It was fun. That was all it needed to be.

Rating: 10/10 (19 January 2016)

Lots of people spending hours of their life writing thousands of words of critiques. Star Wars isn't a religion. It's a series of movies made for young audiences. And they're all incredibly intriguing and have certainly captured the imaginations (and allowances) of tens of thousands of little boys and girls who grew up into the adult men and women currently critiquing it here on IMDb and elsewhere.
The Force Awakens is a well shot, well acted movie. The new lead actors - Daisy, John, Adam, Oscar - are charismatic and likable. The plot is derivative, as was the original Star Wars to Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, and stylistically, director JJ Abrams has uncharacteristically chosen retro cinematography and imagery to match the original Star Wars he saw as a young boy, in the same way George Lucas chose to emulate the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials he enjoyed when he was a young boy.
The costume, set and prop design are top notch, as is usual for the gifted experts working at Bad Robot, Lucasfilm, and Disney. BB-8 is the sort of technical achievement of believably combining real life robotics, puppetry and CGI that Lucas ought to be proud of "fathering." ILM, under Abrams' direction, has done an excellent job of finally finding the right balance of CG in Star Wars - using it only to further the story.
John William's score is sweeping and grand - some people have not thought it as memorable as past Star Wars score, but I enjoyed it; it does not have to overcompensate for a lack of quality acting and overuse of plodding politics.
The dialogue finally feels natural (long a problem of the series under the pen of George Lucas) and The Force Awakens is by far the funniest Star Wars movie in the series.
Of the returning actors, Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill fare the best. Carrie Fisher is rusty but warm and motherly. All classic Star Wars character appearances (including the Millennium Falcon, as much a character as any human, robot or alien) are treated with dignity and respect, and their (re)introductions are crafted to serve as crowd-pleasing moments.
The side characters, played by Lupita N'yongo, Gwendoline Christie, Domnhall Gleeson, Andy Serkis and so on... all underutilized but the movie is tightly edited to allow them to all have moments and leave enough mystery that you want to see more of them.
Overall, the Force Awakens was an incredibly fun movie, the only one I've ever gone back to theaters to watch more than once. I simply don't see the point in wasting time nitpicking details that only contrarians and hardcore fans will ever take issue with. What it does, it does well, and there's nothing wrong with that or enjoying it for that. Que sera, sera as they say.