As bad as Phantom Manace

Rating: 5/10 (24 July 2016)

* Review contains minor spoilers * There are many things wrong with this movie. I was really surprised to see this movie had such a high rating on IMDb but on the other hand, if you see the reviews marked as "best" you will only find bad reviews (which probably means something).
I once read that Lucas based his story on the book "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" (Nothing wrong with this, it is a book that describes the universal hero mythology). The problem is that J J Abrams based his story on Star Wars IV and V. The story is so similar and takes so many elements of this first Star Wars movies that made this one closer to a remake or a parody (parody... yes, my wife kept asking me if this was a parody of the old ones). I will not get into the details here as there are many reviews already with a detailed list of the similarities.
Even being heavily based on the same story line, it does not work as good as the first one (not sure the problem is that I felt like watching a remake of Star Wars IV or because of the flaws of the "new" story, maybe both)
I am not a hardcore fan of Star Wars, but when I saw how someone became a Jedi overnight and was able to do Jedi mind tricks, use a light- saber and fight a trained Sith, I knew something was wrong with this movie (Didn't Jedi's need a lot of training to do all this???)
On a personal opinion, I think there was more humor than needed, making the "parody" feeling even more noticeable.
Is everything bad? No. Locations, characters, aliens, all are in line with what you expect from a Star Wars movie. Special effects are good, but without the exaggerated CGI feeling of the prequels. For the nostalgic ones you get to see Han, Leia, Luke, Chewie and other familiar characters, even Darth Vader's melted helmet.
My final comment is that after watching this movie's rating and specially the positive reviews from critics and comparing that with the actual rating this movie deserve, I got this "conspiracy" feeling that somehow now big movie corporations can manipulate all this (I mean, watch the movie and judge yourself, it has currently the same rating as movies like Batman Begins, Chinatown, Up, Good will hunting and Blade Runner, only in a parallel universe can this happen...)