A solid film for Star Wars fans

Rating: 7/10 (13 January 2016)

I'm going to preface this review by saying that I have always always been much more of a Star Trek fan than Star Wars and as such, any Star Wars movie I watch always ends up shrouded in this bias of "this would have been better if it was more like Star Trek". I don't hate Star Wars, it's just not my preference story-wise.
That said, this was a much better movie than I was expecting it to be. The effects were solid, the plot was strong, the acting impressive. The issues I had with it were ultimately nitpicky in nature and had more to do with personal preference than anything.
I didn't particularly care for the character of Finn, and frankly his entire role in the movie was to act as the friction to push the plot forward and yet, the movie seemed to treat him as a protagonist who was changed by the narrative in some kind of meaningful way. While I suppose his status as a dynamic character is technically true, I think it was shallowly executed and I was overall not impressed with him writing wise. The actors performance was strong, though.
Speaking of performances, Oscar Issac's performance was surprisingly not all that impressive. Issac stars in one of my favorite movies of all time, Inside Llewyn Davis, but his acting in Star Wars left a lot to be desired in my opinion.
The plot itself felt sort of weak at points. In a movie where the narrative tension must be maintained through tight story telling and a plot stretched like elastic so as to not be boring, there were definitely points wherein that elastic slacked.
I have a few other extremely subjective issues with the movie (BB8 felt almost painfully corporate in that you just know he's going to be the biggest marketing tool of the movie and Mark Hamil's entrance felt cheesy as all get out) but I did not really take these things into consideration when I gave the star rating because they were, again, subjective in nature.
On a purely technical level, this movie is extremely solid especially when seen right after some of the stinkers of the season (Joy) but I do think it lacked some of the charm it desperately needed to pull off what it set out to do thoroughly.