good sci fi movie but an OK star wars movie

Rating: 8/10 (8 January 2016)

After the prequel movies I thought that star wars as a franchise was doomed for the fact that it just flat out sucked. but with this movie I sorta ate my words. Now before i get into detail this review does some mild spoilers. Now let's talk about cast and characters and I honestly have to say they did a good job. Each actor and actress did a good job and overall gave a good performance and i felt that they all were the right choice for the characters. I mainly want to give props to Daisy Ridley, i think that she has a lot of potential and if she just keeps working hard i feel that she could become an amazing actress. I also felt like the new characters that they gave us were really well written and I think that all the time and effort they put into them was well worth it. It was also good how they developed the characters because I thought that this movie had a lot of good character development. I mainly liked how they made it to where the development of the characters was interesting and how mostly everything that happened to the character mattered and had a purpose which overall gave almost each character a decent character arc that I believe will get wider and better as the series goes on. But there was one character that i thought was a waste of potential was captain phasma and the reason why i say that was because we didn't really see much of her which is a mistake because they could have added a complete different side to character and really made her a part of the star wars universe but instead she turned out to be like boba fett unless she is still alive in the next movie.
Speaking of the characters i would also like to talk about the main antagonist Kylo Ren. This character is a great villain because not only will you hate his character as a villain, but you will also understand why he is doing what he is doing and you will understand his motives which throughout multiple examples makes certain villains stand out as great in film and fiction novels alike.
When it came to the plot I think that this is when star wars falls flat on it's face. The reason why I say this i because many points in the plot were copy and paste from the fourth installment which I won't exploit because it would be a long boring list. The reason why i mention this is because even though almost everyone loved A New Hope's plot we didn't ask for a reboot we asked for a sequel. Now yes providing a new story line and content was where the prequel movies fell, but you can't be afraid to try something new and even though it's a good remake we were still (the star wars community) were let down. Another thing i would like to mention is that certain aspects of the plot I felt were rushed. I also noticed that the new Jedi in the series developed her skills not only with a light saber but with the force a little too fast to where it seemed unreasonable when she beat Kylo Ren the first time she ever fought with a light saber and performed the Jedi mind trick only after somewhere around three attempts. Now when it comes to the set I was really impressed with what they did. What really impressed me was the fact that they tried to use CGI as little as possible and when they did it looked really nice and it was good to the point where i didn't really realize it when I was watching. The reason why I'm making this a huge deal is because when I was watching the movie it seemed like everything was real, and it increases the ability to immerse yourself into the movie especially if you saw it in imax 3D. So that's all I have to say I'm sure that I have missed some stuff but i would give this as a 7.5 but i'll be generous and give 8 out of 10 stars.