Bravo!

Rating: 10/10 (22 December 2015)

When you're taking on this amount of history, or baggage depending on your point of view, you have to start modest and start small and let the story slowly tell itself and fill in the gaps. That's what happens here, as we begin (not unlike SW IV) with a small droid with an important package running into some random (or are they random?) characters. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that along the way Hans Solo and Chewy join the ride and things really start to heat up. As they do the movie pays homage to previous episodes without just redoing what they did before (with one exception). Maybe it's easier just to say what it is - 1) good plot, 2) good characters, best of them Solo, 3) good dialogue, 4) an active story that moves along well, and 5) beautiful scope to the scenery and special effects. What is one of the things that made the original Star Wars so damn good? Scenes like Luke looking wistfully over the desert grandeur of Tatooine. Just reveling for a moment in the spectacle of a foreign world. We got some of that here. What it's not is 1) too over-the-top, 2) too long, or 3) too complicated. Is Abrams to blame for why this is the best SW since Empire? I suspect he is. Real real nice job.