Second worst Star Wars film

Rating: 2/10 (21 December 2015)

This was easily the worst Star Wars movie ever made, apart from the Star Wars Holiday Special. This film is an insult to Star Wars and that's mainly because, although I wouldn't have minded just a few nods to the other Star Wars films such as Darth Vader's helmet, the storyline is a rip-off of the Original Trilogy.
I like the Prequels. Yes, they have flaws but they have a huge advantage over The Force Awakens because they tried something fresh and original. It didn't pay off as well as George Lucas hoped but at least he wasn't just ripping off one of the other Star Wars movies. Harrison Ford and Max Von-Sydow were good, BB8 was cute and Mark Hamill said everything that needed to be said with a single look, but everything else about the film was crap. I didn't realize how bad it really is when I was watching it but it's clear that Abrams didn't give a damn about making a genuinely good movie, only pandering to the masses. Either that or he's deluded enough to think that this is a good movie and can't see that he's a terrible director.
I never liked the idea that Luke Skywalker could defeat Darth Vader with so little training but at least he actually HAD training. Rey had literally NO training whatsoever, at least not as far as we or even she knows, yet she beat the hell out of Kylo Ren. To be fair, Kylo Ren was injured at the time but he's still a trained warrior so the only way I can forgive Abrams for putting Rey's seemingly impossible victory in the film is if the following movies reveal that she actually did receive training but somehow forgot.
Kylo Ren started off okay and managed to look pretty bad-ass at the beginning of the film, especially when he held off that blaster bolt for an extended period of time, before allowing it to blow something up before he left. However he was clearly a weaker man than Anakin Skywalker and his relationship with Han was just Luke and Vader with the roles reversed. To Adam Driver's credit, he was okay in his scene with Harrison Ford but that was the only scene where he showed that he has any talent. Overall he wasn't much compared to Darth Vader and I'm not even a fan of Vader. Also Ben's light saber was ridiculous but at least he made use of its unique design when fighting Finn.
Rey is the only fictional character I can think of who deserves the title of Mary Sue. I feel like that term is used too freely but Rey wasn't a complicated character and anything interesting about her was because of her mysterious past rather than the character herself. Throughout this entire movie, she could deal with any situation without help or any real difficulty. The very few scenes that give her some depth, such as when she was scared by the Skywalker lightsaber and denied that her family weren't coming back, can be easily forgotten. She had no problems resisting the lure of the Dark side, she could fix anything, fly anything, shoot more accurately than trained soldiers, beat up anyone who messed with her including a trained Dark Jedi and wield both the Force and a lightsaber with an impossible level of skill for someone who, as far as both the audience and character knows, has never been trained.
Normally, I love strong female characters but in order to make a character realistic and interesting, you have to make them flawed. Daisy Ridley clearly had no idea of how to play Rey and not all of that can be blamed on JJ Abrams' bad directing since Abrams himself told Ridley that her acting was wooden. There are vastly more talented actresses out there who could have brought more to the role. To be fair, Rey was a badly written character but if speaking like a noblewoman whilst playing a character who lived in the gutter is the best she can do, it's pretty obvious that Ridley sucks at her job.
John Boyega was an over-the-top, idiotic mouth-breather in this movie. That's all I have to say about him. Domnhall Gleeson was also over-the-top and Oscar Isaac had so little to work with that he was forgettable. One of the saving graces for me was BB8; he was cute and I liked his design.
If TFA was a comedy, it would have been fine but it wasn't intended to be a comedy, hence making it a "so bad it's good" movie. Aside from Harrison Ford, Max Von-Sydow, Mark Hamill and BB8, everything in this film was so bad that people can laugh at how badly Abrams screwed up. I prefer not to think of it as part of Star Wars canon. ROTJ symbolized a new beginning but the people behind this project spat on that and showed us that defeating the Empire was completely pointless. The Empire destroyed millions of lives and obliterated entire planets and a mere 30 years later, The First Order is doing the exact same thing.
The people in charge clearly cared more about money than making a good sequel and used peoples nostalgia to manipulate them into watching this crap. Even before I actually saw the film, I wasn't very enthusiastic about it. The next film MIGHT be able to redeem this movie but I doubt it. If I watch the sequels at all, I won't do so in the cinema. The Prequels are not perfect but they deserve their place in the Star Wars time-line. This film does not.