Why didn't they just officially remake A New Hope?

Rating: 1/10 (23 July 2017)

IMHO with regard to quality not profit this franchise is obeying the law of diminishing returns. This current travesty has no redeeming features unless you are the sort of person that has an obsession with rectifying perceived gender and racial imbalances within popular entertainment. If the rationale is that people can only relate to protagonists that resemble themselves I do wonder why white males should be expected to relate to Rey and Finn.
The original white male creators unsurprisingly created a lot of white male characters. In a similar fashion Kathleen Kennedy has produced a film with a main protagonist in her own particular image. Indeed I could almost suspect that Rey is nothing more than Kathleen Kennedy's avatar running around within the Star Wars universe. She certainly resembles Rey more than George Lucas resembled the three leads from the original trilogy.
Personally I do not think it helped that the creation of Rey and her story was entrusted to three males. It has been suggested that J J Abrams was overcompensating for criticism he had received for supposedly gratuitously focusing on partially undressed women in his previous film. I do think the character of Rey was handled with kid gloves. Presumably a female writer would have been less susceptible to overcompensation and might have allowed other characters to occasionally outshine the new chosen one. It might also have helped if they had gone to the bother of creating more than one female protagonist in the first part of this new trilogy so that Rey was not unduly burdened with the responsibility of representing the entire female audience.
Although I have not seen the original all the way through for a while I have caught individual scenes while channel surfing. Funnily enough more often than not the scenes involved Luke getting beaten up or derided by some other character. For most of the original film he seems to be a milquetoast character and even after the subsequent films came out I was always under the impression as an eighties child that everybody still preferred Han.
In this new film one of the three leads was apparently initially supposed to die before the end while the other male lead seems to be included for comic relief. Anyway, Rey does not appear to need anyone else unlike Luke whose only real moment of triumph was achieved after the timely intervention of a helpful Jedi ghost.
Rey is not derided or assisted. She is given things that have been very important to characters from the original trilogy. It is repeatedly emphasised that she does not need assistance from any man. Unfortunately there are not really any other female characters who could assist her instead. Princess Leia is too busy. Everybody seems to like and respect her and she appears to be at least as much of a prodigy as Anakin was in the prequels. However his competence was offset by the fact that he was a child in the first film and then an extremely flawed student in the other two. And surely nobody in their right mind would want to deliberately create a character that reminded people of Anakin from the prequels.
Everything seems to revolve around Rey and if you don't mind the type of blunt girl power message that used to be championed by the Spice Girls then I feel that you would probably like this film more than I could. I am afraid that I suspect that if the main protagonist's gender had been male there would have been a far more critical response to this turkey from the professional film critics.
The script appears more like a first draft than the finished product and I can not understand why adult men who are supposedly playing adult men should talk to each other as if they were in their early teens. Is Mr Abrams trying to imitate Joss Whedon now?
Having previously had the unpleasant experience of watching Super 8 it does not surprise me in the least that this film makes no sense whatsoever. This director has again produced another mindless frantic action film like he did with the Star Trek reboot.
For creators who are seemingly obsessed with diversity issues I do not understand their decision to cast John Boyega in a role akin to a runaway slave and then to rub it in by making him the foil for Rey while also acting as comic relief. It might improve things if he becomes her love interest but as others have already noted there did not seem to be much indication of that in this particular film.
Was it really necessary to have another Death Star? If so, why didn't they just totally replicate the original concept instead of expecting the audience to accept the mind-bogglingly stupid Starkiller Base? If everything else worked I would probably hate the film for that inanity alone.
The original trio needn't have bothered fighting the Empire as everything is more or less returned to the same state of affairs that existed in the original film. I would imagine that more people would have been bothered by the blatant similarities between this film and A New Hope if they had not been distracted by the gender and racial swaps.
Apparently Han is now a geriatric smuggler while Luke is sat sulking in a corner while all his achievements from the original trilogy are totally erased. Billions of people are wiped out without any emotional impact on the watching audience and the idea that the main antagonist could be redeemed while bearing any responsibility at all for that seems utterly ridiculous.
It would have probably made more sense to just officially remake the original trilogy while swapping Luke and Leia for two black sisters. After all the voice of James Earl Jones is one of the highlights of the original trilogy.