I liked the movie; it's certainly better than episodes 1 and 2, which were abysmal. But I don't get the people who act like it's anywhere near on par with ANH or ESB. I had 3 fears for this movie, all of which came true:
1) I was afraid it was going to just rehash the original movies. I posted that fear in this forum a couple weeks ago after the last trailer and poster were released. It absolutely came true. The new characters were not exact analogues of the earlier characters, but you've got 3 new main characters that include a woman and two men, just like before. Poe Dameron is the closest to an old trilogy analogue; he's very much in the Han Solo mode. The early plot centers around integral data held by a funny droid who is found by a character on a desert world who looks wistfully at the ships because they want to leave the planet (Rey wanted to get back to Jakku admittedly, but only because she wanted to meet her family again so she could leave with them). The bad guy is an overt Vader analogue. You've got a cool-looking character who's barely in this one but is clearly being set up as the Boba Fett wannabe based on look, lack of screen time, and the fact that people were already intrigued because she is played by an actress from another beloved fantasy franchise (Mega, supposedly Phasma is going to be more involved in the next movie). Essentially the Empire is still at large after all this time? Little progress has been made in 30 years to wipe these guys out. And worst of all, we get the Death Star thing all over again. I'm honestly flabbergasted by this. It's the exact same thing as in Jedi, which was already basically the same as ANH. Here, just like in Jedi, Solo takes the team down to the planet to destroy the shield so the air force can blow the thing up. I don't understand how anyone even considered this as a viable story for more than two seconds.
2) I was afraid Solo was going to die. Harrison Ford was top-billed for the first time, he was in all of the trailers, and he's long held disdain for Star Wars. Made sense. I think they handled it well, and Adam Driver's performance in that scene was pretty mesmerizing. I was mostly afraid of this as a fanboy.
3) I was afraid Luke wouldn't be in it. I think this was intriguing as part of the actual story. That first line of the crawl, "Luke Skywalker has vanished," was really powerful. I just wanted Luke to show up and show off an extreme mastery of the Force gained over decades. Again, more of a fanboy fear than poor storytelling.
Those were my fears going in, which were all realized. The first one is the only one that really causes me to grade the actual movie down. The other things that bugged me in the actual movie were:
1) The Max von Sydow character at the beginning who hands Poe Dameron the info. This is sort of indicative of a complaint people leveled at Abrams et al. about Lost. You raise these interesting questions but never answer them. Who the hell was this guy? Why does he know about the Force? Why does he have this map to Luke? If Luke is in hiding from everyone including his sister, why does a map to his location exist AT ALL? Why hire a guy like Max von Sydow to play a character who gets killed in the first 10 minutes? If, as I thought was maybe the case, this character was connected to Luke's aborted training of new Jedi, that would have been really interesting to hear about. But we heard nothing about it, Luke didn't even show up to shed any kind of light on it, and the guy is dead anyway. If the plan is to discuss his connection in greater detail in the next movie, that's a waste because we won't even remember this guy then.
2) Power/destiny creep. This is a problem for ongoing series, especially when it's the "next generation" or something of the sort. The new guy has to be more special than the old guy. In this movie, this is most laughably demonstrated when they showed the Death Star compared to Starkiller Base. "You thought that thing was bad, look how huge this new one is!" But it's just as badly handled, if not worse, with Rey. I've read multiple places where George Lucas said Luke is the most powerful Jedi ever. Now, Lucas isn't in charge anymore, so I guess that's moot. But still, we saw Kylo Ren do things that we've never seen before, and then Rey, who has never handled a lightsaber before, at one point is about to get pushed off a cliff but closes her eyes, literally says, "oh, the Force," and then kicks the ass of this guy who's been shown to be incredibly powerful so far. Same thing when Rey picks up the lightsaber. She's seeing visions in ways we've never seen before because the lightsaber is "calling her"? What the shit? Anakin was the chosen one in the prequels retroactively, but really Luke was the chosen one because he fulfilled his father's destiny, but wait no, Rey is really really chosen because inanimate objects are choosing her and she can teach herself the Force in 5 minutes.
3) R2D2 low-power mode. Why wouldn't Luke have taken him? So he's just been lugged around for decades while not working? Stupid. Next.
4) All-CGI characters. I know JJ made a special effort to construct physical sets for this one, and it really improved the feel compared to the prequels. So why did we get so many all-CGI characters? They were really distracting every time they showed up. Supreme Commander Snoke (played by Andy Serkis, AKA Gollum!) looked really terrible.
All of this adds up to me as making this movie somewhat superfluous. It really serves more as table-setting to introduce the new characters than to actually advance the universe. So much was exactly the same as before, so what was really advanced in-universe except the wrinkle lines on the stars' foreheads? So what is going to happen in the next one? Some predictions:
1) Rey is Luke's kid. RedSon said this, and I agree. They made a big deal about Rey's family over and over here. They purposely showed the child version of her being dragged somewhere on Jakku without showing who was doing the dragging. That's a Chekhov's Gun situation if I've ever seen one. Plus, Maz mentioned that the lightsaber that called to Rey was Luke's lightsaber and his father's before him. Pretty big clue. Luke definitely looked like he recognized her at the end, and even after my complaint above that this movie rehashed so much of the originals, I don't think they will do the brother-sister reveal again. Han obviously recognized his son and was pretty devastated by how that whole thing went down; he would have recognized his daughter.
2) Evil from beyond the Rim. All the Star Wars books and video games that came out starting in the 1990s are no longer canon. Disney wiped them out. Some books were releases in September of this year, including one called Aftermath, that are now canon. I didn't read that one because I heard it was terrible, but supposedly there was discussion about the Emperor, before his death, sending out forces beyond the Rim to search for the source of the Dark Side. I'm guessing that's what Snoke represents. He's of that race or something.
3) Ren will be redeemed. They already laid the foundation for this with Ren talking about being "tempted by the Light," a scene and concept that I thought was handled really well. Now that Luke has shown up, presumably we will hear more about how and why Ren fell, and that will set up his redemption. That might not happen until Episode IX, though, since Star Wars is all about symmetry. Just like we had to have a major character killed in the first episode of each trilogy (Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, Han Solo), I'm assuming the big redemption happens in the last episode like Vader's did in Jedi.
Sorry for the incredibly long post, but I've been wanting to discuss this stuff. Most sites are just all people saying it was the greatest thing ever or it was dog crap, and you can't actually get any kind of dialogue started there when trying to tread a middle path. Don't let my complaints fool you; I still enjoyed the movie. There were scenes that I won't forget anytime soon. It was beautiful looking (they did something different with the lightsabers to make them really pop on screen), and the sound effects were incredible. These things, especially the rehash and the power creep stuff, just kept it from being a classic to me.
