Wow! Impressive! I went to see it early afternoon, weekday, second week. There was a line outside the IMAX auditorium.
Overall, quite a ride. It took me by surprise. I was expecting a first act of the trilogy like ANH, and it had nearly as much humor and energy while being much darker and more ominous than the “second act” ESB.
Casting and characterization were Excellent. BB-8 quickly won me over. I thought Gleeson was on mark. If you are doing Hitler at Nuremberg, there’s gotta be some eyes bugging and facial contortions
Loved the greater emphasis on practical sets, locations, and characters. terrific FX. Great score…
Well worth the ticket price.
I always have quibbles with even the best films, and I did feel that this movie had a few considerable flaws.
My quibbles would include the sense that the score was a little too much of a good thing. I'm old school OT. I'm accustomed to more space for the score to build itself up or quiet itself into ambient sounds and to showcase the major themes. I come from the "Great, do something else useful and you might get to live a few more seconds" school of dialogue in a crisis. CGI characters still don't work as well as costumes in SW, imo, and I don't believe they ever will.
What I consider flaws are the entire subplots that seem a bit extraneous, forced, and unSTARWARSy.
The Starkiller Base subplot seems to exist entirely by itself. In ANH, the DeathStar plans were the macguffin, the imp officers and Vader dropped all sorts of expo in conference, it was the most awesome reveal in cinema history, and facing it or being in it or over it was the ultimate objective for all of the characters in the movie. My guess is that they wanted to center the film on other themes and then decided that wasn't enough, so they created the base.
I have great sympathy for anyone who must rationalize and amortize...FOUR...BILLION...DOLLARS.... I'm sure that if it had grossed 1.5 billion they would have been declared terrible failures. If it made 1 billion it probably would have destroyed their careers. Abrams and his Bad Robot crew are THE WORLD MASTERS of office watercooler buzz. They live and die at the watercooler. Breaking Bad was still a big thing while they were outlining the script. There is a huge appetite among vast swaths of the pop entertainment viewers for material that plumbs the greatest depths of human depravity. They felt a need to poke at some hot buttons and intense themes to generate the "WOW!! OOH MAN!!! You'll never believe what they're doing with STAR WARS!!" sort of chatter. Likewise with the GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER: IINNNNNNNNNNN SSSSSSPPPPPPPPPAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCCE!!! subplot. I'm in AWE of the risks they were willing to take with the franchise, and it appears to have paid-off. They have served Master Rodentium VERY well. They got em into the theater and have them, and me, wondering how they are going to deal with the deep dark hole they have dug and cast themselves into. It came at the cost of my considerable potential for greater enjoyment. Not quite the escapist pop entertainment romp I was hoping for.
Anyway, It did provide some good laughs, amazing sequences, and a reunion with some childhood friends.
Impressive. Most Impressive.
