JJ Remakes A New Hope and not much else

Rating: 6/10 (17 December 2015)

I can only imagine that the critics who have praised The Force Awakens were due to pure spite towards the prequels and the desperate need to once again revisit that magical world from 1977. Truth is, the Star Wars of 1977 was a product of that era and while the prequels as much harm as they did helped create a larger world and a larger context. Part of my disappointment in TFA is that I was expecting the movie to go into an uncharted era, but it ended up very much like a retreading of the older movies. When I say I was expecting more, what mean is I was expecting something a little different. This is a wasted opportunity since The Phantom Menace as flawed as it was it also had very similar story beats to A New Hope and added way too much material that while a lot of it was it hit- and-miss, it didn't feel like a complete ripoff of the 1977 classic. And to be fair TFA kinda started out in a different way, yet slowly but surely began hitting the same beats and started getting way too preoccupied with nods to the classics and much like the prequels, there's so much info left unexplained and unaccounted for (the evil empire and the main villain's motives are sketchy at best). The story itself is interesting, the search for the missing Luke Skywalker, a storm trooper who has a crisis of conscience and leaves the First Order, a certain smuggler comes back, a young girl who begins to feel a connection to the Force, a new villain with clouded motives and a new weapon of mass destruction. All of this is good material to take the series into new area to explore but JJ just seems happy to play it ubber safe.