"Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is a skillful blend of the old and the new which should more than satisfy most fans of the franchise.

Rating: 8/10 (18 December 2015)

The opening of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" (PG-13, 2:15) was a big deal. That's right. I just won the Captain Obvious Award AND the Understatement of the Year Award – at the same time! (Yay, me!) But seriously, allow me to elaborate. How many movie openings see a significant percentage of Movie Fans show up to the theater in costume? How many films make people feel that they need to buy their tickets online as much as eight weeks in advance (as the Movie Fan Facebook Page staff did)? How many cinematic experiences generate a level of anticipation bordering on a heart palpitation? A movie that does things like this is called an "event movie", but "Episode VII" is the event movie to beat all event movies. The desire to see the film's latest trailers (which started coming out over a year before its release) could've broken the internet. Advanced ticket sales reached a record-shattering $100 million dollars in the U.S. and also set new records in Canada, the U.K. and Germany. And that's just the tip of the Millennium Falcon. All that pre-release hype is a lot to live up to! Did the movie do it? Read on I'll get to my summary and evaluation of the movie soon, but first, here are a couple things that I will NOT do. With apologies to all who have lived in caves for the previous 40 years or so, and anyone literally born yesterday, I'm not going to spend precious time and space recounting the "Star Wars" phenomenon or the major plot points of the previous six films. (That's what Wikipedia is for.) I also won't give as many details of the film's plot as I usually do. Since so many fans have so many questions and there's so much speculation about what (and who) is in this movie, even a moderate amount of detail would cross over into Spoiler Land, a country that I'm loathe to visit. Here's what I CAN tell you The story of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" begins about 30 years after the events of 1983's "Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi". Luke Skywalker is the last remaining Jedi – and he's gone missing. The Galactic Empire that was destroyed at the end of the previous film in the franchise's chronology has been replaced by "The First Order" and the erstwhile Rebel Alliance by "The Resistance". Both groups are desperate to find Luke. The Resistance wants him to train more Jedi in order to check the rise of The First Order. The First Order believes that the killing of the last living Jedi is essential to their goal of galactic domination. Now, before this starts sounding completely like a two and a quarter hour outer-space version of "Where's Waldo?", here are a few other things you'll see in this movie This film brings back most of the main characters who were alive and still breathing (or, functioning – in the case of the droids) – mostly played by the original actors, while introducing a new generation of rivals, both good and evil. Daisy Ridley plays Rey, a scavenger on the desert planet of Jakku. She spends her time in what looks like a junkyard filled with crashed and discarded vehicles from Episodes 4-6 and she harvests what parts she can to sell to a junk dealer to get enough food to survive. John Boyega plays a character who comes to be called Finn, a young man who's conflicted about where his loyalties lie, but who ends up joining forces with Rey on a mission – slash – adventure more dangerous and important than either of them ever imagined or even desired. Both characters also find themselves in league with Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), known as the best pilot in the galaxy. Following the template that George Lucas laid down in those original three films, J.J. Abrams, the new franchise co-writer (along with series veteran Lawrence Kasdan) and director, seems to have established these three characters roughly in the mold of strong woman Leia Organa (Rey), reluctant warrior Luke Skywalker (Finn) and cocky rogue Han Solo (Poe). At the same time, the characters on the Dark Side of the Force have their successors too.
The First Order is well on its way to taking the place of The Empire and hopes to surpass the latter's dominance. The First Order is led by an enormous hologram called Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis), who is helped by the loyal and ruthless general Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) and an angry and conflicted black-clad warrior named Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) whose background is first mysterious, and then auspicious. Oh, and these guys have a weapon that makes the Death Star look like a potato gun. Of course, the survival of the Republic is again at stake and peace-loving people throughout the galaxy have to fight to survive.
In "Star Wars: The Force Awakens", Abrams creates a well-updated galaxy far, far away (from long, long ago) in which he skillfully blends the old and the new. Characters on both sides of the story's conflict fly the same ships, live on the same kinds of planets and visit similar bars (with a similarly odd menagerie of creatures) as in Episodes 4-6. The characters are well-cast and well-costumed. Abrams leaves behind the dominant use of CGI that many Movie Fans believe overtook the story-telling in Episodes 1-3 and returns to the aesthetic of the original three films. The story flows naturally from those three and nicely sets up a new set of conflicts for the final three films (with the next two due out in 2017 and 2019). The action is frequent, but varied and gives the audience brief, but satisfying bursts of excitement. This movie relies a little too much on "Star Wars" history and the use of surprising reveals, but will more than satisfy most fans of the series. "A-"