“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is like your favorite breakfast cereal. You eat it in the morning, you say, “Yum, this tastes good!” Then you go about your day, forget what you had for breakfast and when you get hungry, you look forward to some real food. That breakfast cereal isn’t something your Mama made from scratch, by the way. It was mass-produced after many months, if not years, of market research, focus groups, and experimentation, in order to get the precise recipe that will work. Same thing with this movie. It’s a fun, good-tasting product. It follows a successful formula that you’ll probably like. It feels like the result of a lot of market research. And that’s about all it is. It’s quite similar in content and style to all the “Star Trek” reboot movies: bombastic, well-choreographed action scenes that display the huge budget, characters that try to be clever, a few plot twists here and there. The similarity is no surprise, since they were all produced and directed by the same guy as this one: J.J. Abrams. We know from his TV work (i.e. “Fringe”) that he is capable of producing incredible, ground-breaking science-fiction, but he apparently just paints by the numbers when doing big-budget movies. Perhaps that’s not so much a reflection of him, but of the Hollywood system that doesn’t want to risk billions of dollars of opportunity. Oh well.

Extras:

• The plot? The ol’ good vs. evil formula, as personified by a young vagabond woman who discovers her true destiny in the war against the evil empire.
• I didn’t find the original “Star Wars” (Episode IV) by George Lucas as awesome as a lot of people thought when it first came out. But it was fun space opera, we were amazed by the special effects, and it was a jolt of hope during a very difficult time for America. And it was a risk—Lucas spent a big budget on this without having a clue it would pay off; no space opera had ever been done on that scale. He followed The Wise Rule of Cinematic Greatness: Greatness is attained only by taking chances. No risks in this latest iteration of Star Wars, and therefore no greatness.
• After seeing Mark Hamill as the Trickster in the TV series “The Flash,” I just couldn’t get that villain out of my head when I saw Hamill in this movie. That’s the problem with doing a role so well; you keep seeing that actor in the same role regardless of the movie. When Hamill appeared as Luke Skywalker in this movie, I was expecting him to suddenly burst into sinister laughter and throw a bomb or something.
• This must have the weakest villain in the Star Wars movie franchise so far, Kylo Ren. (Some relation to Ren & Stimpy by any chance?)
• At least J.J. Abrams didn’t try reinventing/rebooting the original Star Wars characters as he did with Star Trek (bad idea). Try to put someone else to play Hans Solo besides Harrison Ford. If you can imagine that, you can imagine the rebooted Star Trek franchise.

2021 Update: It feels like a long time since the third and final chapter, “Rise of Skywalker,” appeared in this Star Wars trilogy. Perhaps because it was all released in our pre-Covid world. I actually liked the second chapter, “The Last Jedi,” better than “The Force Awakens,” because it actually broke the Star Wars template and went into its own unique direction. But this new direction was heavily criticized by Star Wars fans, so back to the template for “Rise of Skywalker,” which I have not yet seen. I have “Rise of Skywalker” in my Disney+ queue, but I’m not ever really in the mood for something that appears to be another Star Wars rehash (albeit a well-produced one). Maybe someday.