The Soul of Star Wars For Me

Rating: 2/10 (20 December 2017)

I was 9 when I saw the first SW and for me as for many it was incandescent and larger than life.
I think the reason for this is it brought big human questions and feelings on to the screen in a way that was truly new and exciting and easy to connect with. But I remember all the adults loving it and wowing too.
The main reason I dislike the new offerings, much more so than the prequels, is that they don't connect with what I feel the heart of SW is.
For me, the heart of SW is the force, described in episode 4 as something that connects all life together (this is not attempting to be a quote, more the sense of it). The feeling that we are all connected, all life, right out into the stars and galaxies far far away. And that this force or energy on the light side promotes life, nature, light, harmony, connectivity. And that this energy can be abused for personal gain and power over others, destroying love and connection, killing off light, covering in masks and cloaks, destroying nature and replacing it with faceless machines bent to ones will.
I won't say that as a 9 year old I would have expressed this the same way. But I do feel I got a strong sense of this. I think these are timeless questions about love and hate, selfishness and kindness, life and death, natural and artificial
/ unnatural / against nature, which I think we all have a sense of, even as children.
Apart from it seems the robots / data analysts (?) at Disney! What happened Disney? What went wrong?! There were once people who worked there who I'm sure had a heart and soul. You were famous for it I believe. I think Lucas has / had a strong sense of this.
The new films have absolutely none of this magic. Lights and spaceships and light sabres and new gadgets are just that, gadgets, things, if they are not a showing or example of the soul of the movie. And as we know, we tire of gadgets quickly. There are so many every day now. Gags, fly by night social commentary and ironic humour have no juice. They're like vultures or sharks feeding off the life of a once magnificent being.
I hope they manage to bring in people who really connect with this. It would be just wonderful. I believe so many people. children and adults, would love this, yearn for this and would get so much from it.