I owe "The Phantom Menace" an apology

Rating: 1/10 (16 January 2016)

I honestly think this is worse than the prequels. Yes they were poor, but they at least tried to forge ahead, and add substance to the universe. TFA does not. It lives like a parasite on the original trilogy. This is best seen in how the whole thing is a (lousy) dead ringer for A New Hope. I won't treat that here, as it's been well-examined in other reviews that I read before seeing the movie. However, I was taken aback by the ludicrous speed with which the plot advanced
1) Poe spends like a total of 2 minutes aboard the evil spacecraft. When Finn releases him, there's no security problems to bother with, and the fighter hangar just happens to be right next door
2) when Poe and Finn crash their fighter, they end up on the exact spot on the planet, where Poe's droid is too - yes, ON AN ENTIRE PLANET, they just happen to crash there!
3) Han Solo claims to have looked for the Falcon for years, but the first time someone flies it, it gets like 5 meters before randomly bumping into him
4) I get that we have to see Solo with gangsters that he owes money, to remind us of who the character is - but does this have to happen so soon after him running into Finn and Rey that he barely has time to speak to them, just as they had not yet had time to converse with each other before meeting him? It's as if the whole part of A New Hope that took place on Tatooine was compressed into five minutes. I don't mean that the movie only spends about 5 minutes on it, I mean that even in-movie, it doesn't seem to TAKE more than that. I.e. there's no indication that Finn had perhaps ½ an hour offscreen where he hung out with Poe, or Rey, or Han. No. He appears to, in 10 minutes, even in in-movie time, to experience no less than FOUR separate adventures (freeing Poe, meeting Rey, meeting Han, meeting the disgruntled gangsters), both crashing on, and departing, Jakku in the process!
5) the Republic turns up for 10 seconds, is blown up, and is barely mentioned again
6) Luke's lightsaber just turns up in the first box Rey stumbles upon
7) Finn runs into Poe as soon as he sets foot on the Resistance airbase - is this Resistance only like 30 guys, since everybody runs instantly into each other, aren't they supposed to be a faction of galactic proportions?
8) let's not even get into how quickly people find each other on the Starkiller Base, which is after all supposed to be the size of a PLANET (if I'm in Mongolia and you land in New Zealand, it might take more than 2 minutes to happen randomly upon each other, but apparently not here)
9) the protagonists go to the forest planet to find a transport to get to the resistance. but the republic planets are so close that their destruction can clearly be seen. How big is this galaxy? Ten planets?
I could name a lot more examples, but I'm sure you get the drift - the movie never spends a single minute dwelling on whatever location/plot development is going on, no, it rushes at once to the next. We get no character development of, say, Poe and Finn talking to each other, because the next plot development is breathing down their necks; and nobody spends more than 10 seconds in any place before finding what they look for, giving us no chance to immerse ourselves in the locality. In IV, R2-D2 drove around for a while before being picked up by the Javas, and a whole lot of things happened on Tatooine before the Empire reappeared properly in the story - because of course they had to trace R2-D2 first. In TFA, no matter the supposed (planetary) size of the localities where the action takes place, everyone finds everyone within 30 seconds, giving me, as an audience member, the distinct feeling that the whole movie takes place in a Big Brother house or something
I'm also frustrated by the total lack of backstory - how come the Republic is not a huge force but just a few planets; why is the Republic and the Resistance apparently 2 different things, and why is the latter called so, when it could be called the army of the Republic; what exactly is the power base of the First Order - I mean, maybe they're supposed to be mysterious, but even the Resistance ought to have some idea of "when/how/where did we first notice these guys" - and if the republic is just a few planets and the first order is mainly a planet-sized space station, who is in control of the last couple of million (!!) star systems that make up the galaxy?
This constant rush, the ludicrous idea of naming the head villain "Snoke", and the unintentional impression of the whole galaxy being the size of a South England village breaks the 4th wall for me. The prequels were disappointing, but I at least got the feeling that Tatooine and Naboo were rather far apart, and it took Darth Maul a while to figure out where his prey had gone. The Clone Wars clearly took place on a grand scale (best seen in the final betrayal of the Jedis, where there are battles ongoing in many star systems), and characters sometimes had to walk to get to places, because their spaceship didn't accidentally land/crash right next to whatever they were looking for.
TFA is so bad that I have difficulty pretending to myself that what I see is happening to the characters that I see. I rather feel like I'm watching an avantgarde parody, where even the participants must be as conscious as I that it's just a joke.