For me Force Awakens was initially OK, but the more I think about it the worse it gets.
The new characters:
Rey, Finn, Poe, Kylo, BB8, were all good. I have very few complaints about any of them. Most of the minor characters were OK, except Snoke was a bit pointless and looked bad.
The returning characters:
Han was good, Leia passable, Chewie acted like chewie (but didn’t quite look like chewie, much better than the ROTS costume, but still wrong).
Was initially annoyed by Luke’s complete absence but I can see why they did it.
C-3PO - There was something really off about the delivery of all the lines, seemed more like a poor impersonation than the original character, really bugged me that he addressed Han as “Han Solo” rather than Captain Solo or General Solo. Also there was something off about the costume, it seemed less shiny, but that may have been for practical reasons to avoid camera reflections etc.
The nonsense plot:
Luke goes to find an old jedi temple and leaves a map to his location, when does he do this? before he leaves? or he leaves, finds the temple then makes the map and gives a bit to Max von Sydow, then goes back to the temple? and the rest of the map was somehow in the Imperial archives…
What did he tell Max von Sydow to do with the map? “here’s a secret map, just give it to the first person who comes asking for it”, what if Sydow had died and no one ever found the map would Luke have just stayed on the island till he died?
One of my biggest problems is several populated worlds are destroyed, Leia feels it through the force, so you’ve got to assume Luke felt it, yet he does nothing, just stays on his island waiting for someone to solve his map puzzle. I would hope that might bring him to his senses and make him take action, but maybe he was too far away to feel it through the force?
The starkiller base exhausted the sun it was orbiting in two charges, what was the plan after that? can they move the whole planet to orbit a new sun? or dismantle the whole operation and rebuild it on a new planet? or was the plan to only ever fire two shots, one at the Republic capital, one at the resistance base? That’s a reasonable plan, but someone probably should have said that in the film.
The falcon leaves Jakku and is immediately picked up by Solo, so either he was in the area or he was somehow able to detect it and instantly arrive via hyperspace, he said it was easy to track, but tracking ships from a long distance isn’t really a thing that can be done in the Star Wars universe (I can’t think of other examples from the films), but maybe he had previously installed a homing beacon.
What happened to the poison gas? I may have missed it but I don’t remember anyone re-fixing the poison gas leak.
Hyperdrive now seems to be instantaneous to get anywhere, or maybe they just didn’t travel very far, there were no travelling scenes, just felt wrong. But it’s hard to know how far they travelled as we are never told where Jakku is in relation to anything else.
The gun on the falcon jams in position and Finn doesn’t just climb the ladder to use the other one? Not a massive problem but could have made for a fun scene, and they could have saved the trick with the jammed gun for later in the film. Also why didn’t he go to the upper gun and start shooting when the ship was still on the ground?
Why did Captain Phasma have authority to drop the shields for the whole planet, and why did nobody notice that it had happened?
So many questions, it just feels like they rushed into making this film without thinking through the script, another draft or two could probably have fixed a lot of problems.
