Our LCS hosted a midnight showing, with Nalini Krishan, the actress who played Barriss Offee. I enjoyed it. Obviously it didn't have the impact of the original, but it was fun, and definitely felt like Star Wars. The new characters were likeable enough, the effects were good. Abrams was determined to re-capture the feel of the first trilogy, and maybe aped the original a bit too much. I mean . . .

Young person living on a desert planet
Vital rebel data hidden in a droid
Roguish character gets involved
Older mentor-type who was involved in previous battles
Bad guy in black and a mask
Big planet-destroying weapon which can only be taken down by attacking a certain point
Rogue leaves to save his own ass, but comes back for the big battle
Mentor killed by bad guy in mask
Young hero learns something of the force, and gets a light saber

I'm okay with the new characters' journey paralleling the old, but maybe he was a little too slavish, there.

But the death scene worked, and I loved the final, wordless scene. We'll be seeing it again.

I think Abrams followed the Star Wars template a bit too slavishly, to the point where I felt at times that I would rather just pop in A New Hope and watch that instead. I really was hoping that Abrams would stop trying to pander to his audience like he's done in every other movie he's directed and actually take some creative risks with the massive canvas that the Star Wars universe has to offer. For instance, I think making Finn the main protagonist for the trilogy would have been a more creative and bold choice to make. We've never seen a character become a Jedi who was bred to be a killer and ultimately took a higher road once he saw what he was about to be forced to become. Would he feel worthy of such power? How does someone bred isolated from ideas of free choice and mercy learn to become a Jedi? It's an interesting backstory of a new protagonist as opposed to Rey's discount Luke Skywalker origin (i.e angsty teenager from a desert planet who doesn't know where her real parents are and runs into a droid with top secret information and joins an intergalactic resistance and discovers she is one with the Force )

I would give it a solid 3. It's fun and there are moments of genuine fist in the air thrills, but it's very forgetable in the long run. 

I'd give it a 4, maybe 4.5. Yes, it bordered on a re-telling of A New Hope with new character... it was few easy to plug and play... Rey=Luke, Finn=Leia, Poe=Han, Han=Ben, Kylo=Vader, etc. That said, it was done in a fun way, to make one feel nostalgic, rather than ripped off. The mood, music and effects all captured the original mood very well. I greatly enjoyed it (especially since my 15 year old daughter LOVED it), and will probably go again at some point this weekend.

Harrison Ford was BRILLIANT... I hope when they do prequels or in between-quels or whatever, they person they find can be 1/2 as good. Finn and Poe were both good in their roles... they need to go on some sort of buddy quest, for sure.

Very good scene layout... the scene with Chewy in the Falcon alone had my 15 year old bawling.


That said.. what I didn't like:

-The actress that plays Rey was not good... she had one 'grit-my-teeth' face that was the only one she could use to portay any sort of emotion. The CHARACTER was good, but the actress didn't really pull it off (not quite as bad as Terry Farrell but the same ball park). She had good chemistry with Finn, but not with the old cast.

- The plot really didn't make alot of sense. Why is the legitimate government's military called the Resistance? Why is it not just the New Republic Army? Why are they hiding? This was the instance where shoe horning in most of A New Hope's plot didn't work.

- Darth Gollum, er, I mean Voldemort, er that is, Supreme Leader Smoak was probably the least Star Wars-y thing in the movie... and where the hell did he come from? I would have preferred some regular First Order officer be in charge, trying to harness Kylo's power... would have made alot more sense.

- I would have liked at least some small bit of the old EU to be kept... they tossed just about everything... I guess having Luke fail to keep Leia and Han's kid from the Dark Side is a bit similar, but only just. I did like he was 'Ben' though, that was a nice touch. Even just name dropping Talon Karrde, or Thrawn, or Mara Jade, or something would have made me happy.

Yeah, that's kinda what I was picturing, but that still doesn't totally make sense. Maybe as more material comes out via comics and novels it'll become clear.

Anyone check out the YA novels that apparently came out in September? Greg Rucka writes a couple of them... seems like they could be good.

I thought Daisy Ridley did a really good job.

I agree that the plot was confusing. It seemed to undermine the progress of the original trilogy by implying that the Rebellion had backslid to its old position. If the Republic does hold a lot of territory and the Resistance is just the force fighting to liberate First Order-held territory, the film could've done a better job explaining that.

I totally agree that Snoke was the "least Star Wars-y thing in the movie". He didn't seem to fit the tone or visuals of Star Wars. I realize portraying CGI character through motion capture is Andy Serkis's thing, but Snoke would've looked less cartoony if portrayed through prostheses and make-up. If Serkis won't do that, cast someone else.

I saw The Force Awakens last night and it left me feeling a bit shell-shocked by what I'd seen, to be honest. I've had a bit of time now to gather my thoughts and this is what I think. I'll start with the positives first...

I think that it was a good Star Wars movie overall and I found myself carried along with the excitement of the story and the action throughout most of it. It had that Star Wars-y vibe in spades, and by that I mean that it really looked, sounded and felt like a Star Wars film. Although, did anyone else think that the beginning seemed a little too empty without the 20th Century Fox fanfare at the start?

I'm also glad that J. J. Abrams continued to use the signature Star Wars "screen wipes" to transition from scene to scene, and there was also a certain quick-zoom camera effect that both George Lucas and Irvin Kershner had previously used in A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back that Abrams made liberal use of throughout the film as well, which I liked. The special effects looked great, but weren't massively over the top (well, not for a Star Wars film, anyway) and I really applaud the amazing use of psychical puppetry in the film, rather than the crappy CGI that so marred the prequels. I also appreciated the fact that, for the most part, Abrams avoided any really syrupy, cringe-worthy emotional moments because, personally, I have a very low tolerance of such things (perhaps because I'm a repressed, stiff upper lipped Englishman).

I think Abrams did a great job of simultaneously staying faithful to the past movies and taking the franchise in some surprising and quite bold new directions. For example, I think that I was sort of expecting the original characters of Han, Luke and Leia to be in basically the same place in their respective stories as they were at the end of Return of the Jedi. But having Han and Leia separated and estranged, along with Luke missing, having failed at his attempt to start a new Jedi order, resulting in the catastrophic fall to the Dark Side of Ben Solo/Kylo Ren (shades of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader there!), plus Solo not even owning the Millennium Falcon anymore, was really surprising and, as I say, bold. It's cool that Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan were brave enough to move these old characters into new situations and mess with the audience's expectations.

As for the new principal cast members, I have to say that although I liked them, none of them really blew me away. Rey was very much in the "intelligent tough girl" mold of Princess Leia or Padme Amidala, but without the sass of Leia or any of the sense of regalness or diplomacy that those two earlier characters had. While I agree with wildfire2099 that the actress who played Rey (Daisey Ridley) was a little wooden, her lack of acting ability or range wasn't enough to spoil the film for me. She was still head and shoulders above Hayden Christensen in the acting stakes, for example, and really, was Mark Hamill all that great an actor? I mean, I love his performance in Star Wars, but he was no Laurence Olivier.

I liked Finn's character a lot and he had some really funny lines too, which he delivered well. Actually, there were a few moments that were proper "laugh out loud" funny, which I wasn't really expecting. It's also interesting to see a turncoat stormtrooper as a main cast member. That's quite an interesting plot choice and not something that we've really seen before. The hotshot pilot Poe is clearly this trilogy's version of Han Solo, but I thought his chemistry with Finn was pretty great and I'd certainly like to see more of those two together. BB-8 was another fantastic addition to the cast and nowhere near as annoying as I feared he might be.

Something else that I quite liked was that the actors who played Finn, Rey and Poe weren't too unrealistically good looking. They were all attractive people, sure, but hardly stunningly gorgeous and flawless models, and thus very much like Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford were back in the day. It was also fun to spot all the little references and homages to the original trilogy, including, but not limited to, planting info vital to the Rebellion -- sorry, the Resistance -- into a droid, Finn's stormtrooper number being FN-2187 (same number as Leia's cell in A New Hope), the name of Starkiller Base (Deak Starkiller was an early draft name for the character of Luke Skywalker), Luke's lightsaber sticking out of the snow and being pulled by a Force user (just like the Wampa cave scene in ESB), and a passing squad of stormtroopers on board Starkiller Base saying "we think they may be splitting up now..." (just as a squad of stormtroopers did on the Death Star in A New Hope).

On the down side (or should that be Dark Side)...


...they F@$#ING KILLED HAN SOLO!!!! I mean, seriously...they killed Han Solo!!


Killed! Dead!! Gone! Han Solo!! DEAD!!!

...and worse that that, he went out like a bit of a schmuck! No big blaze of glory, no saving the day...he practically walked right into it and got stabbed through the chest with a lightsaber by his son and that was it. Yeah, that really didn't sit well with me at all.

I know that Abrams et al were trying to show us what a badass Kylo Ren was and how Han and Leia's love for their son led them to believe that he could be redeemed right up until the end, but having a grizzled, street smart smuggler and mercenary like Han Solo basically suicide walk to his death like a gullible idiot felt really, REALLY out of character to me. It also doesn't bode well for the rest of this new trilogy because if there's one thing that The Force Awakens proved beyond any shadow of a doubt, it's that even after all these years, Han Solo, as played by Harrison Ford, is still the single most interesting and entertaining thing about Star Wars. His death is an incalculable loss to the franchise. ...and it wasn't even a particularly good or fitting death. Yeah, I'm really bummed about this.

Oh, and the lack of any scene with Leia and Chewbacca grieving for Solo together was a glaring omission. Yeah, I know we got a quick shot of Chewie looking glum in the Falcon, but personally I needed to see more. Bummer that we won't get to see Han and Luke Skywalker together in future installments too.

Another criticism of the film would be that Kylo Ren was simply not a good enough bad guy. He wasn't even as scary as Darth Maul, let alone as memorably evil, diabolically threatening or iconic as Darth Vader. Also, I felt that the audience could've done with a bit more clarification on what exactly was going on with the New Republic "Resistance" and the First Order. That was all a bit confusing to me. Why are the ruling government's forces known as the Resistance? And how exactly did the First Order rise from the ashes of the Empire? I'm sure this is all explained in various novels or comics, but since it's not explained in the film, it all kinda seemed like business as usual in the Star Wars universe: Rebels vs. the Empire. Again! Which then prompts the question, "what the hell did Luke, Han, Leia and the rest actually fight for in the original trilogy?!" As a result of that, it sort of made the galactic civil war seen in the original trilogy seem like a bit of a waste of time.

Also, having R2-D2 being stuck in low power mode ever since Luke disappeared was a bit of of an eye-rolling moment for me. I get what the writers were trying do, with R2 as pining dog, longing for his lost master, but it was a bit too schmaltzy for my tastes. Something else I disliked was that a lot of the time the new characters seemed like idiots with hugely powerful toys in their hands. For instance, it was great to see the Millennium Falcon in action again, but while the trailers led us to believe that it was Han at the controls of the Corellian freighter as it darted in and out of the wreckage of that crashed Star Destroyer, it was actually Rey and Finn with nary a clue of what they were doing. As an aside, did anybody else wince when Rey was crashing into things in the Falcon? I sure was! I felt like shouting out, "Oi! Be careful with that ship!"

Another problem was that seeing total beginners like Finn and Rey engaging a much more experienced duelist like Kylo Ren with a lightsaber -- and holding their own for a while -- just seemed rubbish to me. Kylo should've made mincemeat of Rey and Finn in seconds. On a related point, Rey got a bit too powerful with the Force, a bit too quickly for my tastes. Luke Skywalker, as the direct descendant of Anakin Skywalker, had huge Force-using potential, but you didn't see him getting to a level of mastery required to effectively use the Jedi mindtrick until the third film in the original trilogy and after a lot of training too. Yet a totally inexperienced and untrained Rey can seemingly do it almost by accident...just by having a bit of a go? Yeah, that didn't sit well with me either.

Anyway, there you go. That's basically what my first impressions of The Force Awakens were. Like I say, despite some major criticisms, it was a good Star Wars film and certainly better than any of the three prequels. That said, I don't think it was all that tightly plotted and as a result, the narrative felt a bit meandering at times. It definitely wasn't as focused as any of the films in the original trilogy were.

However, I don't agree with those critics who have said that it was little more than a carbon copy of the first film. Yes, it paid homage to A New Hope, for sure, but I didn't feel as if it was overly slavish. It's good that Abrams opened up the Star Wars galaxy a bit more too, by bringing in lots of new blood, rather than just having everything revolve around the same half dozen individuals, as the prequels did. A good example of this would be that when Max von Sydow's character was described (I think it was in the opening crawl) as an old friend or old ally, it was refreshing to see that this character was not someone we'd previously met. That's absolutely as it should be. It's a big galaxy out there, after all.

Ultimately, The Force Awakens was, as I expected, very much a "handing over the baton" movie and a pretty reasonable one all in all. As I say, it was superior to the prequel films, but it didn't come close to the magnificence of the original trilogy.

Oh, but where was Lando???