The Force Aweakens

Rating: 6/10 (22 December 2015)

I went into this movie with high hopes. J.J. Abrams did a great job of resurrecting Star Trek and there's no way it could be worse than the prequels. While it was definitely better than the prequels, the movie definitely did not live up to the hype, nor did it live up to even the level of the new Star Trek movies. It's not a BAD movie, it's just not a GOOD movie - overall, it's just average. There are four problems with this movie - a recycled plot, some poor dialogue, a few instances of poor acting, and a appallingly bad villain.
*Some spoilers ahead, though I'll try to keep them light*
First, the plot - this movie shouldn't be called Episode VII, it should be called Episode IV version 2.0. The plot is a complete remake of A New Hope. While an unoriginal plot on its own wouldn't result in a mediocre movie (Avatar was just Pocahontas in space, after all), in order to pull it off everything else had to be solid - and unfortunately, it wasn't.
There was a lot of poor dialogue in the movie as well. For instance, there were multiple "throwbacks" to the original trilogy in this film - which would be fine if they were done properly. Instead, they were written as very blunt "Hey, remember how much better those other movies were?!" shoutouts that fell flat. Every time that they tried to write a "funny" line for Finn, the writing was out of place for the tone of Star Wars and felt more like they were writing for Will Smith in Bad Boys 3. In fact, one of his lines when manning the guns in a TIE fighter in the beginning was almost word for word a Will Smith quote from Bad Boys 2 with "DID YOU SEE THAT?! DID YOU SEE THAT?!" that was horribly out of place. Almost all of Han's lines were completely out of character and did not fit the way he talked in the original trilogy at all and he also had some "humorous" moments that fell flat due to them being too blatantly in your face. Poe also had an attempt at an awkward humor moment early on, which also fell flat due to poor execution. This might not entirely fall under dialogue, but the entire "bar" scene was supposed to be reminiscent of the Mos Eisly scene, but instead felt like the horribly bad CGI of the Return of the Jedi Special Edition Jabba's palace scene.
Then there was the moments of bad acting. Again, Finn's "humorous" moments suffered from not only poor dialogue, but from him acting way too over the top and not fitting the tone of a Star Wars movie. John Boyega is a decent actor and I've seen him in other movies, so all I can assume is that he was "over excited" about being in a Star Wars movie and J.J. didn't tell him to calm down. The only other bad acting (I'm going to assume that Adam Driver's poor moments were intentional and a problem with J.J.'s directing) were Harrison and Carrie. Both of them were dull and emotionless, the complete opposite of themselves in the original trilogy. It just felt like they were old and no longer cared about making a movie and simply did it for the money without any passion.
Finally, there was the appalling villain. Kylo starts out very intimidating for about 1/3 of the movie...then he takes off his mask and stars talking about his past. You find out that the intimidating villain is really just a scrawny, whiny little brat who's throwing a temper tantrum over being told "no". It's actually even worse than Anakin in Episodes II and III. After that, you cannot take Kylo seriously as a villain and only see him as an insolent child. Then there's the bizarre fact that (major spoilers) two people who are new to using a lightsaber were able to go toe to toe with him and come out on top.
Any one of these flaws could have been present and the movie still could have been good - but with all of these flaws, it drags it down to just an average movie. When I left, I didn't think I'd just wasted two and a half hours - but I also don't have any desire to see it again. I think most people who are praising it are still caught up in the "OMG! NEW STAR WARS!" excitement (much like when the Phantom Menace first came out) and after a year or two, people will finally be able to calm down and evaluate it objectively.