I want my money back!

Rating: 3/10 (30 December 2015)

After reading a bunch of positive reviews by the critics I expected this film to be pretty good. It was hard to do worse than the god-awful "Revenge of the Sith", with Frankenstein-like acting by Hayden Christensen and even the cool emperor Palpatine made look like the cartoon character Judge Doom in "Who framed Roger Rabbit". But "The Force Awakens" managed to take the Star Wars franchise to new lows.
As many others have noted, this movie is not so much a sequel to Episode VI, as a remake of Episode IV, and a much inferior remake at that. Has the Hollywood completely run out of original ideas??!
Let's see what we've got here: a wannabe emperor, a wannabe Darth Vader, yet another Death Star, and even a wannabe R2D2! P-l-e-a-s-e!
The new characters of Rey and Finn are likable enough, but they are too vanilla, and the film really suffers from the absence of a non-PC roguish character like Han Solo. Sure enough, Han Solo is present in this film but he is far too old, wise and venerable to be the Han Solo we loved in the original trilogy. "The Force Awakens" does have some jokes (which, I suppose, is an improvement compared to "Revenge of the Sith") but they are few and pretty lame.
The plot is incoherent and often nonsensical. Twenty years after the destruction of the Empire, with the Republic fully re-established, why does the Rebellion still even exist as a separate force?
Plot-wise, the least expected feature of the script is the decision to kill the Han Solo character at the end of the movie. Killing off a major positive character does take some guts, but really I would have preferred that they did away with a less entertaining and much more badly acted character, like Luke or Leia. (It looks like we are stuck with both of them for now).
And when will Star Wars actually deliver actual star wars? I mean huge opposing space fleets duking it out in some gigantic space battle? And maybe some new and original cool villain? (The last cool villain the franchise saw was Darth Maul in the "Phantom Menace", but he was taken from us all too quickly). Why do they keep rehashing old and tired plot lines and old and tires characters??
Arghhh!