Good characters get dragged down by what is, essentially, a remake

Rating: 7/10 (6 April 2016)

The first time I saw it in theaters I thought The Force Awakens was about the level of Return of the Jedi. In their own way they have the same problems, too much revisiting the past, funny and campy but sometimes at the cost of doing something better with the scene.
But upon re-watching it, The Force Awakens just does not hold up well. The characters Abrams and Kasdan came up with resonate well. We like BB-8, Finn, Kylo Ren, and Poe and want to see more of their story. Rey... well she was well cast, but having her go from zero to all powerful wizard Jedi in no time flat isn't a journey, it's speed running a video game and running through destroying everything without any conflict.
But the real problem here is that 70% of the movie is a worse remake of Star Wars: A New Hope. There's the droid carrying top secret rebellion information on a desert planet saved by a soon to be Jedi orphan while the Empire, oh I'm sorry, "The First Order" chases them to recover the information. Oh and then they have to go destroy a death star while doing a trench run.
Except this time "Jakku" isn't half as interesting as Tatooine, the Death Star is now made into literally a stupid assed joke, and all the old characters show up just to sort of butt into the movie when we are 10 times more interested in the new characters and what they're doing.
It's a movie worth seeing once, to watch Kylo Ren be what Anakin should have been in the pre-quels. To watch the extremely well composed action scenes, appreciate Finn and Poe bro-ing off. As a standalone movie to watch once it's perfectly adequate entertainment with some really good parts. But as a "Star Wars" movie, the re- hashing of everything from the first trilogy for no damned reason is just plain boring. Star Wars was great originally because, in part, it showed us a fantastical universe we weren't familiar with filled with fascinating and utterly cool things. Which isn't something you can appreciate when you've already seen all these things before in the previous movies.