Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o as Maz Kanata, an ancient busybody who has an important light-saber to pass on. Of all these new characters, Ridley’s Rey and Driver’s Kylo Ren are the most compelling, but for entirely different reasons. Ridley, who is clearly playing the trilogy’s new protagonist, gives a smart, intense performance that makes her both immediately likable and relatable. On the other side (literally), Driver gives a perfectly calibrated performance of youthful revolt gone terribly dark, and it is telling that the film allows him to be both vulnerable and utterly sadistic.

Abrams, working with screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan (who helped pen Empire and Jedi, as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark) from an initial screenplay by Michael Arndt (Toy Story 3), isn’t afraid to push the nostalgia factor into hyperdrive, a decision that will probably result in as much adoration for the film as it will vitriol. Those looking to hate will jump on the similarities as evidence of creative bankruptcy and a tacit admittance by Abrams that he can’t match Lucas’s original vision, while others will find great depths of pleasure in watching the filmmakers plumb the familiar depths of the Star Wars mythos while making it decidedly their own.

To accuse the film of being too similar to the original must necessarily ignore the fact that Star Wars was itself an exercise in self-conscious cultural recycling, with Lucas reworking the cliffhanger serials of his childhood and mixing it with the art-film pathos and focus on outsiders he learned while studying European and Japanese cinema at USC. Unlike Lucas, Abrams has started from an impossible situation: hew too close to the original trilogy and he risks looking like a hack, deviate too far and he risks the ire of the purists. If The Force Awakens is one of the better Star Wars movies—and I think it is—it is because he finds a sweet spot in the middle, dishing out familiarity without apology and arranging it in such a way that, even as we recognize the patterns and beats, it feels fresh and invigorating and, lest we forget what’s really at stake here, fun.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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