"Star Wars: The Force Awakens" (2015)

I Liked This Movie...I did not love it, I'm not sure a Star Wars sequel is possible that would fully engage the enthusiasm I had for the whole mishaugas back in 1977 when I was ("gulp") fifteen years old. Of course the generally positive experience is strongly tempered by the fact that the whole stupid franchise has been so painfully compromised by the infamous George Lucas driven prequels that the bar has been set unnaturally low...almost anything J.J. Abrams turned in would have been an improvement. Which is funny...because in some ways he does a weird mirror image of his reimagination of Star Trek, there he bolding recast and reimagined the Federation Universe and then was content to connect the dots with mediocre scripts that largely ignored referencing the original cast (save a poignant benediction from the Late Leonard Nimoy). Here Abrams is much more reliant on the as many of the original players as can be patched together & thrown up on the screen in the hopes that the new cast can acquire the lustre of the originals via osmosis. It might work...but it depends on relationships and motivations getting explained down the line, and this is J.J. Abrams who is almost a great director save for his maddening tendency to fall back on safe secure tropes and plotlines...in other words he might not come thru at the end of the day. Which is a shame I like Daisy Ridley's Rey ( a scavenger turned Force Adept whose lineage is...sigh....obscure and ominous), she might evolve into the kick ass female the franchise desperately needs but I suspect at the end of the day Abrams won't take the chances to deliver the franchise over to that character. As for her lineage....I suspect she is Luke's abandoned daughter (just as Luke was abandoned in infancy) and she is being set up with her eee-vil cousin for a showdown somewhere in the numberless sequels to come. That is IF Abrams doesn't chicken out and he may well do that as his record gives me little cause for hope. Well...I've indulged enough spoilage for one blog post...let me just say it was great to see an visibly aging Harrison Ford suit up once more as the perpetually in over his head Han Solo. And let me just observe in a broad general way that there is nothing like a Good Talking Too From Dad to Get A Kid In From Off a Ledge or off a teensy little catwalk. :)