Smoke Monster, anyone?

Rating: 1/10 (29 December 2015)

Heartless, artless, empty and forgettable. This is NOT Star Wars, just another generic, shallow, mindless, 'action-packed' movie Hollywood is so good at churning out these days. It'll be irrelevant by next summer.
Abram's greater sin is the way he has completely diminished our heroes from the original trilogy, just for the sake of rebooting the franchise. All three heroes are pale shadows of their former selves, and all that they've worked for in the previous movies have been complete subverted, and destroyed.
JJ messed with the story arc just so he can return to the simplistic good guy underdogs versus bad-ass bad guys.
Han Solo is 70. For goodness sake give him some respect. Why make him, again, a smuggler and pirate, still owing money to scum. I know everyone has nostalgia for this, but this is 32 years too late. For goodness sake give him some respect, some maturity, some gravitas. More ESB Han than ROTJ Han. He's earned it.
And Leia, still leading a rag-tag rebel force, hiding out from the bad guys, after all these years. Come on.
Luke has apparently done even worse. Not trained a single Jedi, no Jedi Academy, and now in exile. Please, the Empire is dead.
Knowing the resourcefulness of our heroes, they end up this way, losers. In 30 years, they have totally failed in everything they've done?
Trouble with JJ is that he doesn't give a hoot's ass about the narrative, the story. He's only interested in setting up cool scenes. 'wow, this would be a cool scene, let's do it.'. 'But JJ, it makes no sense. How did they arrive at this point? Where are they going from here?' 'Who cares? It's a cool scene, let's just do it. And wing the rest of the story.'
He's changed the blaster laser blast that has been the same since the old republic. They now have recoil and kinetic force. They even sound different.
And he's even changed the sound of Luke's light sabre ('Wow, it sounds way cooler this way!')
And 'wow, won't it be cool if we could make Rey just touch Luke's light sabre, and get a vision? We could add in so much cool stuff, like Kylo in the rain, Luke with his hand onR2'... 'But JJ this sort of thing doesn't happen in Star Wars. Inanimate objects do not cause visions'. 'No, no let's do it... because it's cool. The audience will eat it up.'
The whole story is this way, just to serve the 'cool scenes', never mind if they make no sense. Just kill everything else and make the movie 'cool'.
And his 'planets'. What Star Wars 'planets'? They are just all different places on earth, not even very exotic places. We know the resistance base is in grey England, last scene is on some island off Scotland, Jakku is some desert on earth. They don't even bother to add anything to make the planet more exotic.
Star Wars is a universe rich in breadth and scope. There was Tatooine, completely exotic, and Bespin, even the Death Star had a certain 'hmm' and set design that made it different from anything we are used to. Hoth, Yarvin, Coruscant, Mustafa, Alderaan, etc.
JJ's Star Wars is just forests and snowscapes and desert places on earth. Two dimensional and smaller than these places should be.
A way smaller universe.
And not Star Wars.
At least in the Marvel Universe, they still have people who care. Disney, Kathleen Kennedy and JJ just don't give a damn. Anything to fill seats.
Star Wars 1977 - 2005. R.I.P.