I’d say that the guy’s bloody severed arm in Mos Eisley is more gory than anything in TFA.
I checked out the christian family movie review website: pluggedin.ca and checked both of the movies you listed and here are the more reasonable arguments:
ROTS:
Several flesh-and-blood characters lose limbs to those with better lightsaber skills. In its description of these violent elements, USA Today’s movie preview read a lot like the ones we write here at Plugged In Online: “Children are slain. The heroic Jedi Knights are all but slaughtered. Characters lose arms, legs and heads in lightsaber duels. Anakin is dismembered and then catches fire, screaming in agony while the flesh peels off his body.”
TFA:
Lots of people die, Star Wars-style, from laser blasts. (Which means there’s little to no blood.) Stormtroopers go flying from explosions. To put it another way, the body count here is outrageously high while the gore level registers at near “antiseptic.” When Kylo Ren arrives on Jakku, Finn sees one of his fellow Stormtroopers die, and the expiring soldier leaves bloody finger streaks across Finn’s helmet. A tentacled creature gets slammed in a door, which severs various appendages. That creature and its mates roll through a ship trying to eat anything that moves. (They sometimes succeed, just out of the frame). Lightsabers are the cause of several (instantly cauterized) injuries, and a couple of people die from a saber to the gut. (It juts out the other side.)
The ones in TFA IMO aren’t anything to be concerned about, Darth Maul getting cut in half while the mist of his blood flies up is more violent than Han getting stabbed and now that I think of it, Han’s death barely shows anything, the injury is left to the imagination whereas Qui-Gon’s death shows his injury front and back as well as Darth Maul pulling the blade out. ROTS is warranted a PH-13 rating but I think if you cut the kids being murdered on screen and remove the majority of the decapitations then it wouldn’t be that bad.
