Good Acting and Well Made--But a Terrible Plot

Rating: 5/10 (12 January 2016)

First, let me say that I did watch all six previous episodes in preparation for "The Force Awakens". As such, I am indeed comparing this latest film to its predecessors, which is a bit unavoidable. In doing so, I'm giving the film 5/10 stars--a lower score than I imagined myself giving, and indeed the lowest score I've given any of the Star Wars films. Here's why...
I'll begin with the good parts of the film. The film's young cast does a tremendous job with the script they were given. John Boyega offers an especially strong performance, as does Daisy Ridley. And of course the special effects are well done. That much was to be expected--it's Star Wars, after all.
Unfortunately, the film suffers from three huge issues that just didn't work for me at all.
First, this movie relies heavily on its cast from yesteryear in an effort to add continuity to the franchise's ongoing plot. A silver haired Harrison Ford reprises his "Han Solo" role, along with a graying Chewbacca. The story is okay there so far as how the pair are reintroduced--but in the end it just comes across as another example of tired, worn out action heroes from the 80's reprising their roles long past their hey day. That said, one problem with this film is that it suffers from "Rocky VI" syndrome. Just as Ford's latest "Indiana Jones" film suffered due to his being past his prime, so does "The Force Awakens". At the end of the day, the effort to nod to the franchise's history backfires, as the on screen appearance of Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill detracts from the film rather than augmenting it. A fresh cast with a divorced storyline would have gone over much better than the one we got.
Second, the movie jumps ahead to a distant future in which we see the "Return of the Jedi" cast a good thirty years out into the future, and yet in doing so it picks up the story in a way that it's obvious we've missed out on huge plot developments which will now be forever lost. Without spoiling it, here's what I mean: Han and Leia obviously have a large back story that has happened since "Jedi" in this film. Elements of their lives are referred to over and over again, and ultimately the whole film centers around the effects of things that happened post-"Jedi". And yet we don't get to see any of that. The entire story leading up to "Awakens" is left to the imagination.
What that results in is that watching "Episode VII" is not dissimilar from watching "Episode IV" in that you know you're picking things up in the middle of the story with "A New Hope". But with the latter film, the plan had always been to eventually go back and tell the story of the build up to Episode IV. With "Awakens", that's obviously never going to happen, because Harrison Ford, et al, didn't reprise their roles in their prime years when they could have told that story. As such, we're left with a new villain and a new set of power players in the Star Wars universe who all seem to have interesting back stories, along with interesting developments in the universe itself--but we're never going to get to see that, at least not in a live action feature film. Maybe a comic book or a cartoon will fill us in to what we missed along the way--but we have missed the main course, and that makes "Awakens" suffer.
Third, "Awakens" is so obviously similar to the plot of both "Hope" and "Jedi" that it's impossible not to notice if you use any critical thinking whatsoever. The plot focuses around a droid with clandestine information, not unlike R2-D2 in "Hope", and the rest of the movie is so similar to "Jedi" that it constitutes fictional plagiarism. Sure, there are developments that differentiate from "Jedi", but the overall gist is exceptionally similar.
A long story short, that's three strikes against this film. And three major strikes makes a film hard to like--even a film as well made and as interesting as "The Force Awakens". Again, I give it 5/10 stars.