Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens

Runtime: 2 hours 15 minutes
Budget: Estimated to be $200 million

After 10 years, one of the biggest movie franchises is back. Star Wars Episode VII features some of your favorite returning characters, but just a wee bit more ‘seasoned’—except for Chewbacca. He only used some Just for Wookies – Touch of Gray, but otherwise just as spry as ever.

Overall, I found it to be an outstanding film. I seem to always harp on pacing, but this film did a fine job in keeping its 2 hour, 15 minute runtime from becoming slow and plodding. While the scope of the film tended to focus very personally on a few characters, they never forgot to remind the audience of the scale of the rest of the galaxy.

The movie felt like a sequel yet avoided the pitfalls of the Star Wars prequels and the Hobbit trilogy. There were little to no unnecessary shoehorned references. The dialogue was definitely a cut above either of the aforementioned trilogies.

However, no film is perfect and this one certainly had its flaws. There were some moments that were straight up ridiculous. Since I won’t go into spoilers, I will just say those moments were forced, badly done, and corny. Surely, that is not what they meant by “use the Force.” There were definitely better ways to get the same point across, which might’ve made the movie 30 seconds longer, but that much better.

CommBro Breaker

J.J. Abrams sinks his teeth into another science fiction classic—perhaps seeking only to further confuse those that already had trouble discerning the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars. “Oh, Abrams made other Star Whatzits movie?” Abrams has gone full meta with Lost.

Something like that.

It’s also funny how he stole some minor characters from Lost and a few main characters, wholesale, from movies like Ex Machina and The Raid: Redemption.