Too much of a loving homage to the originals, too afraid to be its own film

Rating: 7/10 (15 January 2016)

I wasn't really interested in seeing this after the prequels turned me off of the Star Wars universe as a whole but I went with a friend who wanted to see it, so that was my attitude going in.
The second 1/3 of the movie was more or less able to be called original but the first and last portions were basically a carbon copy of A New Hope with an extra light-saber battle thrown in.
As expected, the visuals were top-notch but without a decent story or good characters or at least well-acted ones, a film cannot captivate. This was not the problem for a majority of the film but for a few minor characters. The newcomers portraying Rey and Finn were terrific, they should be credited as capably carrying the film but for the stakes in this story it seemed unfitting that they were so young, at least without being accompanied by someone older from the start.
It was hard feeling the nostalgia of anyone other than Chewbacca because all the returning cast look so much different than they did in the original trilogy, but they did perform adequately. The character Kylo Ren's performance was slightly below average.
Overall I would have preferred more information during the opening crawl, a lot of things were left unclear as a result and degraded the amount of enjoyment and understanding of the film and story. It's likely that whether unintended or not, this was tailored for younger audiences to enjoy and less so for adults. It's still somewhat fun at parts but there is a bit too much drag and a lot more needless depressing moments than necessary. Darker does not always equal better.