Yeah, but that's more because of Lucas' retroactive character assassination than anything else.

There was exactly one use of lens flare, when the Starkiller fired. It's actually used appropriately.

Without getting into spoiler territory (is it cool to talk spoilers yet?), Kylo Ren has done some stuff that might be seen as irredeemable. Zuko made some poor decisions, but he never did anything actively evil or sociopathic.

I read a rumor that said that the scene with the Rathtars and THE RAID guys was altered because of Ford's injury.

I considered the fact that there was no Slusho in the new cantina to be Abrams' greatest moment of restraint.

As many have pointed out, with his mask off he basically looked like Anakin in REVENGE OF THE SITH. Which may have been intentional.

So, THE FORCE AWAKENS. You know all the infighting fandom has had over the years about the prequels? Well, that was just a warmup for what is to come. While it's generally accepted now that the prequels sucked, THE FORCE AWAKENS is the STAR WARS movie that will be fought over more than any other. And unlike the…

Now I want Doomsday to start speaking in a Cockney accent.

Christ, Doomsday looks laughably awful. He's like an outtake of the Abomination from THE INCREDIBLE HULK.

Yeah, I heard about that. Mark Hamill voiced him, which is kind of neat. Sounds like they only kept a thin outline of his backstory, though.

Not saying it wasn't technically logical, it just makes for poor storytelling. There's nothing fresh or unpredictable there.

Part of it is that Abrams seems like he's attempting to go back to some of the original ideas that led to STAR WARS in the first place. For instance, Lucas basically intended the war between the Rebels and the Empire to essentially be World War II in space, right down to him basing the space combat on WWII aerial…

The thing is, though, the ideas they came up with instead of recycling the same ideas were ideas they stole from basically every other sci-fi universe. Then they went right back to copying the OT, only making it more violent than before.

The most bizarre thing about reading some of the EU is when they don't get the voices of the main characters right. For example, when Lando talks in the LOTF books, I can at least tell he's Lando, even if he's an comically exaggerated version of the character. Meanwhile, I picked up VECTOR PRIME one day and the…

I like how they killed off two of their kids in horrible ways, but they can't off 70+-year-old Han Solo because that would displease the fanboys.

Here's another awful character that no one's brought up yet: Vergere. You could spend decades trying to make sense of her.

The whole backstory of that novel related to the events of KOTOR was the one time where I felt the EU really added stuff that felt like it was important independent of the movies. Problem is, they then had to have Bane mutter to himself every five seconds about how his plan was a 1000-year-long game to ensure the Sith…

"No, Chewie, I don't have any time for any more damned, conflabbed space adventures! THE SPACE WHEEL is about to come on!"

Katarn was sort of a nothing character. The Vong were a cool idea (beings who existed outside of the Force) that were executed shoddily, in that they became virtually no different in personality than any other EU villain, and all of the alien stuff was generic sci-fi invasion shit. Starkiller was just Luke's evil…

Yeah, but they figured before three years ago that Lucas had closed the toy box forever and that we weren't going to ever get any more STAR WARS movies. They should've taken that in mind and gone nuts with it.