For this week’s edition of Hit Me with Your Best Shot, Nathaniel has gone as current as he could dare, selecting the gargantuan 2015 hit Star Wars: The Force Awakens for this week’s subject. It’s an intriguing choice, and not one, I’m afraid, that gets me terribly jazzed up to hunt for a shot. There are many very lovely, very iconic images from the film, but I don’t know, I’ve seen it three times now and every time I’m just a wee bit cooler towards it, and I can barely work up any energy to talk about it. There are so many instantly-iconic images that just hang there, all hollow-like, like the filmmakers were great at pretty and not terribly keen on storytelling. I suppose the sequence of Han Solo and Kylo Ren facing each other down on the bridge has some really great shots and lighting that tie into the emotional and narrative importance of that scene, but outside of that…
The point being, this one’s going to be real short. The best thing about The Force Awakens, by far, was how instantly likable the new leads were, and for me, the most likable of the them, also by far, was the droid BB-8. So this shot, while barbarically obvious, couldn’t have fit the bill better:
It’s such a god-damned charming moment, definitely my favorite thing that happens in the movie, and one of the points where it most taps into the easy, pleasurable innocence of the original trilogy. You will believe that a beach ball with a salad spinner for a head can have feelings and be part of the team. It’s the most giddy-making, humanising moment in the film, for me anyway, forging a bond between human and robot that feels unforced and fun. It’s not a great shot – like much of J.J. Abrams’s work as a director, it’s TV-scale (seriously, this movie has a weird allergy to medium wide shots) – but its a joyous one. And joy, particularly joy that involves likable characters playing off of each other, is what Star Wars does best.