Thanks for articulating throughout this thread what at least some of us felt. I saw it twice around Christmas. My little niece just got the BluRay and I didn’t even feel the desire to rewatch it with her. My feeling is, it wasn’t horrible by any stretch, but after the hype is forgotten and the flash finally wears off,…

I truly mean this and I’m not being the least bit sarcastic here...but thank you for stating the obvious.

You just proved my point. Star Wars had a slate of planned activity and investment by Disney. There was no way that Disney was going to back out of those investments because TFA underperformed, and you’re also wrongly assuming that TFA had any sort of chance to underperform.

I think it’s clear that you don’t grasp how…

The prequels had oodles of new stuff—new aliens, characters, locations, technology; yes, they made connections where there didn’t need to be connections (Anakin building 3pO) but they also made the most important character (Qui-Gon) in all of Star Wars someone never even mentioned in the originals. On the whole, I…

And there’s only one story in the Star Wars universe worth introducing them with? There exist good stories that aren’t A New Hope.

While I agree with the sentiment that mirroring the original was a good idea...

I think it is funny that they went ‘safe’ and now I could not care less about ANY future movies. Congrats Disney! I will now never watch another Star Wars movie again.

I disagree entirely, based on movie history.

I guess part of the problem for me is that this one *didn’t* work as well. The took a lot of the story of ANH, but then did a much worse job of telling it. Starkiller Base comes out of nowhere in the second half of the film as though they suddenly realized they needed another hour of material and shoved it into story,…

Step 1: Remake Star Wars

The prequels made the Star Wars Galaxy much, much bigger, and I say that as someone who doesn’t think they are particularly good films. Just because Lucas engaged in a bit of mythological connect-the-dots with some characters doesn’t undo the vast worlds, the centers of society, the variety and scale and scope shown…

So re-show the originals. I remember seeing the Special Editions in theaters when I was a kid. It was wonderful. Or make a new story that’s also good, and has a magic of it’s own. There’s more than one magical story in the world.

There’s also something to be said about characters in the original trilogy having their own distinct voices, whereas Awakens suffers from the modern whedonesque mess where most of the characters have to quip their way through the movie.

Anyone in need of a reminder could have easily caught the original trilogy from any number of sources. Nobody *needed* a reminder, it was just a cheap way out.

That’s absolute nonsense.

Unlike other endeavors, where you can swear off a team, or a book series, etc., there’s nothing comparable to replace Star Wars with. The people who “swore off” Star Wars after the prequels either weren’t big fans to begin with (so there was no guarantee they’d continue with the series), or…

Amen, brother. This is like saying that the public needs to be reminded what the Fourth of July is or what Santa Claus does. That “We need to reintroduce the audience to Star Wars” line of thinking was a fig leaf for Abrams to cover up the fact that he has no idea how to generate original material.

The biggest whiners about the prequels were hardcore fans, not general audiences.

The prequels had issues, certainly, but I think The Force Awakens had more. George Lucas can’t write dialog, and relied too much on CGI, but the guy knew how to tell a story. The prequels feel like an original story set in the Star Wars universe, and dialog and CGI aside, it’s a reasonably good story. In contrast,…

I get that, and I quite enjoyed TFA, but... Did they have to destroy Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewie’s happy endings to do so?

Could someone explain to me why people needed to be reminded what Star Wars was? Had people forgotten? The prequels were hugely successful, and people were buying tickets for The Force Awakens months in advance despite having no clue what the plot was going to be. It’s not like the franchise was struggling. They could…