“Crazy thing is… it’s true. The Force, the Jedi. All of it. It’s all true.”

Before I go deep into this review, I want to make it extremely clear that my thoughts on The Force Awakens do not necessarily reflect my opinion on the rest of the trilogy at all (at least at this very moment). Now that that’s out of the way, I also want to say that this is probably the most nostalgia I have for any movie, quite literally ever, and I will give a fairly lengthy explanation of my experience with it at its release, as well as throughout the years. I was introduced to the world of Star Wars with the original 1977 film by my grandpa when I was in second grade, and right away, ever since then, I’ve absolutely loved this franchise. It was quite good timing on my grandpa’s part, too, because just about a year away was the release of this film. The build-up and anticipation that I had before seeing The Force Awakens is easily the most excited I have ever been for any movie ever in my lifetime, and I doubt that it will ever be topped, because being excited for something as a kid is just so much different than being excited for something as an adult.

Once it was actually released, I was there opening weekend and loved it just as much as I possibly could have hoped I would. I saw it once or twice more afterwards (I can’t remember exactly), and couldn’t wait for the rest of the story to play out. The trilogy would follow me all the way up until seventh grade when it was all finished, and I loved both The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker as well at that time. Since then, my thoughts on the sequels have changed drastically. I’ve always held onto that childlike nostalgia for The Force Awakens, but my thoughts on the two movies that followed afterwards, let’s just say, haven’t aged all that well. I know that with this franchise, “head canon” is a big thing, and so I don’t consider any of the sequels canon (even though I love the first one) because of where it took things, specifically with its characters. This is my second time going back to the sequel trilogy since my thoughts have changed, and so I’m curious to see how I look at episodes eight and nine after I’m done. Who knows, maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised (I highly doubt it).

But this review is solely going to be focused on The Force Awakens, and anything that followed it won’t be taken into account with my rating or positives and negatives. Anyways, I had an absolute blast revisiting this movie again, and it’s probably the most fun I’ve had with it in a long time. The first thing that I want to make note of is just how good the production is. J.J. Abrams, despite how controversial he might be as a filmmaker and especially storyteller, absolutely knocked it out of the park here. He might not be great at keeping budget costs low (this movie cost over five hundred million dollars), but he sure does know how to make a blockbuster. All of the sets, locations, vehicles, and creatures are still one hundred percent convincing even ten years later.

The Force Awakens also has some of the best action in the entire Star Wars franchise. I’m not really talking about the lightsaber combat, but rather everything else. The ships (especially the Millennium Falcon) feel faster than ever, with some incredibly dynamic camera work to get your adrenaline pumping during each sequence. Another thing I really like is how the weapons feel a lot more powerful than in any of the other movies, which is primarily because of the sound design. With the exception of The Rise of Skywalker, this is perhaps the fastest-paced out of the entire saga, but it somehow manages to never feel too overbearing or narratively thin.

And for what it’s worth, the new major characters are pretty great, too (at least here). Rey, straight out of the gate, is an intriguing protagonist strictly for how mysterious she is. She’s extremely easy to root for, but has this hidden past that makes all of her decisions and actions throughout make you want to know more about her. Finn is just as great, and I love the idea of a stormtrooper who turns into a hero and possibly even a Jedi at some point. His dynamic with Han also makes him really fun to watch. Poe Dameron, the Resistance’s (essentially the new Rebellion) best pilot, doesn’t get that much screen time, but still manages to be a fairly decent character with a lot of potential.

The last thing I’ll say here is that this certainly does a practically perfect job at capturing that Star Wars magic we all know and love, particularly nostalgia from and for the original trilogy. This movie definitely feels more like old Star Wars, just with better visuals and all of that. Now, I’ll definitely get into how this can certainly be a bad thing for the story’s sake later on, but at least for now, I will say that The Force Awakens certainly captures all the feelings you would want from a movie like this.

For the rest of the review, I’m going to go a bit more into the mixed aspects, where the further I get into it, the more it starts to get into the outright criticisms territory. The first thing I’ll say here is that there are certainly a number of plot conveniences spread throughout the runtime. The reason I wouldn’t say these are negatives, though, is because most of them kind of had to happen to get to the more nostalgic parts. The two big examples of this include how we first meet Han and Chewbacca here, as well as just the nature of Anakin/Luke’s blue lightsaber being brought back into the picture. The only big plot convenience that I would say hurts the movie and certainly had me raising an eyebrow this time around is at the end of the movie, and it has to do with how the characters go about trying to finally complete this map to find Luke. It was one of those moments where I was like, “Why couldn’t that have just happened earlier?”

Now, talking about the returning characters, there are both good and bad, really just with Han and Leia. The good is that it is certainly great to see them back on screen again for the first time since 1983, and there are a lot of pretty emotional moments between them, most of them having to do with the nature of why Luke left and isn’t a part (physically) of this movie in the first place. One aspect that I really love about Han is his outlook on life now, and especially the force. Unfortunately, though, because of the circumstances of the story, we start the movie off with Han and Leia quite literally both going back to their old ways, mainly the way we saw both of them at the beginning of Episode IV. It’s just kind of frustrating to watch when all the fans really wanted to see was them simply back on screen together, which I understand does eventually, of course, happen, but the way it starts is annoying because of this reason: the last time we saw them, they were together and happy. This aspect of character progression that we don’t see actually play out, and rather it just happens offscreen, becomes a much bigger problem further into the sequel trilogy.

The final thing that I’ll say here, again, starting to lean into more negative territory, is the biggest criticism that most people throw out at this movie: while it is a very good movie, it is also extremely derivative of Episode IV. There are still a number of differences, and certainly enough, to keep things interesting - like our main group of characters (besides the fact that Rey also happens to come from a desert planet like Luke), but this heavily borrows a lot of plot points. Han Solo essentially serves as the Obi-Wan/Ben Kenobi mentor figure, Starkiller Base is literally just the Death Star (yet again), Kylo Ren and his master feel a little too similar to Vader and Palpatine, BB-8 is literally just R2-D2, and obviously, we’ve literally got the Rebellion against the Empire with the Resistance and the First Order after that already came to a very nice and satisfying conclusion in Return of the Jedi. Some people will love that it is so heavily a nostalgia fest, but others (like me), kind of have a hard time with it because of the lore implications and story.

I’ve already gone into a lot of mixed stuff, which already had some negatives included, as well as some positives, but the last thing I want to go into is strictly just a negative. As I said earlier, I really like Rey as a character in this particular movie, but her character development was extremely rushed here, to the point where it is almost a bit baffling. I’m sure everyone and their mother knows and has seen how the sequels pan out, but I really dislike spoilers, so just for the sake of the maybe once percent (probably less) of people reading this, I won’t dive into specifics. Anyways, for the first two acts, Rey’s character development is completely fine. Thankfully, even though her roots are very similar to Luke’s, the way she learns and develops is quite a bit different, because though she has a very similar mentor like Kenobi in the form of Han, she mainly figures out stuff all on her own. However, at almost exactly the hour-and-a-half mark, something happens that is very clearly meant to serve as fan service, but feels unbelievably sudden and therefore unearned. Unfortunately, the rest of the story pertaining to Rey is a lot like this, with writing decisions for both the story and her as a character being pretty head-scratching.

To cap off this review, even though The Force Awakens heavily borrows from what came before and has a lot of creatively eyebrow-raising moments, it’s still undeniably a blast. While I don’t consider it and the rest of the sequel trilogy canon to the lore (which I know sounds incredibly pretentious, but this is a pretty much lifelong Star Wars fan talking), it’s still undeniably a blast and one of my favorite movies to revisit. I can remove all of the weird (sometimes frankly bad) creative decisions and enjoy it nonetheless.