[Locke]

I just saw this last night and wanted to get my thoughts down while they're still vivid, so I apologize if I rehash a bunch of things that have already been said.

Okay, so it was a good movie, but I cant help feeling somewhat disappointed.

Calling it a 'Empire Strikes Back Rehash' is a bit simplistic but not entirely incorrect either.

I initially gave The Force Awakens a lot of slack because while it seemed like a nearly shot for shot remake of A New Hope, it was the first movie of the new Universe, it was laying groundwork for the whole new paradigm in the Galaxy and then they could take that groundwork and build off of it.

So to say that I was disappointed with an Empire re-hash that included the Galaxy's slowest, dumbest and stupidest slow-motion chase scene is a bit of an understatement.

Some of the cutesy stuff I get is there for the kids, but its also irksome at times.

Were the pigeons necessary? Why does Chewy allow them into his home?

In the original series Droids were characterized almost as friends and one can say that R2D2 and C3P0 were main characters, but now they're basically pets. BB8 is basically Poe's Dog.

The entire Casino scene was obviously their version of the 'Cantina' scene but you very literally could have eliminated it, Finn and Rose entirely and with the admitted loss of Benecio Del Toro who I hope gets something of an expanded role in the future, nobody would have missed anything.

They could have found another way to hammer home the point that the Force is everywhere. Which isnt a message that I minded at all.

Snoke was a nobody but incredibly powerful.
Rey is a nobody but incredibly powerful.
That kid sweeping up Space-Elk feces is a nobody but he has potential.

'Hope is everywhere!' Great. We got it.

I liked the overall message though, the Jedi were wrong. Burn it all down and start again, you could even imagine that at one point Luke and Kylo were more or less at the same page at the end there but they just couldnt get over their own crap.