Sure there is. The prequels are deeply flawed and stiffly acted and written, but they are also more ambitious and imaginative than this rote marathon of fan service.

If we are going to play to play the rude, dismissive "there is no way..." card, there is no way people in their right mind believe The Force Awakens is INSPIRED or PERFECT. They are just hype zombies.

There are two great Star Wars films. The last one was made 36 years ago.

Sure there is. The prequels are deeply flawed and stiffly acted and written, but they are also more ambitious and imaginative than this rote marathon of fan service.

If we are going to play to play the rude, dismissive "there is no way..." card, there is no way people in their right mind believe The Force Awakens is INSPIRED or PERFECT. They are just hype zombies.

There are two great Star Wars films. The last one was made 36 years ago.

People like to be contrarian for the sake if it. There is no way any of the prequels are better than TFA.

I'm sure there's alot of ways the story would fall apart, but for me that would solve the "been there, done that" problem entirely.

Sure there is. The prequels are deeply flawed and stiffly acted and written, but they are also more ambitious and imaginative than this rote marathon of fan service.

If we are going to play to play the rude, dismissive "there is no way..." card, there is no way people in their right mind believe The Force Awakens is INSPIRED or PERFECT. They are just hype zombies.

There are two great Star Wars films. The last one was made 36 years ago.

I think that in order to know if the movie has captured or recreated that sense of magic you have to ask people that had previously very little or no knowledge of the original films thus limiting the poll probably to only small kids.

For fanboys everywhere “The Force Awakens” was supposed to have one happy side effect: it would exile George Lucas from the galaxy he created. In 2012, Lucas sold his company and his homegrown mythology—I think we call it I.P. now—to Disney. To no one’s chagrin, Disney discarded his proposed stories; Lucas kept his distance while J. J. Abrams jump-started the franchise. As Lucas told Charlie Rose last month, meddling with a “Star Wars” movie would be like cruising by an ex-girlfriend’s house to see what she was up to.

Then the new movie came out, and a strange thing happened. Even as critics saluted “The Force Awakens” and fans turned it into a billion-dollar hit, both camps have come scurrying to the feet of Lucas, the master, rather than Abrams, the apprentice. To call what’s happening a full-blown critical reëvaluation is perhaps going too far. It’s more like a reawakening. For the first time in a more than a decade people are talking about Lucas with something other than withering contempt.

Listen to the hum of the think pieces. Lucas’s original “Star Wars,” débuting in 1977, may have plundered everything from Kurosawa to “Flash Gordon,” but it “was at least an inspired act of cultural appropriation,” the Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik wrote last week. By contrast, Abrams only succeeded—per Vox’s Peter Suderman—in evoking Lucas’s movies. This is the gist of the Lucas reawakening: that in the era of reboots, his pastiches have a kind of integrity. “ ‘A New Hope’ and ‘Empire’ are both masterpieces of pop art in a way that none of the endlessly-proliferating Marvel-universe or D.C. blockbusters are likely to ever be,” the Times’ Ross Douthat wrote.

That argument you might have expected—new movies tend to send us back to the Blu-ray player, and the original trilogy never lost its glow. But even Lucas’s loathed “Star Wars” prequels have gotten a second look. They’re no longer seen as generation-smiting events—or just generation-smiting events. They’re noble failures. “In his clumsy way [Lucas] was going for what had never been done instead of redoing something that had,” New York’s David Edelstein wrote. Vice’s Brian Merchant left the theater after “The Force Awakens” “kind of wish[ing] it was more like the prequels. That George Lucas had been more involved.”

More than most directors, Lucas’s reputation has depended on whether the critic is looking at him through bifocals or Warby Parker glasses. The old—which is to say, baby boomer—critique went like this: Lucas is a product of the sixties. By trading a Black Panther’s clenched fist for Darth Vader’s, he set aside his generation’s political ideals. The lefty filmmaker Haskell Wexler, who died last month, once told me fondly, “Me wanting to make a terrifically socially relevant movie that reflects the angst, the fucked-up state of the planet—I think George could only do that allegorically, with some planet not called Earth.”

Lucas always thought he was viewed as more of a Pop artist than an artist, full stop. Even as he was preparing to sit next to President Obama at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony last month, Lucas told Rose, “I don’t really have a lot of awards, to be very honest with you.… I get a lot of little awards. I’ve got two Emmys.”

After Lucas directed the “Star Wars” prequels, the last of which came out in 2005, he found himself in a different critical vice. The new generation didn’t care about the ideals of the sixties. They cared about the ideals of the late seventies and eighties—the blockbuster era. For them Lucas had desecrated a second sacred cultural moment: one that promised not radical change but comfort—the warmth of Tatooine’s twin suns. These people also had Web browsers. Lucas was blasted by everyone from smart-asses in Ain’t It Cool News’ comments section to Red Letter Media’s Mr. Plinkett, who showed, excruciatingly and shot by shot, how Lucas had screwed up.

I met Lucas during this period. We sat next to a fireplace at Skywalker Ranch, under two very expensive-looking paintings of Queen Amidala, one of the unloved characters of the prequel saga; a portrait of a Dewback creature hung across the room. He was alternatively gee-whiz and grumpy, and his insistence of his rights as an artist seemed like a not-so-gentle reminder that he was one. At the time, fans were furious at Lucas for both the prequels and the changes he’d made—and refused to unmake—to the original films. “Of course, a lot of people said, ‘You can’t do that!’ ” Lucas said. “But artists forever have been changing their work. Even in movies, I’m like the least of the problem. But suddenly I can’t do it or I’m taking away their childhood or I’m doing something that’s just rabid.”

Sitting with the man who’d been the butt of so much ridicule, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him—and slightly guilty. If success obscured Lucas’s gifts as a director, it also obscured his vulnerability as a human.

“Why would I make any more of those when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?” Lucas said of the “Star Wars” movies. “I say, yeah, I don’t need that any more than anybody else does. We’re all doing this so we can either make a living so we can buy dinner or to get a little adulation to verify you as a worthwhile human being. And if you don’t get either one of those why are you doing it?”

Ten months later, Lucas sold the company.

It took a unique—well, derivative—sequel to create an atmosphere in which Lucas could be viewed in a new light. The biggest reason Lucas looks better is because “The Force Awakens” is an admission that, thirty-eight years later, the original can’t be topped. Here, Abrams is following not only his instinct for homage (to Steven Spielberg, to Gene Roddenberry) but also the blueprints for rebooting a beloved franchise. Be reverent to the source material. Scatter around plenty of “Easter eggs” for the fans. And, by all means, remake the most popular film in the series. After seeing “The Force Awakens” twice, I found myself thinking about the image of Rey (Daisy Ridley) on Jakku, living among rusting A.T.-A.T.s and a Super Star Destroyer. She could be playing in a prop closet at Skywalker Ranch, or in a Gen X-er’s toy chest.

Abrams’s shortcomings as a rebooter also make it easier to appreciate Lucas. Lucas didn’t always think of himself as a great director. (He has often said he was mostly a great editor.) But he was a Tolkien-level master at creating new worlds—as the critic Tom Shone noted, he created so many that Abrams didn’t seem to feel the need to create any. For Lucas obtaining the power of cutting-edge special effects meant the implied responsibility not to wield them haphazardly. (The skill had slipped by the prequels.) Amid such dizzying special effects, Lucas demanded that his stories be clear and straightforward, even at the expense of artfulness. This attribute is the thing I most appreciate in the C.G.I. era, when—here I put on my bifocals—nearly every movie loses its mind about thirty minutes from the explosion-packed finale. The fuzziness over what intrigues begat the Resistance and the First Order in “The Force Awakens” never would have passed muster in Lucas’s original trilogy. (Again, the skill slipped with the prequels.)

Lucas’s reputation is getting shined up because he’s no longer in the crosshairs. This is how it’s supposed to go with sequels. Ridley Scott and James Cameron made the great “Alien” movies, then stepped aside for the lesser ones; nobody blames Spielberg for “Jaws: The Revenge.” So long as Lucas was the chief mythmaker and commercial guardian of “Star Wars,” he never had that luxury. Now he does. And though the two men are friends Lucas couldn’t have picked a better amanuensis than Abrams, who honors his heroes but doesn’t have it in him to drive a light sabre through their hearts. Abrams will never be a master.

The reawakening of Lucas also touches on a larger point about nostalgia. As John Seabrook wrote for this magazine in 1997, the original “Star Wars” “makes you feel longing for some unnameable thing that is always being lost … but it’s a longing sweetened by the promise that in the future we’ll figure out a way of getting the unnameable thing back.” Fans felt this longing after the prequels, only now it was nameable: we wanted the old “Star Wars”—our “Star Wars”—back.

“The Force Awakens” isn’t a bad attempt at resurrecting the old “Star Wars.” But it proves once and for all the folly of this kind of nostalgia. The thrill that cannot be recovered—by Lucas or Abrams or Rian Johnson—is the thrill of discovering the “Star Wars” universe for the first time. That’s the thrill that Lucas created.

I suspect Lucas is of two minds about his new puffing-up. On the one hand, he has seen his films—on “Charlie Rose,” he called them his “kids”—cloned in the manner that an army was once raised by the evil emperor on the planet Kamino. We’re so deep in the Reboot Era that we forget what a weird and dispiriting feeling that must be.

On the other hand, it must be satisfying to see his gifts as a director, so long forgotten, be praised. “The Force Awakens” makes it once again possible to think about George Lucas as a man of imagination, of conviction, and (minus Jar Jar Binks) of taste—as a brilliant appropriator rather than an average one. It took a forgery to get him called an artist.

The implication that it is lazy is really what bugs me. I just can't fathom how someone can see this as lazy filmmaking. Lazy writing maybe, but everyone else is working as hard as possible to make this appealing to everyone. I guess that's my issue though.

Watched trailers and thought everything was in. What vital things weren't?

As for lightsaber duels getting the praise. I'm pissed that some stormtrooper from sanitation squad was okay wielding the lightsaber against the person who used it as a main weapon since childhood. I don't care Kylo Ren if was injured and Finn might have some kind of melee training. Lightsabers are supposed to be unique weapons that require training. Same goes for Rey. Dispatching trained dark jedi like it was nothing once she "let it in". It cheapened uniqueness of the weapon and power of force users. Everything requires training. And failure of Kylo Ren felt unnecessary. He was supposed to be quite good and skillful, but had his ass completely wiped by some amateur. Imagine what she could do after several days of Luke's training. First Order is toast.

Well the trailer that got me excited about the film was the one with Luke's voice. So during the whole film that's in the back of my mind, wondering when it will happen. And it never does.

LEIA
Luke, don't talk that way. You have a power I--I don't understand and
could never have.

LUKE
You're wrong, Leia. You have that power too. In time you'll learn to
use it as I have. The Force is strong in my family. My father has
it...I have it...and...my sister has it.

I agree with you Flava. The film is 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is in the IMDB top 100 of all time. It is the highest grossing movie ever released domestically (and is on track to become one of the top 10 even when adjusted for inflation), and anecdotally, you're unlikely to meet many real-live humans who didn't like it.

Now, any of these things when taken alone can be dismissed --- "RT critics are clueless!", "IMDB is ruled by the lowest common denominator!", "Box Office grosses don't equate to quality!", "Anecdotal evidence is worthless!" --- but taken in collectively, the bottom line is it is a very small MINORITY VIEW that TFA is horrible.

But when you visit some message boards (not this one), the minority (often angry/bitter/trolling) view is screamed the loudest and longest, creating an illusion that somehow it is a prevailing sentiment.

It is not.

Furthermore, while it's ABSOLUTELY VALID to point out shortcomings and failings in TFA, to outright dismiss it as horrible is simple hyperbole and an attempt to either be some kind of pseudo-free-thinking iconoclast or plain old trolling. It's throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and it's the kind of black and white simpleton judgment that makes intellectual discussion moot

The first half of the movie is spectacular. It's amazing how much we get from Rey in her early scenes and she doesn't say any real dialogue. The movie really builds up to this great moment halfway when Solo has his "it's all real" speech.

The thing literally DESTROYS the Republic and kills millions of people and senators and it's just such an empty statement.

Oh, and I'm more adamant now that this ruins the OT. It really makes the victory in ROTJ seem just hallow and short and that they really fought that war and lost it all pretty quickly.