Saved by good new actors and good technical execution

Rating: 7/10 (23 December 2015)

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is one of the better movies of 2015... as a standalone film. I can imagine people seeing Star Wars for the first time, really liking this one and developing an itch to see more of the Star Wars universe.
The sad part comes when you realize why the movie probably does that to new viewers: this is a reboot of Star Wars IV. They took 0 risk of making the mistake that the prequels made and that in itself was another mistake. If I had shown this movie in class, I would have gotten a 0 out of 10 and a punishment for plagiarism. It's not even hidden well! As soon as I realized that I had seen it all before, it started to annoy me.
There are positives as well. The movie is visually stunning, the villain is written really well and every new character has an amazing actor/actress in support. The fun of the movie is (for me) in its details: humour, the way certain scenes are filmed... and it would deserve more like an 8 or 9 out of 10 were it not for the recycled story.
In short: visually stunning, great new actors/actress, incredibly well directed, but lacks originality in it's story and tries to purely rely on nostalgic feelings of old fans and the amazement of new, younger fans.