Saw it this morning.  Best one since the first two.  I had the nostalgia of remembering when I saw Star Wars at the movie theater in 1977--the lines, the hype, the crowded theater.  I was surprised at how much humor was fit into the film without distracting from the narrative.  Nostalgia is not even the right word for the nods to the original film--it is almost an homage in character creation, storytelling, and dialogue.  The talk of a trash compactor made me chuckle...

And yes, Rey's performance steals the show.

EDIT: Also, if you have the chance to see it in 3D, do so.  There are some scenes that really pop out, and in one scene a star destroyer looks like it's coming through the screen.  Many gasped in awe when that happened.
This message was last edited by the user at 23:43, Fri 18 Dec 2015.

This was not disappointing overall. I was expecting more from Finn though, both in terms of acting and writing. After the initial awe and thinking it over, he moved my score from 3.5/5 to an even 3.

I just got back from seeing it, and agree with everything that has been said about it. :)

I read a comment somewhere that said it had the feel of the Original Trilogy with the best feels of Indiana Jones as well and I can understand that look at it now. :)

Here comes Chupa Bob's spoiler-free review.

I came. I saw. I enjoyed.

John Williams brought his A game.

Regarding the overall plot, Disney played it very, very, very safe. The new movie is almost a plot point for plot point rehash of episodes four and five. That is probably the most prudent strategy if slightly underwhelming.

The movie looks great. I am thinking that J.J. took to heart all of the razing he received about lens flares in the Star Trek movies. I watched the movie in 2D, so I will take Heath's word for the quality of 3D.

The thermal exhaust port in this movie (and by that, I mean the weak spot) has got to be the dialogue. Every idea is expressed in the simplest and most boring words possible. There was not one memorable quote in the entire film, and in that one aspect, even the prequels were superior. Maybe someone at Disney is a huge Hemmingway fan, but I think that they just didn't try much.

In my scale of one million monkeys randomly banging away on typewriters, it would take 890,000 monkeys to create this piece.

Sorry to be the miserable guy in the corner here but I didn't like it.

I felt it was too much of a reworking of Episodes 4 & 5, lacked originality, was NOT moving at all in it's handling of certain characters and plot points and generally NOT in keeping with the Star Wars theme. These are of course just my opinions on what for some people will be a fantastic movie experience so I am certainly not trying to ruin things for you. If you enjoyed it then I am happy for you.

Rewatch the Lucas-ified versions of the original trilogy before going and you'll appreciate it much more.

I felt it was a solid movie, and a fun one.  It wasn't an Oscar winning masterpiece or anything, but it was fine.  I liked the new characters (both for their well acted parts and their interesting motivations).

My personal gripe is that everything involving flying a ship made no sense, but Star Wars has always been like that.

I felt like TFA was a big love letter to the original trilogy. On one hand, I could say that all of the callbacks made it feel kind of derivative, but on the other hand, Star Wars is all about Campbellian myth, and the callbacks could be interpreted as these iconic events that echo and reverberate through time in a cyclical way...

But mostly I think it was just a whole lot of fun, and you could tell everyone involved loved Star Wars.

I really like Rey and Finn, and I'm looking forward to what happens next.

I shouldn't have to eat at McDonalds before I go to the restaurant in order to think the food at the restaurant is good.  :p

It was a fun ride, but soooo predictable. Even the part everyone says is so emotional can be seen coming a mile away.  I liked the new characters, but they didn't give them enough time to develop and be really interesting.

At least there was no shaky cam or lens flare.  That alone raised the enjoyment factor of the movie.  I wouldn't bother seeing it in 3D, though.  It was big-screen worthy, but doesn't need 3D to excel like some movies.

Oh, and for anyone who hasn't seen it yet: do yourself a favor and not go with anyone who is an Expanded Universe freak.  You will not enjoy hearing them birch the rest of the night about the discrepancies.

Didn't they pretty much de-canonize the entirety of the EU just to have a clean slate to build on and avoid such shenanigans?

In reply to nauthiz (msg # 12):

From what I hear, yes, but you won't get the EU-fanboys to acknowledge it.

Most of them know it was done, and why. They just don't like it.

Most of my EU attachment is the Old Republic stuff, a bit of the Thrawn novels, and the Dark Forces games with Kyle Katern. That said, I was more worried Star Wars was going to get the iPod treatment. Overall, I liked Force Awakens. There are bits that seemed out-of-nowhere (in the sense that it was a set piece just plopped into the story with no other build-up or explanation). There were potential emotional moments that were not played to the fullest. I would call this movie better than say The Phantom Menace, but about on par or a little less than A New Hope. In essence, this felt very much like a Star Wars film and I'm glad I got to see it in theaters.

As for the EU disconnect, a close friend of mine put it best: There is just too much lore to keep up with and a LOT of it is contradictory. So as much as my friend was kinda hoping to see Admiral Thrawn and Mara Jade, my friend understands why they didn't. Though, I admit to being cautiously optimistic with the new Trilogy.

I'm in the "did not like" camp. I can appreciate why others would, but the things that I looked for weren't there.

For me, the main character for Star Wars was the music. It's always in the foreground because the space opera was scored as an opera, and it is always playing. It is playing as Chewie, Han, Leia, and Luke run down the Death Star corridors, and even as Leia is trying to communicate with Wicket. Love or hate the prequels, the same is true for them. You are always hearing music.

The Force Awakens just felt silent to me. The music always seemed like it was in the background, or less daring. Even the Scherzo for X-Wings lacked the bombastic themes of "The Battle in the Snow" or "The Last Battle." Don't get me wrong, there are points where it pokes through (especially Light Side of the Force's theme), but then disappears into the background.

I was also hoping for something new. To paraphrase Ed Asner's character in KOTOR, the movie leads us down an all too familiar path. Given that Abrams' last big movie did the same thing with Star Trek Into Darkness, it was a bit disappointing to me. Also, it's not a good idea to pick well-known UNESCO sites as places for your alien planet. It makes about as much sense as using the Sphinx as the staggering monument to alien cat-people warlord. It works (kinda?), but it breaks immersion. At least, it breaks immersion for me.

I did like Finn's character. He was both entertaining and sympathetic. Plus, I can't not like someone who had possibly the best reaction to seeing himself in a Star Wars trailer.

http://www.ign.com/articles/20...orce-awakens-trailer

I totally would have done the same thing.

You shouldn't have to, no, but I watched those films (4-6) with my daughter the day before we went to see the new one.  That greatly lowered the bar of my expectations and, I think, made for a better overall experience.  If you're riding too high on nostalgia and expect more than a Star Wars movie can possibly deliver going in, you're going to be disappointed.

Personally, I never followed that much of the EU, but the main problem with the EU is that most of the big stuff involves the original characters... who are all too old, now.  If you kept all (or even most) of the EU, you'd be coming in after a big swath of it was done to match their physical ages.

I loved that 3D scene!  The movie as a whole too - but I remember that scene you're talking about.

No movie is ever going to impact me now the way the star wars trilogy did when I was young.  so it's pretty unrealistic to expect a new star wars movie to somehow live up to those.  But by the same token, the prequels were so disappointing that any attempt to go back to the original theme and feel of star wars is very,very welcomed.  So to me, it was fun, it was exciting, and it has made me happy to be a star wars fan and look forward to the future movies they make (especially the Boba Fett origin movie, that just sounds all kinds of violent and dark to me, which should be great).  There were no gungans, so that's pretty much automatically a success to me.

Also the Force seems to have gone back to being a mystical energy field that connects everything (whether or not it has a serious strep infection).  :)

I saw it last Wednesday.  And I enjoyed it immensely.  :)

the power Kylo Ren exhibited in the first scene caught me pleasantly off guard.  "That's new"  was my only thought when the blaster went off...

Star Wars, back before it was A New Hope, Episode IV, or any other name, was the first movie I saw in the theater by myself. I attended a boarding school in 5th grade, and they took us to see it. I was hooked on all things Sci-if just from that one introduction and the moment that initial Opening Scene.

Imaging my immense pleasure when TFA brought back similar feelings.

I do know that I will be trying to see it a couple more times once this initial surge of interest/lack of ticket availability dies down. :)

First and foremost, I did very much enjoy the movie and when it ended I was left wanting more. The two and a half hours went by way too fast. But I still think Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire series would have made a much better 7-9.

I don't disagree with you, but that would have been flat-out impossible to do after the early 1990s.  That series has a lot of Luke, Leia, and Han in it, and all three of them are now much, much too old to be the central characters in an action-adventure movie trilogy.

I think, given that constraint, they did the best job of framing a story as they could.

The things I wish they'd done differently mostly boil down to "learning physics", "have soldiers act like soldiers", and "make space battles that seem like actual space battles".  However, I've pretty much given up any hope of seeing that outside of specific anime.

Finally got a chance to see it, and managed to avoid any spoilers beforehand.  Aside from the initial trailer, I have stayed away from anything that discussed any plot points, avoided interviews with the actors that might have given up anything about their characters, etc...so I went into it with tempered expectations.  I knew it wouldn't be the prequels...but I'd also seen J.J. Abrams do some very ham-fisted things with both Star Trek movies, so I didn't have my hopes too high.

I loved the fact that it looked, and felt, like Star Wars.  The prequels felt like some kind of high-end soap opera, that had precious little to connect it with the original trilogy (the names of a few characters and a couple of settings, pretty much, at least until we started finally seeing some hints of the coming visual designs in some of the Republic military craft...)  This had the same sense of adventure, the same general visual design (updated, some good and some bad changes...I actually felt like these stormtroopers might be able to see me if I was standing right in front of them...)

The places where it fell short for me:
--I think it got a little carried away with the 'callbacks' to the original series.  When it got to the point where I was asking myself just how many references they were going to cram into this film, it stopped being fun for me and started drawing attention to itself.

--The impossible physics of powering the Doomsday Weapon du jour.  Even if you could manage to somehow suck away a sun's energy, when you have superheated plasma hitting oxygen-rich atmosphere, a lot of stuff is going to die a horrible death...this was such a big issue to me that every time they showed it on screen, it took me a couple of minutes to get back into the story.

--I honestly wonder if J.J. Abrams can write/direct decent villains.  I hated his Romulan miners-turned-super-bad-apple-space-warriors, I think he botched Khan and Admiral Whatshisname...and I definitely feel like Kylo Ren got hosed.  Your heroes are only as great as the villains they defeat, and I don't care how super-powerful with the Force you want to make Kylo Ren, the fact that he's got the emotional maturity of a very disturbed pre-adolescent child with severe anger management issues totally undermines him as a successful villain, in a storytelling sense.

All that said, I will actually rest a little easier in the knowledge that the prequels will end up not being the last hurrah for Star Wars on the big screen.  And I'm guardedly optimistic for EpVIII.  But if they don't do a significantly better job than they did on this, they're going to lose an awful lot of the good will they've accumulated from this one.

I actually kind of liked the anger management issues.  Sith are supposed to give themselves over to their anger and hatred, but we honestly don't see a lot of that in 4-6.  A half-trained Sith that can't keep his stuff together?  That seems pretty alright to me.  I also wouldn't characterize it as pre-adolescent.  It's actually very adolescent and in character for a young adult/teen with issues.

In the end, though, I still don't feel like he's meant to be the villain.  He's probably going to be the conflicted bad-guy-good-guy.  Kind of a Space!Snape, if you will.  He even kind of looks like Alan Rickman, if you squint hard enough.

You're right about the Deathstar 3.0, though.

I actually feel like Kylo Ren was the Anakin Skywalker we never got. This is because the dark side is meant to be, right? Anger. Hate. Suffering—and above all those, passion. That’s not passion in terms of romance (although it can be), but the strength, the amplification, of your emotions. In George Lucas’ original conception, the Jedi were meant to be the warrior monks, skilled and precise and in control of their feelings. They harness power from that control. The Sith are the ones who give into their passion and seek power from jumping into that swirling sea of emotion. They’re angry and sullen and screaming at the world, at the legacies handed to them, because that’s what empowers them.

It almost sounds like a certain Skywalker, doesn’t it?

Personally I liked him. He represents a sith before a sith is in control of his emotions. I feel like through his training in the next movie we will see a more in control and precise sith like Darth Vader.

In reply to Evil Empryss (msg # 11):

I have to agree with you that, as much as I liked the nostalgia of this and reworking of the original trilogy moments, I too did not find the movie emotionally compelling.  That supposedly emotional scene was not emotional and was probably my least favorite of the whole movie.