The Force Awakens, A.K.A. The Easiest Paycheque Mark Hamill Ever Earned In His Life.

Rating: 6/10 (21 December 2015)

Let's make no mistake: this is a cynical film, one that feels like they found an algorithm that makes action films and just let it run. I'd like to know, for example, just how many iterations the BB8 design went through before the focus group decided that it was sufficiently mathematically adorable. There's no reason why X-wings and TIE fighters need to appear at all - given the diversity of ships in the canon, and how technology marches on and all that - but it's important to this film to trade on recognisable cultural properties. This can't afford to be the start of another prequel-esque trilogy, which lost 40% of its audience after The Phantom Menace, so X-wings it is. This is cynicism that extends to continuing to use Stormtroopers as disposable people to be mown down in their hundreds, while at the same time offering them the potential of agency and independence as expressed by Finn; the clearly-delineated heroes and villains worked fine in the fairy-tale logic of the original trilogy, but become more problematic given the attempted additional characterisation of the new film.
There's a potentially rewarding postmodernist reading to be had of Kylo Ren, a character motivated by his desire to live up to a mythologised ancestor he never met, the point of borrowing his looks and voice without having any reason to. He's the Buffalo Bill of Star Wars villains, trying to wear the skin of the person he wants to become. I quite like the idea that the mask and his hilted lightsabre exist only to be ostentatious. A Marxist reading might be less sympathetic: how do you continue to commodify a character who, despite being a cultural icon, was definitively killed off thirty years ago? Easy: design a character who's in thrall to him, ensuring that his shadow continues to loom large while necessarily weakening the new character as a consequence. So I'm mixed regarding him, although I think a lot of his character works well in the story.
The attempts at thematic depth have a tendency to drop in and out as well. Take the climactic lightsabre duel, which on its surface seems a conscious response to the overly choreographed and safe fights of the prequels; this is much grittier and seems to have more of an emotional centre. However, one of the cleverer themes of the original trilogy is that lightsabre duels are as dangerous to win as they are to lose. In A New Hope, Kenobi understands that in order to "win", he has to lose, and offer his life to Vader. A key theme of Empire is that Luke needs to stop being a hothead, and he suffers a heavy defeat because he relies on fighting skill rather than the Force. In Jedi he wins a decisive victory, and comes within a whisker of turning to the dark side as a result. Message: relying on physical combat is a dangerous strategy that usually causes more harm than good. This is a clever and daring idea in a story known for its action. In this new film, Rey uses the Force not as an alternative to physical combat, but to help her physically overpower the villain. The Force being used in the service of combat, without also having that link to the dark side, is a disappointing mistake of the prequels that the new film steps into as well.
The story's real weakness is in the narrative structure. It has a tendency to spend a long time going nowhere, and then suddenly rush to the next bit very abruptly. At one point, I asked myself where the narrative had got to, and thought that the central characters had met up and the villains were looking for the droid; I then thought that I'd have answered the question the same way an hour before. Then, suddenly, the "totally not a Death Star, honest" Death Star just kind of appears on the scene, and very quickly we're rushed through the exposition of how to defeat it. Lucas is no master but he knew well enough to establish in the first scene of the original film that the plans to the Death Star were being stolen, leading the film naturally to its final act. Gone is the propulsive narrative of the original trilogy, and in its place is a weird stop-start alternative that made it feel overlong and rushed at the same time.
I didn't hate it, but it's got lots of problems.