Star Wars: The Disillusionment of a Fan Base

Rating: 5/10 (21 December 2015)

I renounce Disney and Star Wars.
If you have only seen the movies, you probably will like this one. But if you are a fan of the novels and the expanded universe – you will most likely hate it, or it will make you extremely uncomfortable. It ignores all of the events of the novels and makes up an entirely different (and extremely lame) history. I wish I could love this movie. Heck, I wish I could like it.
Why would Disney pay 4 billion dollars for a franchise with a rich universe and a broad fan base only to negate most of it? Oh, yea. That's apparently Abram's thing – completely ruining an established franchise. I foresee the need for Star Wars recovery groups.
TFA is just a retread of Episode IV ANH - Chasing after a droid containing important information, and blowing up a giant planet destroying weapon. So, there was all of this hype regarding firing the initial screenwriter, and Abrams taking it over. That was obviously a huge mistake.
The film looked great. It was fun, exciting, and had most of the great elements of a Star Wars story. The score by Williams is great. Special FX also great. I like the new characters Finn, Rey, and Poe. Supreme Leader Snoke and Kylo Ren were both lame and lacking characters. And it's difficult to swallow that Ren, trained in both the light and dark side, even with an injury, would have such a difficult time battling an individual with no apparent force talent wielding a light saber, or a girl with obvious force talent, but who is completely untrained.
Harrison Ford is truly the star of this film, and he is great. His character arc was completed with full satisfaction.
Unfortunately the film is so fast paced, and there is never a pointer scene where we are allowed to breathe and to digest the plot of the film.
I wish Disney would have just followed through with re-releasing the first 6 films in 3-D. They would have made money on that investment, and that strategy would have afforded them the time to really analyze the vast amount of material they had to draw from. There are several of the novel trilogies that would have made far better films and not abandoned a vast fan base. If they would have consulted with one or a few of these great Scifi writers, there might have even been a way to tell Abram's story and still make it fit in the existing universe.
Plot Hole - Anakin & Luke's Lightsaber – That is the one that was lost when Darth Vader chopped off Luke's hand in Bespin. I'm not sure, but didn't it fall out of the bottom with Luke when he ended up hanging on the antenna, and it continued to plummet into the atmosphere of that gas giant? (Though, somewhere in the expanded universe, it was recovered along with his hand, and was used to clone a version of Luke.)
Conclusion – This was a good movie, just not a good Star Wars movie. TFA makes any of the prequel trilogy look like masterpieces.