I actually never minded the trade and peace treaty discussions in the prequels. It felt like an interesting way to go about world building, especially if we're supposed to be learning about how the galaxy functioned before the Empire took over. 

BTW this was the most insightful review I've ever seen of the Star Wars prequels. Some of the criticism is sure genius and helps me to understand exactly WHY I didn't like the films through sheer objective logic and really meticulous behind-the-scenes research. Force Awakens didn't fall into ANY of these traps.




A word of warning -- cursing is involved, and the narrator feels the need to give himself a creepy fictitious backstory that totally disrupts an otherwise brilliant series of reviews at times.

Maybe if you tell them what you thought was amazing they'll agree

I was looking back and you're right, the posts here are pretty lukewarm... I liked it alot more than my review sounded (I went twice, after all, and still have to take the wife and the little ones).   I would have liked a bit less parallels with A New Hope, but the sights, sounds and FEEL were all spot on.  That's the important thing.  Hopefully with the 2nd one we'll see a bit more of an original story to go with the cool characters and set up.

Just got back from seeing it. Overall, I enjoyed it much more than any of the prequels, though it didn't rise to the level of of the original trilogy. It just misses being as good as Return of the Jedi for me. I agree that it was striking how closely it followed the plot of A New Hope. I get why they chose to do this, given the way the prequels went, but I'm hoping for a bit more innovation with the upcoming films. My gut tells me that they're going to branch out as the series unfolds. I agree with other posters that the First Order and the Resistance relationship to the Republic needed to be explained a bit more, but I think we all get the general gist. It all does seem to undermine the Rebel's victory at the end of Jedi, but when you think about it, it really doesn't. The incomplete Death Star was hardly the bulk of the Empire and galactic empires that big just don't go away over night.

I was most surprised with how much I liked the new characters. I think they all did a fine job, particularly the character of Finn, and more importantly, they were all likable. This is an area where the prequels failed virtually to a character. I was a bit unsatisfied at Kylo's poor performance against Rey in the lightsaber duel, but he was injured from Chewie's shot, and kept hitting at the wound, so I'm going to assume that this was meant to be the cause. After the Jedi/Sith heaviness of the prequels, I think it was a good idea to tone down the force-powers for the first installment of the new films. That said, I'd like to see a balance of acrobatic force-movement and classic sword-fighting as we progress in the series.

I'm still unclear (obviously) if there are other Jedi apprentices out there that Luke trained or if Kylo Ren was supposed to have killed ALL of them. Perhaps he has them out there on missions or in hiding? I'll be shocked if Rey doesn't turn out to be Luke's daughter, and while I like the idea, I kind of hope they through us a curveball. The big mystery, of course, is Supreme Leader Snoke. Given the ancient history of the Sith, he could be anyone, with the top theory right now seeming to be that he's the Darth Plagius that Sidious mentions in Revenge of the Sith. I think I'll be able to enjoy the movie more, and absorb more details, when I can watch it at home. I found the sound quality, at least the voice levels, to be poor in the screening I went to and I missed some dialog here and there.

I liked it fine. In fact, I liked it a LOT. I just didn't think it was amazing and in certain aspects it was actually quite flawed. But I enjoyed it as it played and I'll definitely go and see it again. The five star reviews it's been getting are a bit of a headscratcher for me, but it was all that I was expecting it to be really: a decent space fantasy film and better than the prequels, but it didn't match the magic of the original trilogy.




Well, you should be hard to please too. In all things! Don't settle for anything other than the best in music, writing or any other type of art or entertainment. Just because The Force Awakens was better than the prequels, which I agree it was, doesn't mean it was a faultless success.




Agreed. I kinda liked the fact that parts of the prequels played out like a political drama. Although I disliked the fact that George Lucas tended to "tell us" rather than "show us" in the prequels, in some ways The Force Awakens goes too far the other way. A few additional background details about how the First Order rose to power, how the Resistance came too be and some background on the Starkiller Base would've made the film much better. The original Star Wars film threw us head first into the galactic civil war when cinema audiences knew nothing about the Empire, the Rebellion, the Senate, the Emperor, the Jedi Knights or anything else in the Star Wars galaxy, but the screenplay took the time to fill us in on all the stuff we needed to know. Audiences weren't told every detail, of course, but they were given enough background info that they weren't wondering why stuff was happening.




Not to be snarky, but which bits didn't make sense to you? I thought that Senator Palpatine's devious manipulations of the Galactic Senate and the principal cast members was one of the most successful aspects of the prequel trilogy. We'd known, roughly speaking, that this was how a weak, relatively powerless senator had risen to become supreme Emperor ever since the publication of the novelization of the first movie back in 1976. Finally seeing that happening in the prequels was, for me, one of the more satisfying aspects of those movies.

As much as I agree about the source material (in fact I show Episode IV to my mythology class every year when we do Joseph Campbell and discuss our modern American mythology), there's a lot of evidence that Abraham was specifically trying to reinvoke Episode IV and not just Joseph Campbell (though I've no doubt he was aware of the source material and took pains to adhere to it too).