This is what happens when you have unreasonable deadlines

Rating: 3/10 (25 December 2015)

When I first heard that Disney would be buying Star Wars, and releasing the first in a new trilogy of movies in 2 1/2 years, I was a bit concerned. "How can they get it done so quickly?" I thought. George Lucas had spent three years on each prequel movie, and he already had the stories written! He never wrote scripts for a 7,8,9, just had some rough ideas. Then I learned that Michael Arndt, one of the writers for Toy Story 3(a great movie), was hired to write the script, and my fears were eased a bit. Besides, I was beyond excited about the fact that I was going to get three more sequels to my favourite series of movies ever!
The best part? All the original cast are still alive! They can do sequels and it will have that authenticity we Star Wars fans crave. What could possibly go wrong? Well here we are, and I finally have the answer to those questions I asked back at the end of 2012. I'm not going to comment on the obvious plot similarities between this movie and "A New Hope". Not technically what I was expecting, (I thought they would start the story earlier, during the academy days, and space the movies out more) but then too, I figured there was a reason they weren't divulging details about the plot (rare for a movie these days to not reveal anything) in any of the trailers. My biggest problem with the movie is the sloppy scene-scene progression at times, and the overall illogical, constrained nature that is the story we've been given.
The characters seem like they can travel vast distances in very short periods of time (see Kylo, when the weapon is fired, he's watching it from the ship, and less than 30 seconds later, he's landing on the planet Han, Finn, and Rey are on, even though they all just watched the same planets being blown up). At the end, Han, Chewie, Finn and Rey are infiltrating the planet-sized weapon, and in a very short period of time go from crash landing in a random spot, to some place where they have a birds eye view of the station. Then in no time at all, they are in a position to kidnap Cpt Phasma(who for some reason has the ability of walking into an unguarded room and shutting down the shield). Next thing you know, Han and Finn are exactly where Rey and Kylo are.
I realize this is Star Wars and a lot of the time you have to suspend your disbelief. But this is a still a space movie, which is supposed to have vast distances, and the weapon in question is supposed to be "planet sized". The scene where the resistance was all standing around looking at the starkiller plans was painful to watch. "These things always have a weakness!" I believe was Han's line. UGH! It's like if something doesn't really make sense, just throw in a few lines of spoon fed dialogue to explain your way out of it. If that's not possible, throw in some explosions, random things breaking, or snappy one liners and you're good to go.
All this and more means I rate this movie 6/10 but only because I love Star Wars so much. I truly believe that this sloppy, rushed mess under any other brand name would be panned universally by critics.