Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Rotten Tomatoes didn't exist back then and a lot of reviews later were more negative. Movie's not even out in the US. I don't think we'll know what the long term reception is until like a few months into next year.

I remember the reviews for TPM at least being pretty positive at first, then gradually turning over the course of the summer to match word of mouth. Ebert and Rolling Stone, to name two off the top of my head, had raves about it. Most of the negative initial reaction I recall was from fans, not critics.

You would think they'd advertise it.

Yes.

Not great, but an overall enjoyable experience. John Boyega, Daisy Ridley and the wonderful cinematography help make this a fun 135 minute B-movie. Hopefully the sequels will be more original though.

I dont know if thats an actual spoiler or not cause i didnt click but remember there is an actual spoiler thread if you wanna discuss plot points

Though it didn't suck - and John/Daisy are indeed stars in the making - I felt oddly cool about the whole thing. The music cues, the familiar faces that should have had 13-year-old me squeeing in joy... felt like a bad photocopy of something I loved a long time ago (in a blah blah blah far away).

Post-Lupin Ben Grimm I feel like Abrams left the series in a good place, though - if this was the movie that had to convince everyone that the spirit of the original trilogy has been surgically grafted into these movies, along the way it slammed together a new, interesting cast of characters, and left us with a number of good story hooks.

I loved this movie. It seems like Abrams has been trying to make something like this for a while now but ended up awkwardly shoehorning it into stories where it didn't work. But this felt like a real Star Wars movie in a way the Star Trek movies never felt like Star Trek movies. There is a lot of nostalgia-mining (all of which absolutely worked on me), but it also introduces a lot of new characters, and it feels like it's looking forward while still bringing back familiar faces.

I loved the feel of this film. It definitely feels like Star Wars! At one point, it made me realize exactly why Star Wars is so different than all these other comic book movies that are out. The feel of this is so, so different. My friend commented that it seemed weird to be waiting for Star Wars and seeing a bunch of trailers about comic book characters arguing about the morals and ethics of being a vigilante.

Anyway, I'm feeling pretty good about the new movie. It definitely doesn't commit one of the biggest sins of the prequels which was OVER-EXPLAINING EVERYTHING. I liked that this film was (mostly) content to just get on with the story.

My biggest quibble is that I feel like this movie has no real plot. It seems like it is 85% about introducing new characters. And the other 15% is setting up stuff for the *next* movie.

But, hey, at least I still really want to see the next movie! Which is a feeling I definitely didn't have after I saw Episode II.

I think it's also because they're war movies, that is, there's an 'us' and a 'them,' and in war movies you do a whole lot of killing 'them.' Comic book heroes may be saving the world without reporting to an authority, but Luke and company do have superiors - the admittedly fairly nebulously defined Rebel Alliance leadership.

The only character who seriously considers going it alone is Han Solo, and his ideas for operating independent of the Rebellion are purely economic and personal.

@matt1 But the Zod situation is one Star Wars does care about. I mean I've not seen Man of Steel, but assuming Superman had beaten Zod and he was defenseless; that's a situation where Star Wars is fairly consistent that killing people is bad - even if those people are the worst criminals.

And the Death Stars were WMDs. They're pretty much the definition of a legitimate target - it's not carpet bombing a civilian area (and I imagine the deaths of both Death Stars combined is probably still less than the deaths on Alderaan alone.)

No, that was the same thing we were thinking about. As recent comic book movies have delved into this "gritty realism" style, it makes Star Wars feel more and more different. This is a Galactic-wide WAR. No one is going to be fretting about the morals of being a vigilante. We WANT to see the Good Guys go out and kill some Bad Guys! There really is no functioning government whose laws our heroes are subverting. It's a Rebellion! The Government is Evil! The Rebellion/Resistance IS the functional authority. And their goal is to eliminate the enemy. (Which I guess makes what is happening in this movie understandable.) The simplicity of it is great: We're Good Guys. They're Bad Guys.

I'm sitting there watching aliens, robots, space ships shooting at each other.....it just feels great! It's Star Wars!! Wooo!

I'be been thinking about it more today (i.e. day-dreaming about it in church like a hellion) and I realized why my favorite part of the movie was , which a lot of people really disliked. That for me was the part when it felt the most like things were happening in a real world, where things had moving parts and computers could break and fuses could blow and there were actual wires and dirt and rust (glorious rust!). I'm ok with most of Star Wars occuring in a gleaming fantasy universe, but sometimes I want to remember that it's real and have something look more Nostromo than Naboo Starfighter.