[CorsiHockeyLeague]

I thought it was entertaining, and I liked a couple of the performances. It was certainly impressive in IMAX, that's for sure.

But I did think the pacing was terrible and they tried to stuff too much into it. It was pretty obviously a re-hash of ANH. Unapologetically so. Hell, even the initial scene is a villain intro involving stormtroopers shooting a bunch of people followed by a dramatic entrance of a guy in a helmet. Which, yknow, okay, but I didn't think they did a good job of re-telling that story. There was too much shoe-horned in. One thing I thought was particularly jarring was the follow up of the serendipity of, "oh ####, the Millenium Falcon just happens to be on this random planet we're on" with "oh ####, it's Han and Chewie, they're here now too". And if Rey just happens to be someone's daughter, as seems inevitable? Deus ex force I guess but damn, guys, it's a big universe, it contains more than one extended family, and all these coincidences start feeling super implausible.

They should have saved the UberDeathStar for EpII. We had no reason to give any f***s at all about the Republic planets being destroyed. Even if that weapon had fired again, we wouldn't care much about the Rebellion worlds either (I'll leave aside it not making any real sense to fire the first shot at anyone other than them because that only bugs me ever so slightly). So the whole final act of the movie didn't have much in the way of stakes... If the climax of the movie surrounded rescuing Rey from Kylo Ren; say from a Star Destroyer, that would have been preferable. Then it's all about the Han and Ben thing and the importance is getting the map to Luke while saving the protagonist. There's plenty of stakes there; we care about them getting to Luke, we care about Han, we care about Rey, and we care about Kylo Ren. It also distinguishes the film from ANH and it leaves you with somewhere to go in VIII. Ren can take out some of his anger at getting cut up and defeated by a novice out by using the big gun once we've had some time to figure out that we should dread its use.

EDIT: I'm not saying it was a bad movie and I'll definitely see it again at some point. It's a fun movie and I don't regret seeing it in the theatre, it was a better big screen experience than most movies and on the whole, I'm a fan. But I almost find myself in the same place as I was after the prequels, thinking about the relatively minor and fairly obvious (to me, anyway) tweaks that could have been made to turn it from entertaining to amazing.