Star Wars: The Force Awakens is as bad as the reviews say. Well, it's not bad so much as it is just not there. There's nothing to it. It is, as most people have pointed out, A New Hope mildly re-arranged, with a touch of Empire... here and there. The is no snap to the dialogue, no compelling technical achievement. The new female Luke is bland as hell. The new black Han is a bit of a doofus. The new Darth is dweeb. The old Leia gets nothing to do that let's her have the fire of the old Leia. The old Han is about the only saving grace. After all the years, Harrison Ford can still pull off the role and frankly, when he's not on the screen the film becomes background noise.
Aside: J.J. Abrams needs a win desperately. Let's face it, it's been a decade since Alias and Lost, and the trend line of his movie production career has been on a slow decline. His work on the Mission Impossible films has been solid, but Star Trek has been spotty and I have heard nothing encouraging about the upcoming one. He's in danger of falling into Michael Bay territory.
But back to The Force Awakens. The main problem is we don't feel any affinity for the new characters. They are pretty much cardboard. We know their motivations because we have been told, but we don't believe them because, well, we've only been told, not shown. I have some sympathy; we have been spoiled by years of quality TV where you can take nearly a full season to develop characters. You need incredibly talented writers who can genuinely define and motivate a character in about two scenes and five minutes for a movie to work. (Note 1: Say what you want about George Lucas (he probably deserves it) but halfway through A New Hope we were fully invested emotionally in Luke, Han and Leia. Note 2: Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man had stand-alones to create themselves and connect with the audience so the ensemble opera could begin at full speed.) Instead we get about three minutes of the flimsiest background on Finn, Rey, and Poe which is somehow supposed to justify their strong loyalty and friendship with each other. The net result is that these characters aren't real or appealing, they don't respond to motivation so much as get just puppeteered around to generate set action sequences. (Han and Leia come off better because we already know them.)
And it's worse than just the shallow characters. As with the other recent disappointing come-back, Jurassic World, this was not so much a sequel as a remake. Not just in plot, but in concept and production. From tropes to camera angles to effects, there is nothing we haven't seen thousand times in the previous decades. What would make anyone think that a 20th century-style blockbuster will make it today? Have they not seen The Avengers?
