Sounds like a blockbuster

OK, I think we can go right to the main point: The Force Awakens delivers the goods, keeps its trademarked promises, lives up (or down) to whatever its massive advance publicity campaign might have led you to expect, etc., etc.

It entertains. It’s a fast, funny, noisy super-spectacle. It’s an armchair version of a theme-park thrill ride that aims to excite and soothe at the same time.

Beyond that, let me offer some marginal notes on this latest installment in the motion picture branch of the Star Wars franchise:

The key newcomers—Daisy Ridley as Rey, Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron, John Boyega as Finn, Adam Driver as Kylo Ren—all make strong impressions. Ridley has the best role. Isaac does the best acting, but only in the early parts of the story.

The returning veterans—Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill—seem like guest performers on some kind of reunion tour. They’ve all outgrown their respective characters (including the aging versions they play here), but they’re all good troupers and they gamely play along with the fun. Max von Sydow is on hand as well, if only to add a brief note of Bergmanesque gravity to the proceedings.

It’s no surprise, of course, that The Force Awakens has plenty of visual excitement—the light-show/lite special effects, the magical gadgets, the mildly bizarre costumes and settings, etc. But here again, it occurs to me that the Star Wars movies are above all about sound: the story provides a pretext for the spectacular visual displays, but the story and visuals get their main dramatic effects from the grand musical score and the orchestration of those larger-than-life sound effects.

John Williams’ score, by the way, seems crucial to the film’s sense of space. Take that music away and the film begins to lose its sense of vast expansiveness. Even some of the interior scenes might begin to feel as enclosed and claustrophobic as anything from the cheapie sci-fi of the 1950s.

The other source of breathing room in this production is in its comedy. The antics of the androids and Chewbacca are part of that, and there’s a recurring comic streak in the fitful efforts of Ridley’s Rey and Boyega’s Finn to integrate themselves into the main narrative (and to find their respective life paths).

A beach-ball-size android called BB-8 provides the film with some of its very best comic moments. And since a sense of humor is a basic marker of humanity in this film, you might be able to make a case that BB-8 is the most human character in the film. Anyway, he’s my favorite here.