Afterwards my younger kids told us how surprised they were at how old Han Solo was. My wife and I were expecting it, but hadn’t considered that to the kids no real time had passed between the movies. My son didn’t realize that was Princess Leia. When I mentioned her on the drive home, then had to explain who I was talking about he quite rudely asked why she was so old and fat.

I loved the dialogue between Leia and Han. It felt so real. I think this was the biggest success of the movie. The plot itself was a bit of rehash of the earlier movies, but the characters walked off the screen. The prequels were never convincing and the dialogue was rarely funny. In the Fore Awakens the dialogue was genuinely funny and didn’t resort to the slapstick of the prequels. This is the true successor to the original trilogy.

Even the teenagers acted like teenagers. There wasn’t the broodiness of Anakin and Padme. Finn and Rey felt genuine. There were some genuinely funny parts as Finn tries to fill the role of hero, but is in fact the one being rescued. I even felt that Ben Solo/Kylo Ren was done well. The tie-in to the Anakin of Ep 2 and 3 was well done and you can definitely see the parallels.

Some disappointments: Seriously hated the death star planet concept. Are there no new ideas in the SW universe? And then to actually drain a sun was epic denial of physics worthy of only JJ Abrams’s over the top style that we saw in his Star Trek movies. I also thought the big baddie was pretty weak. Seriously he must be compensating for something projecting himself so huge. I bet he’s the size of a frog when they actually meet him.

I was kind of wondering if we’d get a Palpatine return. 20 years ago I’d read some comic books form the Expanded Universe that had him survive via clone bodies he had stockpiled away. I kept wondering if that was where it was headed, but I don’t think so. I think this is a new baddie altogether.

One funny thing I learned about my wife. In all these years of watching Star Wars, I’m not sure she ever sat down to watch them with us. She’d seen them as a kid and watched the prequels with me once in the theater but that’s it. So when the storm trooper at the beginning grows a conscience she started speaking aloud that that’s not possible. Later when a stormtooper bleeds (shocking for Star Wars) she says they can’t bleed because they are robots. I said not robots, but some were clones, still people. She didn’t get it. Later in the day I had to explain the origin of the stormtroopers. All these years and I had no idea she thought they were robots.

Anyway, the movie was a great success and I’m glad. Its on the right track, has a director that understands people and dialogue if not physics. Good enough. Looking forward to seeing it again with at least two of my kids when it hits the cheap theater in a few months. Then of course we are buying the DVD.