a safe re-run of past well-performing brand names given a fresh lick of paint by talentless hacks in the service of corporate greed

Rating: 1/10 (5 January 2016)

So I've been doing my damnedest to avoid The Force Awakens but was sufficiently bored today to get sucked into its gravitational field along with just about the entirety of the rest of the western hemisphere, it seems.
The new Star Wars cash-in is a terribly dull, unoriginal, empty and uninspiring facsimile of a movie made by shareholder meetings and accountants brunches that I nearly walked out of more than once. There were no Jar-Jars and midichlorians in it, it's true, and we should be thankful for that, but there was nothing new in it to take their place, either: it added nothing whatsoever to the existing universe or overall story, and instead of moving it forward was - as many others have said already - for the most part simply a remake of the first film that started it all.
Han and Leia looked frail and doddery and had almost nothing of substance to do - I would be surprised if Carrie Fisher's role required more than a day and a half of shooting, and Harrison Ford was apparently simply told 'look regretful once in awhile' and that was about it for the acting. I saw the film only hours ago and cannot recall even one single line of dialogue from it.
None of the much-loved returning characters DID anything to remind you why you loved them in the first place, they were just wheeled onto the set, propped up with sticks and then wheeled back off to the nursing home again afterwards. And the new actors were all bland, characterless and immediately forgettable, with the possible exception of Adam Driver, who starts out very well but like the rest of the cast has nothing to do by the end and his character has become an inexplicably weak shadow of himself by then.
The only flickers of enjoyment in the whole sorry affair came from nostalgia: the ruins of an AT-AT, half-covered by sand in the desert; the reappearance of the Millennium Falcon. All the rest was a safe re-run of past well-performing brand names given a fresh lick of paint by talentless hacks in the service of corporate greed, with no surprises and no discernible story requiring telling at the heart of it.
I didn't quite feel my childhood was being raped in front of me, but I know it's the last Star Wars film I'll ever pay to see. I guess at least I got that hard-won knowledge out of the experience, but that is all.