Taking Luke’s seat, as the main protagonist, is Daisy Ridley. She straps herself in, swats aside any vestige of Mark Hamill, and takes command of the movie. Her character is Rey, a scrap-metal scavenger by trade, stranded without a family on the dusty planet of Jakku. “Luke Skywalker? I thought he was a myth,” she says, with the calm assurance of someone who knows herself to be solid flesh and blood. Frankly, she is twice the guy he ever was. Ridley is given plenty to do before she even delivers a line: proof not just that Abrams trusts herbut that his obedience to the basic laws of action movies is intact. (We first saw it in “Super 8,” which also had a female presence, Elle Fanning, at its core. “Women always figure out the truth,” we hear in the new movie. George Lucas, look and learn.) Our first glance of any new performer, watching simply how she or he walks across the screen, can be more instructive than anything else—far more than the utterance of dialogue. Ridley has a firm gait, a determined sprint, and a talent for ad-hoc sand sledding, and Rey needs no help from anyone, thank you very much. “Stop taking my hand!” she cries, fleeing a fracas in the company of a stranger.
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