Not the chosen one

Rating: 2/10 (3 January 2016)

On one level, I was pretty skeptical of the idea of a new Star Wars movie. The unfortunate Hollywood trend of rebooting and rehashing old franchises with sequels, prequels, and requels with only occasional success (Mad Max) has made me wary.
On the other hand, the menacing phantom of prequels past needed some sort of redemption. I was very cautiously optimistic that Disney's Episode VII would make good.
For the most part, the team working on this movie created a wonderful aesthetic that is referential to the original trilogy enough make it feel like a legitimate continuation of the saga. They also carefully created a droid in BB-8 that is cute and amusing enough to sell plenty of toys to children without being overly annoying to the adult audience.
Now for criticism. So much has been made of the problems with Episode VII that I want to just mention two.
C-3PO seems to be a pretty good metaphor for this movie. He is relatively unchanged from the original trilogy, and so is the plot of Episode VII. The only difference is that now he has a red arm for some reason, recycled from some other droid, a superficial change that is lamely put forward to indicate that this isn't just the same old movie. It now has a red arm!
Episode VII does something much worse than just 'remixing' older movies - it buries the heroes of the original trilogy in an attempt to establish the new ones. Han Solo, who shows the only really excellent acting performance to the movie, is now a failed parent who captains a mockery of a ship that Rey seems to know better than he does. Remember how Luke Skywalker engaged in painstaking training to finally return as a Jedi over three films? The new protagonist learns the ways of the force without tutelage, training, or effort, defeating a Sith Lord by the end of one film. JJ Abrams makes the critical mistake of elevating his protagonist too high and too quickly at the expense of the heroes of the films he intends to celebrate. Even the scale of the Starkiller Base makes the Death Star seem puny and weak in comparison.
Episode VII provides spectacle and fond familiar sights, but it really doesn't provide anything creative or new that justifies its existence beyond as a moneymaking venture. Unfortunately it tries to one-up the earlier movies instead of taking the story in new, interesting, worthwhile directions.