Reviews

Three episodes in. It's really nice to see Ewan McGregor return as Obi-Wan, and every time I see him and the other characters of the prequels on the screen I get this pleasant, nostalgic feeling, bringing back the good memories. But that alone unfortunately doesn't make up for the bad script, and it feels like this feeling is the only thing driving the show. The conversations are often weak and cringe, the character choices are stupid and unrealistic, and the female antagonist Reva is just boring/annoying. Both Part II and Part III left me feeling a similar void that I felt during and after the new trilogy, and even though it has the looks of Star Wars, it just doesn't feel like Star Wars that much.

With that being said, I'll continue watching every episode with a new hope that it will get better...

Maybe it's because I had higher expectations for episode VII and almost none for this one, I feel like this movie managed to achieve what the other one couldn't.

I'm not saying that it was perfect, but it sure was good enough for me, and it will be good enough for many other die-hard SW fans. Leading female actor wasn't that good in my opinion, but otherwise this movie had everything a SW fan could wish for. Good old characters, good old places, and an overall good old SW feeling. Fits into the story line quite well, CGI was a bold move , could've gone bad, but it played out quite nicely.

Overall I think SW fans will love it, but anybody not deeply immersed in the saga would also enjoy it.

Honestly, I envy those people who could give 10 stars to this movie. I was raised on Star Wars, read all the books I could find, and was a big fan of the SW universe, and wanted to enjoy it as much as possible, but I just couldn't.

This movie didn't feel like Star Wars to me.. J.J. Abrams wanted to add something new to the existing saga, but ended up creating something too different.

You can read a lot about the positive things, since most people praise the movie, so I'm going to focus on the negative here:

* Instead of putting that much drama into it, it could've focused more on details which made the StarWars universe unique (for me at least). I remember I loved the details of the cantins, and cities. Here the cantin looked like something out of the middle ages, and although it was filled with creatures, I couldn't really enjoy it that much.

* Putting that basement with the wooden box and all that stuff into the movie with Luke's first lightsaber, it just felt like something more like out of Harry Potter, then StarWars.

* All those new creatures...I don't have problem with adding new things, but still, I felt like it's too much.

* The Force powers felt a bit exaggerated from time to time

* Some of the jokes were funny, I have to admit that, but some of them seemed a bit forced.

I'm not mentioning the plot holes, since the previous movies had plot holes as well (although this movie has some serious ones), all I wanted to have is the 'Star Wars feeling', which I didn't get.

Sometimes I felt like all this Episode VII hype was all about the money and marketing, and the actors (Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher), etc only agreed to take part of this to get a nice paycheck before retiring.

Watch and enjoy the movie though, and this review is just one drop in the sea :)

--Edit-- Forgot to mention one of my biggest 'technical' problem: the planets. There was a desert (which could've been Tatooine), and a planet with a lakes and forests, then they covered the forest with snow and pretended they are in an other planet. Even in the end of the movie, there is just a Scottish landscape with all the small islands and that's it, nothing science fiction. Nothing like Bespin, Kamino, Coruscant, or any planet which I felt was unique or creative. Even in the Phantom Menace, there was the gungan city, which was kind of creative. Here? Nothing creative. (I didn't find the death star creative, although it did look different.) That's also why I didn't have that Star Wars feeling.