Didn’t Lucas originally have drafts for VII-IX that he gave to Disney? What did they mistake the draft for Episode IV as the next movie to make or something?
“The Star Wars movie we got is one we’ve already seen more times than we can count” - Forbes review.
It starts in space then cuts away to a desolate place that looks much like Tatooine (except without the podracing, or the Dewbacks for the Stormtroopers to ride). There’s some kind of droid that functions as a mechanic for spaceships, carrying an important messages that must be delivered to the Rebellion, that just happens to find their way to a local inhabitant who as it happens is unknowingly gifted in the force, and also a pretty amazing pilot. At first they don’t want to get involved, but then they do anyway. Then the storm troopers come and they escape from them by flying to safety in the Millennium Falcon, which then gets caught in a tractor-beam and swallowed whole by a larger ship. They then leave from this location with Han and Chewy in the Millennium Falcon to make their way to the Rebel base.
Oh yes and don’t forget there’s a sub-plot where the girl has to be saved from the Death Star, and the scary man in the black mask kills an old man by striking him down with his red coloured lightsabre. And the Death Star fires and destroys large celestial objects just to prove that it works.
Then the rebels plan an attack on the Death Star, which involves flying along a long trench-like channel in their X-Wings and hitting a target so that the whole massive space station gets destroyed. Leia of course stays in the base and plays a significant role in coordinating the attack.
And then the Death Star is destroyed, and that’s pretty much the end of the movie.
Okay, what movie was I just describing? Star Wars Ep. IV or Star Wars Ep. VII? All this movie is is a shameless direct remake, nearly scene-for-scene, of the original movie. There are some additions from the other two films in the OT like Vader talking to the Emperor’s hologram in a large room, Luke using the force to get his lightsabre out of the snow and into his hand, destroying the shield generator on Endor, so that the rebels can attack and destroy Death Star II, and Luke going off on his own to find a mysterious Jedi master who’s living alone like a hermit on a deserted swamp planet.
In fact the movie it seems pays constant tribute to just about every aspect of the OT, even referencing to the “garbage chute” on the Death Star, those Mynocks in Empire, many of the characters/aliens seen in the OT, the death-star laser cannons, etc. But JJ Abrams & Co seem to have gone out of their way to ignore anything from the PT, spaceship and droid designs and all. So much so that they don’t show us the Republic itself, they just show the Starkiller Base (aka Death Star III) fire at them and destroy 4 or 5 Republic planets all at once, of course with no explanation whatsoever as to why the Republic wouldn’t be able to defend themselves (or for that matter why they wouldn’t be able to retaliate against the First Order).
From a review on Forbes titled “The Empire Strikes Out”:
“The film follows the structure of A New Hope to such a significant degree that I spent much of the first act wondering if I was watching the Star Wars equivalent of Gus Van Sant’s Psycho. It also omits or neglects vital connective tissue and merely hints at a far more interesting story than the one we get. Considering what a precedent-setting franchise the original Star Wars was, it is not a little disheartening that this new installment does not blaze its own path, but rather rehashes its former glories for our approval.”
(snip)
“Say what you will about the prequels and their visual callbacks (and wow is series low-point Attack of the Clones a slog before its final show-stopping reels), but George Lucas didn’t just retell the same story a second time out. He told new stories and offered truly eye-popping action sequences (the “Duel of the Fates” in Phantom Menace, the entire last act of Attack of the Clones, and the whole first reel of Revenge of the Sith) that raised the bar for popcorn blockbusters in their day even as the likes of Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man encroached on Lucas’s territory.”
It’s a good movie, but it’s just a remake of Episode IV, which makes its story unnecessary, and as the Forbes review says, the movie just doesn’t present any new ideas to the Star Wars universe, it just relies on the previously established stuff. Lucas at least brought new things every time - in Empire we got Yoda, cloud-city, and carbon-freeze, in Jedi we got Jabba the Hutt and the Sarlacc Pit, in Phantom Menace we were introduced to Naboo as the home planet of Anakin’s love interest, as well as Coruscant and along with it the Galactic Senate and the Jedi Council, then in Clones we got Kamino - an ocean planet where the Star Wars version of arms dealers create ready-made armies of clones, and of course Geonosis and the Separatists. One of the interesting things we learn in Clones is that the Empire did not design the Death Star, they just stole the plans and built it! And finally Sith shows us the Star Wars version of an Opera, shows us Chewy’s homeworld, and how a State-funeral looks in the Star Wars universe when a much loved public servant dies.