Good but not great

Rating: 7/10 (21 December 2015)

The Force Awakens is a much better movie than any of the prequels, but lacks the imagination, pacing, and sense of wonder of any of the other six Star Wars films, and suffers for it. I had high hopes, and they mostly weren't quashed, but I think it could have been so much more.
It's impossible to see this movie outside of its ancestors, so I'm not going to even try. It may be unfair to compare it to several of the greatest movies ever made, but if you're going to put the name "Star Wars" on there for the money it's going to bring you, and if you're going to include characters and events that were in those other films, then you're inviting the comparison. Reviewers will complain about it being unfair to compare this film to those other ones, but bury that complain in between discussions of how Han Solo fits right back into his role and calling Boyega/Ridley "newcomers." If you're going to acknowledge the film as part of a series, I can review it like one.
And where does this fit? Definitively above the prequels, but solidly below IV and V. What made those movies great was their expertly crafted pacing, their sense of tension and balance between the conflict of good and evil, and their ability to give us a limitless universe full of interesting characters and personalities. This movie lacks all of that. Again, it's good, but needs a director more creative and original than JJ Adams to take it to the same level of ANH or ESB.
First the good. The two young stars (Boyega and Ridley) and Harrison Ford all give three of the best performances in the series (it will be hard to beat the work of Guinness and McDiarmid). There are several moments of true, original humor (love BB-8's reaction to Boyega's thumbs-up) and the cast seemed to really enjoy working with each other. We actually feel some burgeoning and unforced affection between Ridley and Boyega, and this is due to Abrams, who knows how to get human performances out of his actors in a way Lucas always struggled with.
The effects were outstanding - nothing intentionally showy or flashy, but very detailed and highly technically competent. I saw the film in IMAX (one opened in my city a week ago) and it was gorgeous. The 3-d was well done and smooth, which was a new experience for me, though that could easily be a function of the IMAX format.
And there were a lot of good, not great aspects. First off, Ren felt like a solid bad guy - human and flawed, interesting and dangerous, and certainly better than Darth Maul, but he lacked Vader's (and the Empire's) presence and seemingly insurmountable control over everything. The result leaves less of a sense of scale to the battle between the dark side and the light side, and the ending doesn't have as emotional weight because of it.
While the action sequences themselves are staged very well technically, there's no escalation of each conflict. Battle sequences begin and continue at the same pace throughout, without ever having any momentum swings that makes the audience feel like it's on any sort of roller coaster ride. If it's all one long, straight drop, eventually you get used to that falling and it ceases to have that emotional impact on the viewer. Some people may prefer that non-stop excitement, but to paraphrase The Incredibles, if every moment is special, then none is.
The first Star Wars is a perfect example of its opposite - they spend time building up to the attack on the Death Star, so that when it comes, you're prepared for it and the sequence feels like the true emotional culmination of everything the movie's been working for. The Force Awakens never has that - minimal time is spent emotionally preparing the audience for any of the conflicts, so there's no sense of dread. The Force Awakens starts with an invasion, for example, but there's no sense of normalcy before the invasion to create that emotionally resonant juxtaposition with the chaos and excitement of the action. Compare this with how A New Hope starts - that movie lurks on the anxious faces of soldiers preparing for their ship to be boarded, and there's actually a calm before the storm that allows the viewer to wait with anticipation, to build up to the conflict.
The original trilogy was willing to linger in the quiet moments before the action, to draw audiences to the edge of their seats - the loading of ships for the Battle of Yavin, the characters staring over the pit in Jedi, Vader and Luke preparing to fight each other. This, sadly, is a tendency that is completely absent from The Force Awakens, and the movie, while exciting, suffers for it.
I think where the creators ultimately failed the most, though, was in their universe-building. Even in the prequels, the other Star Wars films gave us a sense that we were seeing a wide variety of things happening everywhere else outside of just what our characters are doing. I didn't get that sense in this movie. There was never a Boba Fett or Greedo character that hints at other events occurring outside of the storyline. There's no Lando Calrissian struggling with his own unrelated problems, no Jabba's Palace with its own isolated subculture that begins before and ends after the movie's events. These characters exist entirely in their own storyline and all of the secondary characters are there to move the plot along. That's so much of what Star Wars was and should be about - the entire franchise began with that "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away." It's supposed to transport the viewer to a cohesive universe ready to be fully explored. And that's what this movie, good as it was, failed to do.