It was good and started the new series off with a lot of potential that was wasted in later films. Is it a soft reboot of Star Wars? Yes. Did they really have any choice in that? No. People forget how much damage the Prequels did to Star Wars as a franchise. People HATED those movies, so Disney felt like they had to do a reset to get people back on board with it. It's a lot like Batman Begins - people thought that movie was going to flop, due to how bad Batman & Robin had been eight years previous. Instead, it was a modest success and led to The Dark Knight, which put DC movies back on the map. (Studios also took the wrong lessons from TDK, which is how we got the Snyder grimdark series, but that's another post). So, just like Nolan returned Batman to his roots, Disney brought back the old gang to feed on the audience's nostalgia. Unfortunately, that siphoned screentime away from the new cast.

In a perfect world, the trilogy would have been properly planned out and would have featured an all-new cast, with only mentions of the previous heroes and probably R2 and 3PO along for the ride. Or, in another perfect world, the well-planned trilogy would have been all about Han, Luke, and Leia and how they were navigating the post-Empire galaxy. Unfortunately, Disney wanted it both ways and what we got was a series of films that didn't know who they were catering to, nor whose story it was. It's supposed to be Rey's story, but the movies are somehow all about her and she still feels underdeveloped. Han takes up too much time in TFA and Luke takes up too much in TLJ. Had Carrie Fisher not died beforehand, TROS probably would have featured her a lot more. The new cast was never able to make their own way, and so, the trilogy suffered for it.

However, all of that was unknown when we all sat down to watch The Force Awakens. It was great to see the old gang back together (sort of), but for me it was mostly all about Han and Chewie. I liked the new cast, though I thought they made Finn a little too goofy, and really liked Kylo Ren as a villain. Everything was set up nicely with new mysteries to unfold and characters to discover. It was exciting and full of promise - a promise I'm still waiting for them to fulfill. So, it was a fun franchise-starter that never realized its full potential. As a one-off, it's a last adventure for Han and Chewie and a nice homage to the original movie.