Good movie. 7.5/10
Few points:
- BB-8 lighter thumbs-up needs to be the new face of Star Wars marketing gimmicks.
- It was a nice touch having Jakku as a war-torn collaterally-damaged planet by simply showing the poverish nature along with the AT-AT and star destroyer remnants.
- Extremely obvious as soon as Han and Chewie split up that Han wasn't making it back, but the confrontation on the bridge was still emotional.
- Apparently Simon Pegg was the junker alien on Jakku. Wow.
I can buy the 'if we have the designs for it, let's keep building and improving it' meta for the deathstar -> starkiller thing, but it bugs me that the entire plot of the movie goes through the same **** as A New Hope and RotJ for destroying it: attack it head-on, land a ground crew, disable shields, skim a trench, fire missiles. Watching that sequence felt like I was already watching the Family Guy Force Awakens episode.
Otherwise great cast, awesome opening/escape sequence, good ending - looking forward to the next one