A beloved franchise falls further

Rating: 3/10 (20 December 2015)

How you react to this movie depends on your need for instant gratification. If you like big-effects action to happen fast and keep happening, you'll love it. Unfortunately that's about the only thing that JJ Abrams has managed to do well. Everything else - and I do mean that - literally everything else has been botched.
Originality: zero. Every one of the big three in the trilogy had something unexpected, something unique... the Pit of the Sarlaac, the ice fields of Hoth, the now iconic X-wing run to the Death Star. Awesome spaceships and uniforms, with new gear introduced in every movie. Utterly iconic characters. Not this time. This is a trip down memory lane. That's fine - for ten minutes - but there's no way it should be a full movie.
Plot: the key storyline is beyond ridiculous. It's farcical. I won't do a spoiler, I'll just say that you'd have to be a five year old to buy into it. The rest of the plot line is just a re-hash of IV and V, at times playing like a mixup of scenes from those movies.
Dialogue: bad. Generally just bad. Not appalling (The Phantom Menace, anyone?) but the dialogue turns scenes that could have been actually pretty damn good into scenes that are just waiting time before the next action sequence.
And that brings me to where the movie really falls flat on its face. It fails its characters. Scene after scene, something is set up, the audience gets some anticipation going... and then whatever happens is either a fight sequence, or lame. There really isn't anything else happening.
Finn, a stormtrooper with doubts, could have been a tour-de-force of conflict, self doubt, morality and late blooming - but he just isn't. He's an action cutout, nothing more. It's a crying shame. There's so much more that they could have done with him, but it just never happens.
Poe Dameron should be awesome. He's a daring pilot, a man without fear... but that's kind of it. There isn't anything else going. He ends up being completely forgettable. Cut-outs are just fine in Star Wars, being forgettable isn't.
BB-8 is alright. Maybe a bit hammy in some scenes (yep, Abrams manages to make an expressionless droid overact) but generally good. C3PO and R2D2 aren't, though. They get thrown in for sentiment's sake, then they get left to flounder with a script that leaves them nothing to do except be annoying and unnecessary.
Kylo Ren was supposed to be the next Darth Vader. Nope. Adam Driver does the best he can, but when the mask comes off, the reaction is: this guy should be the male lead in a teen romance comedy. He's miscast and also misdirected. The first half of the movie sets him up as a remorseless badass, then they switch directions and try to make him conflicted. There's a scene where Darth Vader's burnt and melted mask turns up, for about ten seconds. The mask has more presence than Kylo Ren manages in the whole movie.
And that brings me to Luke, Han, and Leia. What the movie does to these beloved characters is simply unforgivable. I can't say more without giving spoilers, but they all end up being much sadder, paler versions of their past selves.
Rey somehow manages to transcend her setup as Luke Version 2.0 and actually become pretty freakin' awesome. This happens despite her apparently magical ability to pick up skills along the way. Luke had to train. She doesn't. She's a heroine for the instant-fix generation. I still ended up liking her, though. She's one of the few parts of the movie which actually work.
The comedy is an unusual touch in a Star Wars movie, and long overdue... or it would be, if Abrams didn't insist on making the point and then driving it home with a hammer as well. Comedic delivery is suitable for the average eght-year-old, but then again, that matches the plot.
J.J. Abrams can't take the blame for everything. The writing credits include Lawrence Kasdan (who's credited for V and VI, as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark) and Michael Arndt (who's an odd choice: Toy Story 3 and Little Miss Sunshine). Between the three of them, they've managed to committee-write a movie with a basic mistake happening at least once every five minutes of screen time. I imagine that Disney studio executives were breathing down the creative team's necks at every step of the process, methodically vetoing anything even vaguely risky out of existence, and insisting that the writers do as they're told. Unfortunately, given the film's record-breaking box office take, that approach will have been justified.
It's simply a bad movie. People were walking out of the theatre during the screening I went to. Nobody clapped at the end, or looked particularly happy. The die-hard fans will go anyway - and rave about it - but for the rest of us, this is now a franchise trapped in its own fossilized iconography. It would take a very brave director to break new ground and take risks, which is what it desperately needs. That hasn't happened here. It's one safe bet after another, but in the end it's a flop.