Star Wars is back

Rating: 10/10 (30 December 2015)

Kathleen Kennedy and JJ Abrams have delivered the best Star Wars movie since Return of the Jedi, and it may be the best one ever. This is the Star Wars movie fans in 2015 have longed for.
All of the actors knocked it out of the park. Daisy Ridley was wonderful as the lead. John Boyega had a great mix of confidence and reluctance. I wasn't expecting to care much for Oscar Isaac's character, but I was pleasantly surprised at how likable he was.
Adam Driver: wow! I loved the inner conflict he brought. The fact that he lost his temper a couple of times was great. You feel like anything is possible with a villain like that. Unlike Hayden Christiansen who came across as a whiny, baby in the prequels, Driver plays it wonderfully.
This movie had the perfect blend of drama, humor, and action. The humor was more in line with the original trilogy, but slightly updated for a modern age. The action was the same as the humor in that it felt like the original trilogy but was slightly updated; there were some great action shots like the Millennium Falcon grazing the sand during takeoff on Jakku and the turnaround the Falcon made just before it went into the exhaust port on an old Imperial ship.
I have so many thoughts about this movie, and I can probably articulate them more completely after I've had a second viewing. For now, I'll just say that Star Wars is back, and not in the sad, pathetic way it was back in 1999, 2002, and 2005; I mean it is really back!