It Disappoints Me

Rating: 2/10 (16 December 2015)

This is my first review of a film. The film had such an impact on me, that I felt compelled to write this review and post it here.
This review may contain spoilers *** I went in premier night here, where I live, excited to see the new film. I wasn't afraid that it would be bad, I wasn't even expecting it to be bad. I was under the impression that the guy who made a great Star Trek reboot and a pretty okay sequel to said reboot would do a good job of not screwing up the film.
So, I walked into the cinema, got some chips and a soda (in a promo cup, in fact), and sat down to watch what was ultimately for me, a disappointment.
Let me list the pros and cons: - Pros 1. Most of the Actors were Good - Fin was good, Rei was good, a lot of the other new characters, from Poe Damaron, the X-Wing pilot guy, to the dudes wanting to blast Han Solo dead because he was screwing them, they were pretty good. If I was going to go and rate the actors, I'd say the guy who played Fin and Harrison Ford pretty much ranks top in this movie.
2. The Design and the Effects were Good - This however, is a given. Love how the stormtroopers looked, very bad ass and professional. The ships (both fighter ships and the interiors of the larger ones) were also pretty cool, resembling still their counterparts from previous films but with a polish that gave them more detail.
And sadly, that's pretty much it for me. Now for the cons: 1. The Important Characters were Terrible - Kylo Ren was terrible, with the peak of his bad acting climaxing at the scene where he go faces Han at the walkway in the third act of the movie. This also sadly allows me to understand that he is related to Han, sadly because apparently the guy got his acting skills from his mother Leia, who also acts without much emotion in the film. She does two things, act sort of sarcastically happy to see Han, and then act sorta sad when he dies. Spoilers, by the way.

Oh, and Supreme Leader Snoke looks like that White Orc from the Hobbit films. For a moment also, I thought he was a giant (thankfully, he was not, but he did too little in the film for that to actually help my opinion of him).

2. The Other Characters were Also Terrible - Captain Phasma? Waste of screen time. The biggest thing she did in the movie was to get captured and be forced at gunpoint to deactivate the station's shields. Nothing else. - Evil First Order officers? Terrible acting, all of them. They were generic evil dudes, nothing else at all.
3. The Story. Oh God, the Story... - I'll go and focus with the things that really irked me here. One, the First Order pretty much decided to just build an even bigger Death Star (with a very stupid weapon and also blew up in a very stupid way), and second, the way the father-son thing between Han and Kylo Ren was also done and resolved in an abysmally dumb way. Here's the rest:

Knowledge of the Force now appears to be widespread, and some characters seem to treat it like a religion

The Republic and how they supported the "Resistance", which I guess is like the Rebellion, but much more underground or something. How it (the Republic) got decimated is to me, very lazy and also very dumb.

The Resistance Fleet - That was just around two-dozen X-Wings that they sent and I'm sorry, that is not a fleet. That, plus Han Solo, Chewbacca, and a deserter storm trooper whose plan to steal explosives from said station and use it to blow a hole into a vulnerable part. Maybe it's just me, but if your planet-sized, planet killer weapon can't defend itself against that, then maybe your planet-sized planet killer weapon deserves to blow up.

The Starkiller Station Weapon, just everything about it. It devours stars to recharge? Why not just strap light speed drives onto asteroids and then send them careening at full speed to the Republic worlds? Also, when it blew up, it became a planet-sized sun?

I understand that I may be nitpicking a bit much here, and as someone who's read a lot of the expanded universe fiction and played the games, I agree that it may be skewing how I saw this movie overall. Still, I find it hard to go and lower my expectations and give this film a higher score. It's lazily written with some important scenes poorly acted and has plot threads that are poorly executed and resolved.
It just disappoints me, no matter how I try to run it again and again in my head.
Oh well, here's to hoping Star Trek Beyond won't suck.