The Force is strong, but not a Jedi yet

Rating: 7/10 (4 May 2016)

My main problem with the film is that it lacks focus. Finn and Rey's characters are both good but it feels like the writers had trouble deciding which is the protagonist.
Rey has very little motivation and is too perfect. In A New Hope, Luke is naive and inexperienced. He gets beat up by the sand people. He gets bullied by the criminal in the bar and Obi Wan has to rescue him. He has difficulty with the training drone. His plan to save Leia is pretty bad and it's only thanks to the droids that they managed to escape the trash compactor. Also, if Han didn't save him he wouldn't have been able to blow up the Death Star.
Pretty much anything Rey does she succeeds at almost immediately. She can fight, she can fly the Falcon like an ace, and she's some kind of tech genius who speaks both robot and Wookie. Not a single one of her skills was really earned throughout the course of the film. She just closes her eyes and boom she has the force.
Finn's evolution peaks too early and he is just kind of a flat line for the rest of the story. By the end he is left with nothing; no lightsaber, no Millennium Falcon, no X-Wing, no blaster, no droid, nothing - he's just in a coma. Feels like they wrote his character into a dead-end. However, this is partially redeemed by the fact that he and Rey have fairly good chemistry.
Poe Dameron is a totally unnecessary character and he also suffers from being too perfect. He's likable, but not very interesting. The characters of Finn and Poe should have been merged into one.
Kylo Ren is quite interesting and I like how they decided to unmask him early on. He's a much better villain than Darth Maul or Grievous even though he might not be as "cool". The lightsaber fight at the end is pretty good but don't think Rey should have won and I wish there was more dialogue. Duel dialogue seems to be a lost art these days.
Harrison Ford gives a great performance as Han Solo. After seeing him in Ender's Game I was worried he was too old and grumpy to ever be Solo or Indy ever again. He proved me wrong. They also wrote an good story for him and he had some great one liners. "That's not how the force works" is probably my favorite line in the film.
Snoke is weak and should have been left out, however I'm still partially intrigued.
Captain Phasma is possibly the most hilariously pointless character in a film ever.
I like the First Order although the political situation isn't very well explained, could be remedied in the sequel. I kind of wish they were modeled more on ISIS rather than the Nazis. It would have been more interesting if they were like a terrorist group with an even more fanatical ideology than The Empire, striking fear into the heart of the New Republic with bombings, assassinations, and kidnapping of politicians. Sith Radicals or Dark Side fundamentalists.
I didn't like that they ended on a cliffhanger. They could have ended with a medal celebration type of thing and I would have been fine with that. The whole "finding Luke" plot is kind of weak even though Luke looks cool and I can't wait to learn more about what happened between RotJ and TFA.
The biggest disappointment is John William's soundtrack. So bland. Not a single memorable tune. I know this is blasphemy to a lot of fans, but hey should have handed it over to someone else. Williams has lost his creativity and energy. The franchise really needs a new injection of life in the music department.
The visual effects are good but not really impressive. One thing that kind of annoyed me is how they throw the Falcon around as if it's some indestructible object, making it crash through trees and bounce off the ground without ever seeming to take the slightest damage.
The problem isn't as much how well rendered the graphics are, it's how invested we are in the big special effects scenes. Having perfect ace pilots like Poe Dameron makes it really hard to care during the Starkiller Base trench-run. ANH, despite having some dated effects in the trench run scene, still makes you care about every second of that battle. It's tense because Luke is an amateur X-Wing pilot. He's never fought in a space battle before. The stakes are high and the movie is entirely focused on that battle. In Force Awakens, we're bouncing around, trying to imitate the climax of ESB and ROTJ at the same time and it doesn't work as well.
Cinematography is possibly the best in the series (at least for the modern eye). JJ really has a good sense of motion, but I didn't like it in 3d.
Pressure's on for the next film because it could make or break The Force Awakens. After A New Hope it didn't really matter if the next film was as good or better because New Hope could always stand on its own if the others couldn't. The Force Awakens really requires a follow up film to establish it as a truly good Star Wars film. It seems pretty obvious where they're going to go with Rey's character so I'm more interested in what they're going to do with Finn and Poe. I hope they focus on some of Kylo Ren's Dark Side training because that's something we haven't seen in a SW film and it would help establish Snoke.