Quote Originally Posted by Lint View Post
Definitely a more enjoyable movie than the prequels (and even some of the original trilogy films IMO). Found the pacing to be particularly good, especially when compared to the dialogue heavy scene to dialogue heavy scene to pointless CGI battle scene prequels.
IMO the Prequels were a poor execution of a good concept, and Force Awakens has been a good execution of a pretty ordinary concept (i.e. mostly rehashing A New Hope).

While the Prequels did certainly have their share of flaws, they were - IMHO - fundamentally sound. Because those movies did fulfill the following:
  • Showed us the origins of Anakin Skywalker, including his gradual journey from being an innocent and good person towards his ultimate fall from grace into villainy. And of course, Anakin's romance with Padmé, culminating in the birth of the twins.

  • The Jedi in their prime. The Prequels gave us an unsurpassed amount of lightsabre action. As griffin pointed out before, the Original Trilogy was set after the fall of the Jedi; so all we saw were old men, a cyborg and a quasi-trained boy.

  • The Clone Wars! Something that we've been itching to see ever since the 1977 film where Luke asked Ben, "You fought in the Clone Wars?!" and nothing more was ever said about it.

  • The transformation of the Republic into the Empire.

Of course, one of the core problems with the Prequels was that the stories themselves were more driven by these events rather than being character driven. The Prequels spent more time world-building which left less time for character-development. We didn't really need to see so much world-building, such as all those boring Senate sessions (seriously, who wants to watch a galactic version of Question Time?), the Pod Race (they only really need to show ONE lap), the Kaminoan cloning facility, the Geonosian droid foundry etc. While they were all cool things to see, they ultimately weren't that pivotal to the plot per se. They could've been made much shorter or just mentioned in passing. Then Lucas would've had more time to intensely focus on characters like Anakin Skywalker etc.

To me, The Force Awakens feel like the complete opposite of this. The general story is pretty much a retelling of A New Hope, but the story is reasonably well driven by its two protagonists -- Finn, the man who's desperate to flee his past, and Rey, the girl who's desperate to run back to her past. Both characters go on a personal journey and they grow and become different people by the end of the film. Finn learns to stop running away and become a selfless hero (similar to Han Solo's journey in A New Hope, actually), and Rey learns to living in the past and embrace her future.

Hopefully the future Sequels will give us a good combination of having a good character-driven plot, which is what the Original Trilogy gave us (hence why it's regarded as the best by fans). Bear in mind that Abrams is not directing Episodes VIII and IX, I think that we may have a new hope for this franchise to strike back and deliver a return of the story-telling standard that we loved from the OT.