A New Hope, But Not

Rating: 1/10 (19 December 2015)

This movie was painstakingly average. There are many reviewers on this board who compare this movie with the prequel trilogy and base their review on that. However the success or failure of other films should have no merit in this movie. The use of practical effects also has no merit.
The Force Awakens can best be described as taking A New Hope and baking a cake around it. All of the key elements from A New Hope have been copied over to this film. Only you have to dig through a bunch of surgery junk to get to it. Just some of these key points are as follows:
1) Mysterious masked sith who speaks with a robotic voice, and who is related in some way to a main character. 2) A droid given valuable information required for the plot to progress, who stumbles across our main protagonist. 3) Deathstar, only bigger. Even Han Solo mentions that it is just a giant Deathstar. 4) Trench battle at end to destroy the "not Deathstar". 5) Old mentor who becomes a father figure, who is killed by the masked sith. 6) Seeking a jedi master at the end for further training.
Episode 7 lacks very little originality and feels more like a fan film riddled with references to the other movies. We get to see Luke's blast helmet and probe that he was training with, the chess game Chewbacka and C3P0 played, etc etc.
While certainly making me laugh throughout, the newer characters that will be taking over this series felt more like cartoons of themselves than actual people. Finn reminds us throughout that he was raised to do nothing but be a soldier, yet he is consistently shown to be useless. Rey is a junk scavenger, yet can fight of countless soldiers (better than Finn).
There are many key points in the film that are left unexplained. The argument that a movie should not need to explain everything is true, so long as there appears to be some sort of unspoken explanation.
A character, Maz Kanata, has Luke's first lightsaber in her basement. When Asked how she got it, she responds with "That's a long story". R2D2 is in sleep mode for some extended period of time, only to wake up for no reason when it became convenient for the plot.
In all this Star Wars installment is nothing more than a popcorn movie. It adds nothing to the series, and was done too safely to take anything away. My recommendation would be to just watch A New Hope again.