A promising start to the Sequel Trilogy

Rating: 8/10 (6 January 2018)

After waiting so long to see a new Star Wars movie, and facing the lemons from the Prequel Trilogy, I came into this movie with some trepidation. Thankfully JJ Abrams handled it well, and the result, while not great, is a good movie that reintroduces us to a galaxy far, far away, shows us how it has changed over the several decades since Return of the Jedi, and leaves us looking forward to its sequel. (How that worked out, you'll have to read in my view of The Last Jedi).
The Good:
1. New heroes - I liked Rey, Finn and Poe, all of whom are likeable and engage well with each other and the audience. They don't quite have the chemistry of Han, Luke and Leia of A New Hope, but that was almost unique in film history and I wouldn't expect it to be recreated on demand by different actors in a different era. We are also left keen on finding out who Rey really is, what she is doing in exile, and how she has such tremendous potential with the force.
2. New villains - Kylo Ren is an interesting villain in that he starts off a troubled youth doing a poor impersonation of Darth Vader, but then reveals himself to be a genuine villain in this own right as well as a serious threat to the galaxy at large. Snoke is intriguing as a bigger bad behind Kylo Ren, and certainly we are left curious to know who he is, why he is so powerful, and his connection to the larger Star Wars legendarium.
3. Old heros - Seeing Han Solo and Chewbacca on the big screen with the Millennium Falcon (a character in its own right, to my mind) hit all the right spots in a very satisfying serving of nostalgia. That said, I was not expecting that Han would meet his fate in this movie, and the scene in which he does was truly shocking. How can we have lost the coolest guy in the galaxy? It greatly raised the emotional and dramatic stakes of the movie and left me hating and fearing Kylo Ren as the new Darth Vader, as it was meant to. Seeing Princess Leia on the big screen as an older and wiser princess who is less of a hip-shooter than before is also satisfying, even if she doesn't have a good deal of screen time this time around. And the final scene with Luke and Rey at the very end of the movie is beautiful, and left me eager to see more.
4. Visuals - stunning and yet bringing us back to the gritty realism of the original Star Wars. This again feels like a real, lived-in universe.
The Indifferent -
1. Blowing up Starkiller Base at the end - it was exciting but all the same, too derivative of A New Hope as so many people have correctly said. My actual thought when seeing this in the theatre was "I hope no future Star Wars movies involve blowing up the Death Star or its equivalent."
The Bad -
1. I can't think of anything really bad about this movie, but that said nothing in it quite elevates it from the ranks of good to great - although the scene between Han Solo and Kylo Ren comes very close. It is more of a promising start meant to set-up what follows.
In conclusion, JJ Abrams handles this movie competently and gets the Sequel Trilogy off to a good start. Hopefully he can carry this promise forward when he takes back the director's chair for Episode IX.