"Fan" service leads to nostalgia, nostalgia leads to money, money leads to suffering.

Rating: 2/10 (17 December 2015)

"Fan" service is the path to the dark side. JJ Abrams, being a "fan" himself, shows this with The Force Awakens by not only reusing the same plot points and set pieces of the original trilogy, but completely rehashing them and overlaying them with modern visual effects, adding nothing new or exciting, actually getting rid of the only thing that made the boat float and leaving nothing to look forward to. You can read all the dirty details in other negative reviews but I want to focus on something else.
Picking someone who is quite blatantly a Star Wars Original Trilogy elitist to direct and write a new Star Wars movie is an obvious cash grab targeted at loud audiences who proclaim themselves to be "true star wars fans". The same fans which have ruined the deep interaction of Star Wars philosophy with our real world and the intricacy of human emotion and familial values and relationships that George Lucas masterfully poured into a six part saga about love, philosophy, brotherhood and the relationship between a father and son.
The only thing these "fans" have managed to do in the last decade of enraged online bullying is a complete dumbing and watering down of something that was a modern metaphor for love and spiritual enlightenment and turning it into a 2 hour long laser fight on the same old boring desert and snow backdrops with the same old ridiculous antagonists we've been watching reruns of for the last 35 years with an embarrassingly cheap attempt at conveying human emotion.
The quips and the banter is all forced with no intelligent context designed only to provide a quick break from the constant stream of action sequences. And I wish those action sequences were something to look at, but the prequels blow it out of the park with superior choreography, effects, pace and score.
The score to me is the saddest part. It's unnecessarily loud only to convey how familiar it is, making it a forgettable mess. Gone are the days of goosebump inducing Duel Of The Fates.
But, that's what you get when you sacrifice originality for money and praise, praise from a group of whining douche bags.