Star Wars, by Philip Glass

Rating: 4/10 (4 January 2016)

So you make three movies and a billion dollars or so re-telling the classic Hero Journey, then you make three prequels that were apparently scripted by channel-flipping between Ring of Honor Wrestling and CSpan. So you're out of ideas and sell the franchise to Disney for more billions. What do they do, the great Dream Factory of the world?
What they did was chop the original triptych into bite-sized plot nuggets, change some names, genders, and species, and stitch them together into a sequel. You know, like Dr. Frankenstein, stitching together bits of various people to make a single new person. Too bad he picked the brain of a murderer.
Even worse: Disney picked Rain Man's brain for this movie. I can hear Rain Man now, chanting "Hero lives on desert planet. Droid finds hero. Bad guys can't shoot. Narrow escape is narrow. Old man puts hero on path." Every. Single. Plot point. Recycled.
If you've seen the first trilogy, you've seen this one too. As Philip Glass might say, there is nothing new. There is nothing new. There is nothing new. There is nothing new. There is nothing new. There is nothing new. There is nothing new. There is nothing new.
So don't get your hopes up. Go, if you must, you probably won't drive into a bridge abutment on the way home. But don't get your hopes up.