What a waste.

Rating: 1/10 (16 February 2016)

If you were to look at this movie without any of the previous Star Wars movies in mind, it's a decent action movie. The acting is okay, the characters are meh, the special effects are very pretty and some of the one-liners aren't entirely cringe-inducing.
But since you probably haven't recently crawled out of a cave in which you've spent your whole life, you've probably heard of the original Star Wars trilogy. Everyone who's been around for a while has. Apparently, so have the makers of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I don't quite know how to begin since I could probably ramble about this movie for two hours, so let me get right into it:
It's the same goddamn thing as Episode IV, with some V and VI thrown in. It's the same. Down to the smallest details. Even the parts that aren't precisely the same are very similar. "They rhyme", as good ol' George Lucas used to say about the prequels. The plot is pretty much identical. Rebels vs Empire, a deathstar, a droid carrying an important message, a new version of Luke in female, a new version of Han in black, a new version of Obi-Wan in Harrison Ford. After the first third of the movie, you're already aware of how the movie will play out and will be able to predict every scene, because it's almost entirely the same thing as the original.
At this point I would like to add that nobody talked about this as a "reboot" or a "remake" beforehand. My interpretation is that after the failure of the prequels (with fans anyway, not so much at the box office), they wanted to play it safe. And what's safer than just remaking the movie everyone loves?
It absolutely blows my mind. I just couldn't believe what I was watching. You have so, so, so many resources at your disposal. Not just money, but the vast Star Wars universe that extends far beyond the previous six movies. Books, video games, comics, even fan fiction. If you're gonna just straight up copy something, at least do something that hasn't already been made into a movie. I never liked that they chose to connect these new movies to the previous ones, in my opinion they should've just started from scratch, say 1000 years earlier, but if you're going to do it this way, at least don't do the same story again. Or at the very least, don't put the most interesting stuff the opening text crawl. The Empire came back? How? Kylo Ren turned to the dark side? How? Why? The Republic is struggling to keep order? Why? An so on...What a wasted opportunity to tell an interesting story.
The only way to redeem this movie is if the next two movies go in a different direction, although it's hard to imagine that they could. Kylo Ren aka Darth Vader survived, Snoke aka the Emperor survived, Rey aka Luke Skywalker being trained by Luke aka Yoda, it's all set up to be basically the same all over again. I'm sure a new, even bigger and better Death Star is already under construction.
I'm not even going to get into all the little details, like how Rey is essentially flawless and how the original concept of the Force has been ruined even further by making her able to mind-control a stormtrooper and kick Kylo Ren's ass in a lightsaber fight, despite having no training with the force at all. There's tons of stuff to talk about, but in the end, to me it comes down to this:
If you've seen the originals, you already know what happens.