Star Wars: Episode VII - The Return on the Investment

Rating: 1/10 (11 January 2018)

My one expectation going into this movie was that it would be better than the prequels, which were abysmal. It failed even in that regard.
I hesitate even to call this a movie. All the reviews you may have read referring to this as a reboot as opposed to a sequel, are apt. I would go a step further and call it a cynical exploitation of fandom, and an attempt to reverse engineer that which made the original trilogy so successful and repackage it without creating anything new or risking Disney's $4 billion investment.
Say what you will about the prequels: bad writing, bad casting, bad acting, pandering to little kids, shamelessly designed toward merchandising; they were at least a continuation of the original story and contained some new ideas. This movie, on the other hand, was in such a hurry to make you feel A New Hope/Empire Strikes Back "feels" that it plunked you down in the same settings, with the same characters, and the same objectives, changing only the names. Tatooine is now Jakku. Luke is now Rey. Obi Wan is now Luke. Yoda is now Maz Kanata. Darth Vader is now Kylo Ren. Emperor Palpatine is now Supreme Leader Snoke. The Rebellion is now the Resistance. The Empire is now the First Order. The Death Star is now Starkiller Base. And on, and on... If you plotted this movie's story beats on a graph they would line up perfectly with those of Episode IV--except that they feel totally unearned and anti-climactic, lacking the proper character development and buildup to carry any real weight. The filmmakers, in this case, were counting on the audience to bring this to the equation and fill these empty ciphers with their memories from the original films. I'm baffled as to why newcomers to this story would care, because even I don't.
Well, the detailed galaxy that George Lucas envisioned had much more potential than this, even if he largely failed to realize it in the prequels. There were more worlds to visit, more characters to meet. It seems like any fan could have imagined a better sequel. What happened after the rebels toppled the Empire? What did they put in its place? As leaders of the Rebellion, what role did Luke, Leia, and Han play in that? Not only are these questions never answered, the people in charge of this movie chose to hit the reset button on all of it, either because of a failure of imagination or fear of diverging from the tried and true formula, or some combination of the two. They calculated that you'd like to see Leia, after struggling against the Empire in Episodes IV-VI and finally triumphing over it, still a soldier in that same struggle. They figured you'd enjoy seeing Han Solo, after having ascended to the rank of General in the Rebellion, returned to the life of a smuggler. They squandered all our investment in the previous three movies in favor of trying to remanufacture the experience of seeing them again for the first time--something adults should have known was both futile and impossible.
These are not the continuing adventures of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Han Solo. Those only exist in your imagination now. And believe me, they're better off there. This is just a bunch of arbitrary, apocryphal claptrap, crapped out by an entertainment megacorp trying desperately to secure a monopoly on childlike wonder and bend it to the will of its shareholders--the second largest of whom, it should be noted, is George Lucas. Jar Jar Abrams is an unoriginal hack, but I don't blame him any more than I blame Darth Vader for doing the Emperor's bidding. Yeah, that's right, I had to get in a "Jar Jar Abrams" dig.