The EU died for this? Seriously?

Rating: 1/10 (23 January 2018)

So my review is quite biased, being a fan of what used to be the EU (now legends), having read more than 50 books and played many of the now non-canon games. Therefore, take this review with a grain of salt. TL;DR at the bottom.
All in all, I consider this film bad, especially under special consideration of the successor "The last jedi" and why this trilogy is doomed. Why though:

The story. This movie is almost a 1:1 copy of a new hope. You have probably read that before, but it is astonishing now much of the concept has been taken to try to please the crow by giving them something they are familiar. Well, not familiar, but almost identical, which makes, in itself, the plot almost ridiculous. First of all, between ROTJ and TFA we are thrown into a situation where, after the supposed victory of the rebels, we are somehow back to square one: The rebels are a minority, the Empire (now called the first order), built yet another Death star, because it worked so well before TWICE /s. Seriously. All in all, our childhood heroes Lukeleiahan have achieved nothing, their victory is meaningless.

Okay, maybe we are up to a fresh restart of the galaxy, its setting. Maybe we have good characters...or maybe not

The characters. Oh boy. Where do we start?

So first of all, our heroine, Rey, is close to being omnipotent. Yes, I know it sounds stupid, but it's actually baffling how overpowered the character is. First of all the actress follows the stereotypical, new way of acting, as seen by many young actresses like Jennifer Lawrence. As it seems, "acting" today means dropping your jaw, opening your eyes, occasional yelling and otherwise not being capable of controlling your face to mirror an appropriate emotion. Nevertheless,
our heroine can do everything and everybody likes her the moment they see her (even Leia hugs her after Han died, not even Chewie whom she'd known for DECADES). She immediately knows the Millenium Falcon just as good as Han Solo. Alright. She grabs Anakin's lightsaber and immediately gets 10 level ups...Alright... She takes a friggin lightsaber, a weapon as deadly and hard to control that jedi needed years to not chop off things by accident and pummel the bad guy. I mean, if it were Anakin Skywalker, the Chosen One, a being made by the force, I could get that. But she is NOBODY. It's just bad Character design and it gets worse by such a bad actress.
So how about the bad guy? Darth Caedus...oh wait.
Okay, so they took Ben from the Legends books... But they made him the Solo children (Because Han and Leia had so much to do with Ben Kenobi instead of, I don't know, maybe Luke, his student?!?). Maybe he is a cool guy...aaaaand he sucks. Seriously. Remember all the previous baddies from the Star wars movies? Darh Maul? Tyrannus? Sidious? Vader? Remember when they slashed their light saber in an emo phase all over their star ship and whined about their granddaddy issues? I see the idea of introducing a mentally unstable teenager, and they could have made an interesting character out of Kylo from the knights of Ren (who will never be mentioned again), but here are the flaws:
First of all, I dislike Adam Driver. He could play Gollum in Lord of the rings without CGI. Hell, I was yelling "put back on your helmet, you hideous monste....oh, that's Adam Driver... PUT IT BACK ON" and his acting talent doesn't convince me either. But most of all, he seems to be quite skilled in the force (he can stop blaster shots in mid-air, even Vader couldn't do it) but then he gets shot by a Wookie bowcaster (he is severely injured, I get that), but loses to Mary Sue WHO HAD NOT HAD A SINGLE LESSON IN LIGHTSABER FIGHTING, and uses it like some wooden stick. Even if he were injured, he would be able to just force choke or crush her or pull the light saber off her hands. They totally messed everything up with this character by being inconsistent to the maximum.
The other characters, okay: So we have a new C3PO-Jar Jar character, now played by John Boyega - the clown character of the series, only good for a few Star-Wars-untypical jokes, who is supposed to be a main character, but actually does nothing except being clumsy, afraid of everything and completely overwhelmed by everything. Then e have the new R2D - BB8, a new way of selling toys and Poe Dameron. I don't even remember his input.
The old characters are also butchered in every possible way. From the little context we get we know that Han is not a Rebel hero, but regressed to being a smuggler again, Leia does Leia things (but somehow learns to fly through outer space in the next movie and survive for quite a while), and Luke is going to be a sulking, bitter old hermit on some rocks. Great, you fuckers, you didn't introduce new, interesting characters but you also butchered the old one. Great job!
The big flaw comes from the fact that this movie has a successor, though. The last jedi ignores EVERYTHING that happened in this movie. AGAIN. WE destroy the star killer base here. Cool. Next movie: We are running from an "Empire" that is still powerful, even after we blew their headquarters with billions of soldiers into pieces. They introduce more characters, because the ones here were boring and they make them pointless AGAIN. We thought Snoke was a powerful and mysterious new Sith Lord? Gotcha! Rey is somebody who is from a powerful force heritage? Nope. It's just a big big mess

TL, DR:
The big, big problem from this Disney Wars franchise comes from the fact that they bought the license but didn't plan around it. They don't have anything to tell us between ROTJ and TFA which makes this new beginning incredibly sloppy, even though it's almost a carbon(ite) copy of episode 4,but they also didn't plan ahead. The 2/3 of the existing trilogy are incoherent, the characters are either powerful beyond anything or emotionally unstable. Everything we knew about the force since the old Republic is meaningless, because everyone can master the force in 2-3 hours and just holding an old lightsaber. Loved, old characters are butchered to create space for socially acceptable factions.
You didn't like episode 1-3? At least they had a cohesive strategy for the plots.
Here, you also get the same bad dialogues, (un)funny characters. But they don't give you a plot or direction, disregard everything about the force, fill it with slapstick jokes and mix it together with CGI to create a parody that is called "Disney Wars: A New Despair- RELOADED".
You could have taken anything from the existing Legends, yet you decided to take a big chunk of poop , paint it C3PO-golden to make a few quick bucks and shit on every fan's face.