tl;dr: it is good, go see it, it made me give a fuck about this franchise again, I’m going to go see it a second time. No spoilers.
Mostly-non-spoilery commentary beyond the cut.
So it turns out that most of the images we saw as trailers – the hulks of Star Destroyers crashed on a desert planet – are all from the beginning of the film. Much the first act happens in a junkyard, with Our Heroine trying to scratch out a living salvaging among the ruins of these once-mighty warships.
Which makes for a pretty good metaphor for the task Abrams and his crew had ahead of them when they started making this movie. Something grand and epic lay in ruins. Could they rebuild it?
Yeah, I think they did. Like probably everyone else I went into the theatre with a lot of trepidation: was I about to get Phantom Menaced again? I didn’t. Instead I got a really tightly-constructed film, that had the sense to let a lot of important story points get made via images, music, and wordless acting, rather than explaining itself endlessly, miring itself in backstory, and making all the actors try to mouth terrible lines.
At times it felt a little bit too salvaged; there were a few bits where I began to feel I was watching the result of shoving Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi into a blender. But then it’d double down on whatever theme from the original movies it was hitting, and nail it. It even made me cry at one point, which was really, really not something I would have ever expected from a new Star Wars picture. It rings the changes on the same familiar bits quite expertly. I’m hoping that the next installments go to some new narrative territory, but after the debacle of the prequel trilogy I think this was pretty much the only option: demonstrate unambiguously that you know why the original films worked to regain the credit Lucas’ prequels squandered.
And ultimately? It delivered exactly what the original movie delivered. An exciting, fast-paced adventure in space, with a densely-constructed world behind it. And a few really gorgeous moments when it just shut the hell up and made things happen.
I really liked that the movie set up sequels, but worked as a stand-alone film. If I never see Episode VIII or IX, I can still walk away feeling like yeah, I saw this awesome movie. I think that’s a neat bit of writing in contrast to stuff which either assumes sequels (Peter Jackson anything, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, etc) or which is scrabbling to follow up on an unexpectedly successful film (The Matrix).