A New-New Hope

Rating: 8/10 (19 December 2015)

Being a survivor of the date rapes that were "Phantom Menace" and "Attack of the clones" in 1999 and 2002, The Force Awakens was certainly a good surprise (I didn't bother to show up to watch the third one in 2005 as the beaten-wife-syndrome had worn off at that point).
Some people have noticed that this movie has many of the same story-pattern as "A New Hope" , it's true, but in this movie it's not necessarily a bad thing, in fact i enjoyed this movie a great deal, but yes creatively speaking it doesn't take many chanceS.
Being a J.J Abrams movie, it's very action oriented and lose some of the poetry from the original, but since it's Star Wars which has always been about glorious space battles and clashes of characters, it tackles it well. In fact I particularly liked the way "the Force" was presented to us as its presence is getting felt thorough the movie in the many action scenes The new characters were... fine, but as main characters they certainly lacked the panache and charisma from their counterparts from the original movies.Especially Harrison Ford steal the show from the younger actors more than once.
The bad guys had an even harder time here as the Darth Vader "wannabe" lose most of his steam half through the movie and comes out as a rather poor reflection of the original. The "First Order" itself although well armed with everything from Storm Troopers to "Super-size-Death-Star" didn't feel half as menacing and threatening as the soul crushing Empire from the original.
The special effects are great with impressive armadas of enormous space ships on the screen and the battles are amazing (3D is recommended, it looks pretty amazing), but unfortunately most of is still CGI and computer rendering,it's all very nicely done, but my hopes that lifelike models of the spaceships would be used like in the original movies didn't materialized. Walt Disney even cut corners on some important alien characters like Maz Kanada whose CGI was rather poor, and the "Supreme-Leader-Snoke-Emperor-wanabee" who looked like an over-sized and ridiculous Gollum.
J.J Abrahams did a great job with the atmosphere however, especially at the start and the action scenes are smooth and entertaining. But at the same time those scenes are so numerous that they strain the connection between the characters who have very little time to get to know each other between yet another space or planet battles. I wouldn't have minded a couple less action scenes for a little more conversation between the characters, but that's J.J Abrahams I guess. Still it's a very solid movie and although it's not as good as any of the originals from the 70's or 80's it doesn't put them to shame either and bring new elements into an universe which I can't wait to see more of.