J.J. Abrams responds to criticism that ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ is a ‘rip-off’
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"Star Wars" director J.J. Abrams. (Getty Images)
If you believe "Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a rip-off of the original trilogy, J.J. Abrams completely understands why.
The director admits he, too, has heard those criticisms about the film, which is now the highest-grossing movie ever in America, and anticipated some fans might have a bad reaction.
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“I can understand that someone might say, ‘Oh, it’s a complete rip-off!’” Abrams told the Hollywood Reporter in a recent interview. “We inherited "Star Wars." The story of history repeating itself was, I believe, an obvious and intentional thing, and the structure of meeting a character who comes from a nowhere desert and discovers that she has a power within her, where the bad guys have a weapon that is destructive but that ends up being destroyed -- those simple tenets are by far the least important aspects of this movie, and they provide bones that were well-proven long before they were used in "Star Wars."
"I respect every reaction," he adds.
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Abrams shared that before the movie was even released, he knew that there would be people who didn’t like it.
“I knew that, whatever we did, there would be a group of people -- and I was just hoping and praying that it would be smaller than not -- that would take issue with any number of things,” he explained. “But I knew we weren’t making the movie for any other reason than we believed that it could be something meaningful and special and entertaining and worthy of people’s time.”