For a (dumb) pre-teen audience - whatever their biological age

Rating: 1/10 (23 April 2016)

God almighty, but this film is trash. It is an unbelievably, obscenely expensive mountain of malodorous tripe, with a stench of worthlessness that rebounds around the galaxy. Before this, I had only seen the first one, which I dismissed, as anyone with half a brain must, as just a noisy kids' movie - who cares, right? But now it has taken over the world, and someone must speak up to say that the emperor has no clothes and vile body odour.
Like all the others in the series, this story is just goodies versus baddies, with no originality and dialogue that could hardly be more banal. This is the story I'm talking about, but even the colossal effects are hardly new. As in the Saturday matinée presentations that some of us watched as children in the 1950s and 1960s, you know the goodies are going to win - the rest is tedium, with not the slightest hint of surprise at any point. But at least those Saturday serials only cost a couple of quid/dollars, not the GDP of a medium-sized country.
"Saturday matinée" actually is the key here: this movie (and the whole franchise) are aimed at nine-year-olds - or those in their late teens to early 30s whose emotional and intellectual development has frozen at nine years old, and who want to be treated to updated versions of the toys and comics they enjoyed at that age. This movie, along with all the pathetic "superhero" franchises that are polluting our cinemas, supplies that need.
And even on its own terms, it's shoddy. You would think that the makers could at least get the most basic physics or cosmology right, but no. There are many scenes set in deep space in which spaceships from the First Order or the Resistance zip across the screen, firing countless laser bombs. And. You. Can. Hear. Them.
That's right - as the spaceships go zooming past, or the laser torpedoes (or whatever they are) explode, they make a huge noise. Noise! In space! I thought that basic, unforgivable error had gone out with Flash Gordon (if even he thought it was right), but no - it's alive and well, and flourishing on Tripe Mountain.
Let's give the makers the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they know this is rubbish, but that's the trouble with having a target audience who mentally are still at primary/elementary school. When nine-year-olds see lots of really, REALLY cool flashes and colours, they demand very, very loud bangs and whooshes to go along with them. So that's what they get - and to hell with common sense.
But there is something far, far worse than what I have written above; and that is the utter tragedy of a whole generation - maybe two or three - who have been dumbed down to a point from which, I fear, there is now no going back. They believe that this is not just a good, but a great, movie, and that means that, intellectually, they are lost, utterly lost. It is almost as if this franchise has taken the place of something bigger in their lives - religion, maybe. We all need something larger than ourselves to believe in, and the generation under 40 have found it, tragically, in these cruddy movies.
I will now stop, so that the true believers can savage me for my impertinence in not treating these films with the respect they deserve and bowing down before them. I would only ask anyone who reads their comments to check out their spelling, punctuation and grammar. If nothing else does, that will testify to their mental and emotional age.