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Star Wars VII Review

What I liked: The Force Awakens more than anything else it did or failed to do felt right. There were new characters and new aliens and new planets. There were familiar faces, places, and plot devices, some we hoped to see some could have been avoided. But even without everything familiar the film would still have felt like star wars. There were models, there were muppety things, there were quirky smugglers playing the xylophone, the spaceships broke, as Han said we were back home. I liked the way they worked in elements from the old movies, the crashed star destroyer and cameos by old characters. I liked the new characters; of the three main ones, I think Finn had the most developed character and backstory but look forward to seeing how the others will grow to fit their roles. They started off with a good dynamic which hopefully will continue to build. Most of the comic lines hit home the few that didn’t with me did with other people in the audience. I had fun. I laughed, I cheered, I am looking forward to the next one.
What I didn’t: The tentacle alien. Fail. Of all the aliens this one was the most CGy it was kind of out of place. It was a valiant attempt at a new kind of alien but nope. Why is it always a death star. after episode VI they should have figured out that just making a bigger better one doesn’t solve your problems. While on the topic of the death star, why do you have to wait for it to be fully charged? couldn’t you use it half charged? Do they even know what an oscillator is? I saw no oscillating happening. And why was there a single bridge in the middle? Not one for every 3-5 floors of the massive hundreds of stories monstrosity, no just one bridge. And every other walkway in that whole installation has handrails why not the isolated bridge? Clearly EHSO did not approve the building design. I am also confused how people got around so quickly in a military base the size of a planet. It should go without saying but I dislike Hitler. The empire in the old movies clearly channeled fascist rallies but the speech in the new movie looked disturbingly similar to the famous first televised Nuremberg rally from speech to crowd. Whoever cast Severus Snape as the bad guy should reconsider their career path. Also the bad guy should reconsider his career path, clearly he would do much better as a wizard double agent than a pouty emo sith. Better than Duku and Grevious but worse than Maul and leagues away from Vader. Finally, Rey really should have had some force development. She went from 0 to most powerful jedi in the universe in about 5 minutes screen time. This is not only unbelievable but also severely stunts her character’s development for the next two movies.
Who should watch this? Star wars fans, so everyone and going by the numbers everyone in the world has at least once.
Would I watch it again? Yep.
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