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Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens is the seventh film in the Star Wars trilogy. Directed by J J Abrams from a script written by Lawrence Kasdan, J J Abrams and Michael Arndt, it premiered in Los Angeles on the 14th of December 2015, with a US-wide release four days later.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The principle problem with the film is a lack of any real transition between Return of the Jedi and it: seemingly as an overreaction to people complaining that the prequels were too full of boring space politics, there is no explanation of the political situation or why anything in the film is the way it now is. The information on what actually happened between the two films is instead shunted off into external source materials.
 * 2) *Perhaps the most blatant example of this is that the Millennium Falcon, the ship that destroyed the second Death Star, is for no apparent reason sitting out in the open on some desert planet in the middle of nowhere, rather than being in a museum.
 * 3) *Second place probably goes to how in the world the First Order could afford to build a weaponized planet in complete secrecy, something you will have to go EU-diving to get any explanation of.
 * 4) *There is also the problem of the time skip not being nearly large enough: we are supposed to believe that everything that happened in the original trilogy is treated as myth, despite that it has only been 30 years since the destruction of the second Death Star. This makes about as much sense as creating a modern story where the existence of the Soviet Union is treated as being comparable to the existence of Atlantis.
 * 5) The film lacks a sense of scale: a huge number of events are the result of characters simply bumping into one another as if the film takes place in a small town rather than a galaxy. Even the action sequences fall prey to this, with a Star Destroyer only being able to deploy three TIE fighters to go after Rey, the entire Republic fleet apparently being parked in orbit of five planets in one system, and just a dozen Resistance X-Wings being all it takes to destroy the ridiculously gigantic Starkiller Base.
 * 6) *A particular stand-out example is when Rey simply bumps into Han and co while escaping from the planet-sized Starkiller Base, despite there being no reason whatsoever for their paths to intersect.
 * 7) *Another example is people in totally different star systems being able to see Starkiller Base firing in real-time, which required the writer of the novelization to create heroic amounts of nonsense about "sub-hyperspace" and "quintessence" to hide that it's because the director didn't realise that space is kind of big.
 * 8) The film "borrows" liberally from A New Hope, to the point that it's been criticized as being more like a soft reboot or even a remake than a sequel.
 * 9) On that subject, the setting's crippling desire to re-establish the status quo basically makes everything the characters of the Original Trilogy struggled for moot, Han's back to his old ways having broken up with Leia and rewound all his development as a character, and everything Luke tried to do after Return of the Jedi blew up in his face and now he's in hiding having achieved nothing at all. The most galling part is that the Galactic Republic, the free state that these characters fought so hard to establish, seems to be swept aside in a single stroke and nobody even cares particularly. Nothing they did mattered in the slightest.
 * 10) Rey is a dull, aimless and overpowered protagonist who pulls abilities out of nowhere as the plot requires, lacks a coherent goal, and spends most of the film being shilled for by the rest of the cast, who all pause to tell her how amazing she is. Some claim she is not the very definition of a Mary-Sue character, even though:
 * 11) *Despite growing up as a loner in the middle of nowhere, she speaks Droid and Wookie, two languages implied to be rare.
 * 12) *Despite being abandoned as a child, she gained survival skills sufficient to live in a harsh desert, technical skills sufficient to identify valuable components and remove them safely, and is effectively running her own business that gives her enough resources to live on.
 * 13) *She has none of the trust issues, underdeveloped language skills or social awkwardness that someone with that kind of background would have.
 * 14) *She turns down a huge reward from a person she trusts for a piece of equipment she just found that is of no use to her, and it's implied she's just doing this because giving the piece of equipment away would be mean.
 * 15) *She can defeat a group of people physically larger than her with only a staff, and somehow thinks hand-to-hand combat is a good idea on a planet where people should be literally tripping over military-grade guns just by walking through the desert in a straight line.
 * 16) *Finn immediately decides to dedicate himself to protecting her for no reason at all.
 * 17) *She can outfly three fighters with professional pilots in an old cargo hauler she's never flown before and kill one of them with a jammed gun. She is so confident of her abilities in this sequence that she yells at Finn like he's cramping her style.
 * 18) *By letting out vicious unpredictable monsters, she kills only the bad people and manages to manipulate a system that was never designed for what she's using it for to save the one person on her side that this affected. One truly classic Mary-Sue sign is when even their mistakes have completely positive outcomes.
 * 19) *She knows the internals of the Falcon better than Han, a man who owned it for decades, does.
 * 20) *Han, who's always been stand-offish and sarcastic, instantly takes a shine to her.
 * 21) *Firing a pistol one-handed, she gets a hit before a professional soldier with a rifle, minutes after a scene that implies she's never even held a blaster before.
 * 22) *Kylo Ren nonsensically decides he doesn't need BB-8, the droid he has been hunting for up until that point, because Rey's memory of the map will be just as good as the original. She is more important than an actual MacGuffin.
 * 23) *She exhibits Force powers with no training to the point she can overpower one of the strongest Dark Side Force users ever seen in the films, and learns the Mind Trick simply through it being used on her a few minutes before.
 * 24) *She defeats one of the most powerful Dark Side Force users the series has seen the first time she ever picks up a lightsaber. He's wounded, you say? Pain makes Dark Side users more powerful, and he seems to have no issues flexing his abdomen all over the place while fighting her. The ground literally has to split apart to stop her from killing Kylo there and then.
 * 25) *Leia consoles her over the loss of Han, a man she knew for a couple of hours, over Chewbacca, who had been friends with Han for decades. She places this over her own need to be consoled over the death of the man who was the father of her child. She also does this in spite of having never even met Rey prior to this point.
 * 26) *Leia then decides that it's far more important to send Rey, some random girl from the back end of nowhere, to see Luke, rather than that she go and get back in touch with her own brother or the Resistance do whatever the hell it was trying to do with the map to Luke.
 * 27) Daisy Ridley's acting was also criticised, particularly her extremely noticeable habit of not closing her mouth.
 * 28) The film has a disagreeable feeling like it's going through the stuff of classic Star Wars characters to give it to the new, "better" characters, such as Rey ending up with Luke's old lightsaber (it is never explained how this was recovered after being dropped into the atmosphere of a gas giant) and Han's ship, as well as Chewie and R2-D2 as her sidekicks.
 * 29) BB-8 is an extremely unoriginal design, being basically just a tiny R2-D2 head stuck on a football.
 * 30) The Millennium Falcon hyperspace jumping inside Starkiller Base's shields created such an obvious contradiction (in that if this were possible, there was no need for two-thirds of Return of the Jedi to actually happen) that external material had to be written to explain that Starkiller Base had a one-off special shield which would be uniquely vulnerable to this.
 * 31) The movie fuelled questioning as to whether J J Abrams knows any way of raising the stakes in a sci-fi movie short of blowing up one or more planets. The fact that nobody seems to really care about the Hosnian system getting destroyed (it is mentioned so little that most people thought it was Coruscant from the Prequels) does not exactly help.
 * 32) Kylo Ren is very inconsistently portrayed, on the one hand being a Dark Side user so powerful and disciplined that he can freeze a blaster bolt in mid air for several minutes without any apparent effort and strong enough that he could defeat Luke Skywalker and his apprentices in combat, while on the other hand he is shown as unstable, undisciplined and able to be Force-overpowered by someone who didn't even know the Jedi were real earlier that day. The character was also derided as "Emo Vader," and many felt the removal of his mask was premature and underwhelming.
 * 33) Finn is also inconsistent: he is so profoundly moved by a fellow Stormtrooper dying that he refuses an order to kill, and is next seen gunning down dozens of his fellow Stormtroopers in a docking bay. The reveal that he was a space janitor also makes no sense given that he was first seen as part of an assault team. His latching on to Rey also seems very forced, particularly given she spends most of her time treating him like dirt.
 * 34) *Those only familiar with the movies also found the character a little puzzling, as it has never been specifically stated on film that Imperial Stormtroopers stopped being clones of Temuera Morrison at some point between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope.
 * 35) Captain Phazma is a complete waste of a character: for all the interviews about how cool this female Stormtrooper commander was going to be, she's only in a couple of scenes, during which she respectively does nothing, does nothing again, gets beaten up by a Wookiee, turns off the shields to Starkiller Base despite that she has no reason to think Han, Finn and Chewie are going to let her go if she helps them, and then is implied to have been unceremoniously thrown in a trash compactor.

Good Qualities

 * 1) The action sequences were well-directed and effective, with some very memorable scenes.
 * 2) In particular, much as it involved Rey pulling new abilities out of nowhere, the chase through the wreckage of a downed Super Star Destroyer is both a breathtaking visual and an inventive use of the series' classic imagery.
 * 3) Much as it also involved Rey pulling new abilities out of nowhere, the ending duel between Rey and Kylo Ren was far more visceral than the floaty lightsaber combat of the prequels, feeling like two people trying to kill each other rather than having a dance-off.
 * 4) Criticisms about the Prequels' overuse of CGI were listened to, and the film has far more scenes using physical sets and practical effects. It also has much clearer visuals, without the excessively cluttered scenes (that are "so dense") of the Prequels.
 * 5) The imagery of the "boneyards" of Jakku with wrecked Imperial and Rebel equipment looming over barren deserts is very striking.
 * 6) Excellent performances from Adam Driver (who does a great job in spite of issues with his character) and Andy Serkis. Serkis' Snoke in particular is a menacing and memorable villain.
 * 7) A typically great score from John Williams, though many felt the opening theme sounded off without the 20th Century Fox music in front of it.
 * 8) The scene where Chewie is trying to put the moves on a female Resistance doctor and it seems to be working is legitimately charming.

Reception
The Force Awakens was generally well-received at the time of release and was an enormous box-office success, breaking multiple records including highest-grossing opening weekend and fastest to reach $1 billion. It ultimately became the third-highest grossing film of all time unadjusted for inflation (after Avatar and Titanic) and the tenth-highest when adjusted for inflation.

Critical reviews were mostly positive, though some criticized the film for its highly derivative plot. George Lucas in particular criticized the film on this basis, stating that Disney had not replicated his efforts to "make it new." Critics of Rey as a character were met with a barrage of ridiculous articles about how they were being sexist, and / or that Luke Skywalker (who spends most of A New Hope getting rescued by other characters or failing at things) was somehow just as bad. Several plot decisions were also divisive: in particular, the revelation that Han Solo broke up with Leia and just went back to "being Han Solo" with Chewie was felt by many to undo all of their development as characters in the original trilogy. The death of Han Solo also divided fans as to whether it was a good send-off for the character or a cheap way to write Harrison Ford out of the script, with those in the latter camp particularly critical of Han dying before he ever had a chance to interact with Luke on screen.

It has been more heavily criticized recently, and it is generally agreed that The Last Jedi makes the film a lot harder to watch, as it "reveals" that much of the film's content is useless setups for plot points that Rian Johnson decided he didn't want to pick up on.

Trivia

 * Disney purchased the rights to Star Wars from George Lucas for $4.05 billion in 2012 ($4.45 billion adjusted for inflation). This initial expense should be taken into consideration when evaluating any claim that the Disney films have actually turned a net profit, as they have to repay this and their production and marketing budgets.
 * J J Abrams' move to Star Wars was due to the comical mishandling of the Star Trek license by CBS and Viacom. Put as simply as possible: Viacom (which includes Paramount) owns the rights to the Star Trek films, and to make further films, but CBS owns the rights to the Star Trek IP, including all the original characters, logos, designs, etc. The new Star Trek films were based on a copyright licensed to Viacom / Paramount by CBS, which was only for movies and required the film to be visually distinct from the original shows. Abrams wanted to make a multimedia franchise, CBS told him no, and so he left to try to do it with an IP that's only owned by one company instead while Paramount commenced their heroic attempt to go bankrupt.
 * Harrison Ford is known to have demanded Han Solo die as a condition of his contract: it is something he has wanted for a good 30 years, having never liked that Lucas refused to kill the character off in Return of the Jedi because of his merchandising potential.
 * Mark Hamill revealed that he signed on to the film when George Lucas was going to direct it, and was rather surprised to find himself suddenly working for Disney. Lucas himself has stated that he offered to give Disney his notes for a sequel film, but they essentially just told him to go away.
 * Poe Dameron's complete absense from a large section in the middle of the film is because he was hastily written back into the script at the last minute: he was supposed to have died in the crash on Jakku. This was apparently due to Oscar Isaac feeling he was playing too many characters who looked important but got killed off early in the film, and no doubt fearing he may turn into Sean Bean (and immediately die) at any moment.
 * J J Abrams confirmed that Leia hugging Rey instead of Chewie was a mistake: the script was rewritten in a way that skipped over a scene where Chewie would have taken Finn to a doctor, leaving Rey and Leia to meet one another and strike up a conversation. This is as opposed to the scene in the final movie where Chewie just wanders by in the background and everyone ignores him.
 * Contrary to claims in the media, Daisy Ridley did not have to close her Instagram due to trolling by evil woman-hating Star Wars fans: rather, she closed it after a backlash from her sharing of posts by US gun control advocates.

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