REVIEWED: The Force Awakens (SPOILER FREE)

[Aractus]

You didn't comment on performances. I can't imagine this being worse than some of those delivered in the first three episodes.

Actually I did, but not in this thread. The performances were, in my view, worse than any of the prequels. Now I will grant you that Rey's character is better than Luke in the original, and much better than Hayden Christensen, and as she's the main character you would say the movie has a really strong lead. It's not at all fair to compare to Lloyd as I'll discuss in a minute. It's also nice to see a strong female lead, especially as the OT only had three human female characters to speak of, and only one of them appears in all three films: Leia.

The classic cast includes: Ford, Hammil, Fisher, Daniels, and a few others. Among the classic cast I have few complaints about their performance, overall that was really good. I did feel that Ford's performance was quite flat overall - but he did have one scene in particular that I thought was great. Daniels also I felt just didn't sound the way that 3PO should.

The rest of the cast was in my view all inferior to the supporting casts of the previous movies, including the prequels. I'll just take one movie, The Phantom Menace. The supporting cast included Portman, McGregor, Neeson, McDiarmid, and Ray Park. Out of those actors they all gave great performances. Jake Lloyd also gave a good performance, but the director didn't bring out his potential in all his scenes - I don't at all blame Lloyd for that I blame Lucas. There are some scenes in particular that he did really well, such as when they're leaving Tatooine and he's cold and alone, and when he faces the Jedi Council and is tested he looks very realistically scared and afraid.

If you compare the supporting cast in TFA directly to the supporting cast of any of the previous six movies you find it to be inferior. Boyega - pretty two dimensional and bland, he just doesn't at all compare the comparable character in the originals, or the prequels. Driver as Kylo Ren just can't hold a candle to any comparable actor, like Park, or Prowse, or Christopher Lee. Even Harrison Ford as one of the "older" good guys just has such a bland performance overall when you compare to Alec Guinness in the original film. He did deliver a couple of pretty good scenes though, I'll grant you that, but it was much less consistent than Guinness (or McDiarmid in the prequels for example).

If you were to look at the original film, you also have the character of Tarkin played by Peter Cushing, a really strong supporting character in the Empire - but none of the characters in the First Order deliver a comparable performance to his, including the semi-prominent General that we see in the film.

Your special effects comment is a little discouraging. I don't mind special effects at all and was hopeful based on reports that the overuse of CGI in the first three episodes had been scaled back.

Scaled back from what? Attack of the Clones? It certainly has more prominent CGI characters than AOTC did. For example, in AOTC they chase down a bounty hunter/assassin that goes to hide in a bar, and if you look at that scene from when she enters the bar from the outside to when Obi Wan and Anakin go inside to find her, to when they catch her (and Obi Wan displays his love of lobbing off people's arms with his lightsabre in bars) it's actually really hard to see any CGI characters in that scene. In fact I don't think there are any, it looks to me like every character is physical. Much like in the cantina in the original film. But in TFA there's a scene where the characters enter a bar of some sorts and pretty much 1/3rd or even half the characters in it are CGI.