Matthew's Journal

The TL;DR spoiler-free version: good fun, not great, lacking new ideas.

I did enjoy this, much more than any of the prequels. I saw the original trilogy at the sort of age where I can no longer remember watching them, but they obviously made a big impression (and I've really enjoyed re-watching them from time to time). It's pacy, has no really annoying bits, a decent female lead, and the BB8 droid is definitely on the cute side of the cute/annoying line for me.

It felt to me as though it was rather a box-ticking exercise on what you have to have in a Star Wars film, though: protagonist with untapped Jedi powers; alien bar with goofy music; Dark Side using dodgy video-conferencing; planet-destroying weapon which is itself a planet, which is destroyed after a big space battle by someone flying an X-wing inside it to shoot it some more just before destroying the recently-discovered Rebel base; father-son face-off over a big drop; slightly annoying bleepy droid that contains the secret everyone's looking for; female protagonist gets captured, interrogated to no avail, then helped to escape by male lead and Han Solo; old Jedi is sought out by new Jedi, hiding on inaccesible planet.

I dunno, it just seemed to be lacking any new ideas at all. Presumably in the next film, Luke will be as annoying to Rey as Yoda was to him, causing her to leave before her training is complete, and so on.

Also, I note that none of the events in this film disprove the theory that Chewie and R2-D2 are the key agents: R2-D2 knows he has to keep silent over knowing the rest of the map to find luke until the new-Jedi appears who Luke must teach, etc. etc.

All of which said, I still want one of these :-)