JJ Abrams delivers a good one.

Rating: 9/10 (19 December 2015)

*** Please don't read on if you don't want spoilers****
From the first few words, and the title, we are on familiar but different territory. George Lucas has handed over the reins, once again, to another director in a bid to bring the final films to a satisfactory conclusion. I don't blame him.
The film begins with the news that Luke Skywalker has disappeared and gone into a sort of exile. Desperate to find him is a former apprentice and now big bad guy of the remnants of the Empire ie The First Order. The First Order, who are the Empire but under a different leader are hunting for a map that shows Luke Skywalker's whereabouts. However, the map has been separated into several pieces, to be sure, and one of them is held by a village on the planet Jakku. To retrieve the final piece, Leia Organa, now General Leia, head of the Resistance dispatches her best pilot, Poe Dameron, Dameron, played by Oscar Isaac is a determined and very good pilot. He arrives on Jakku and talks with the head of the village and retrieves the piece, but before he is able to get it back to Leia, the First Order turn up and destroy both village and the leader, played by Max Von Sydow. Poe, before being captured, puts his piece of the puzzle into his robot BB8, a smaller, very agile version of R2. Poe is then captured by the new Darth Vader, or a Sith by the name of Kylo Ren. On the way, a stormtrooper by the name of Finn removes his helmet and realises he doesn't want to kill anymore. He goes back on-board his ship but realises that he has no place among the First Order stormtroopers.
We leave both Poe and Ren and meet the other new member of the cast, namely, Jakku scavenger Rey, played by Daisy Riley. Rey, in the course of picking up scrap and the remains of dead Empire spaceships on the desert planet of Jakku runs into BB8, captured by another scrap hunter and befriends him. Despite temptation, she decides not to sell the droid. We learn that Rey is waiting for someone to come back and she's been waiting a long time. Like Luke before her, she also doesn't seem to have much of a life outside of her hard work for little reward.
Back on-board the First Order ship, Ren tortures Poe to find the missing piece but gets nowhere. Finn helps to get Poe out and they fly off to Jakku. Sadly, it appears Poe hasn't made it and Finn is on his own. He finds Rey by helping her from being robbed in a market in Jakku. Chaos ensues when the First Order turn up and destroy a space ship. Finn and Rey unknowingly get aboard a ship kept for junk, only to find they have piloted the Millennium Falcon.
Both get away with BB8 and find themselves being sucked into another ship, a scavenger. Looking to hide out, the pair hide in smugglers places, only to find they are found by the original former owners of the Falcon, Han Solo and Chewbaca the Wookie. They tell both of their plight and Han tells them that all they've heard about the Force, Luke and the Rebellion is true. Rey tells them they need to go to the Resistance and hand over BB8 who's information is valuable. Solo pilots them to another planet where they meet another alien but Rey leans something more about Luke.
Finn decides that he has to go with others and leave Rey. After all, she is now with Han Solo who can get her to Leia and the Resistance. Its not as easy as that.
There is a lot more going on. The true identity of Kylo Ren's family is revealed and Ren himself is unmasked. There is also one big upset but enough of that. I daresay once you've seen the film and know the reasons why it has happened, it becomes obvious why it was done and a sensible decision of Abrams to do it as well.
The Force Awakens has plenty of the things which made the first Star Wars films so good: action and beautiful locations, which, for a change, look real, rather than the CGI'd to death backgrounds of the Lucas prequels. It has some strong characters, Kylo Ren is a character needing to find his place in the saga, Domhail Gleeson's General Hax adds a clear note, if slightly over-acted, Gwendoline Christie is heard rather than seen, residing in the Stormtrooper costume of Captain Phasma and Oscar Isaac and others bring some much needed fresh blood to a saga which was in danger of getting long past its sell by date. Its also nice to have Han Solo on board to bring some balance to the rather tiresome mythology which had gone overboard in the prequels.