There is lightsabers, stormtroopers and a beach ball that is a droid. Oh my!
Lets keep all the spoilers here so those of us who havent gone to see it yet don't have the movie ruined.
There's some kind of annoying puppet, a child who is secretly a marshmallow, and a warehouse full of glow-in-the-dark clockwork spiders!*
* Warning - I may not have actually seen this movie.
We'll, I've just got back from seeing it and omfg quite possibly the best Star Wars movie yet. It leans a little heavily on dues ex machina but what the heck, when it tries to thrill it really thrills, when it's supposed to be amusing it's laugh out loud funny, and the spectacle is incredible. And when it gets sad... well, you'll see.
Good call on the spiders though Silverleaf, how did you know?
Really, it's a smashing movie, even without all the weight of the licence. People need to see this so that we can talk about it!
Hey! This is a spoiler thread! Where are the spoilers?! 
Dobby dies.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!
Some spoilers for you then:
All the talk of Kylo Ren really being Luke are totally off. He is, in fact, Jar Jar Binks.
Also, I was surprised that Chewie turned out to be Lando's half-cousin, and that Rey is actually Princess Leia after undergoing an age reversal treatment.
Somebody important also dies in this one. It's George Lucas' credibility.
But seriously, if you want real spoilers I'll give 'em to ya. Much of what happens you have probably already sussed and the big shock moments are fairly well telegraphed tbh.
Oh, I'm serious (and probably shouldn't have included the " 
".on my earlier post) I enjoy spoilers. Let's me focus on and better appreciate the execution when I'm watching the film.
But I'm weird. 
Alrighty then! Happy to oblige.
For anyone else, seriously don't roll over the text below. If you are going to see the movie I heartily recommend that you go into it cold on any spoilers, really I do. Did I mention before that it's great? It really is.
Just don't do it okay? That means you.
I'm serious now!
Okay, have they all gone now?
Rightio. In no particular order…
Rey - abandoned on a desert world (no, not that one) but with memories of another place that possibly tie her to a member of the rebellion, turns out to be force sensitive. She is set up to be the new Jedi by the end. She ends up with Anakin's original lightsaber (the first one that Luke used and then lost on Cloud City in Empire), which 'calls out' to her while the gang are on Maz Kanata's jungle world.
Maz Kanata - is kind of a budget Yoda who lives in a Jungle version of the Cantina. She gives some wise words to Rey that will strenghten her control of the Force in the same way that Ben's advice comes back to Luke during the trench run.
The First Order - formed out of the remains of the empire. We get to see behind the curtain to a certain extent, which neatly explains some things like how the Empire managed to maintain an army of Stromtroopers long past the sell-by date on the clones, plus a lot of the action is up close in places like docking bays which really strive to show 'how things work'. They are run by crusty old sith-a-like Snoke who looks a bit like a maxi-sized Gollum and only appears as a hologram. Kylo is Darth to his Emperor, Domnhal Gleeson is a very wooden replacement for Tarkin, and Captain Phasma, as far as I could tell, is basically there as a plot device.
Super-weapon - the bad guys have a new planet busting weapon that is built into the side of an actual moon (the snowy place that has cropped up in the trailers), with a gun muzzle about the size of the Death Star. It sucks the energy out of a local sun and shoots it back out to vaporise whole star systems. They use it to take out the remainder of the Republican Senate who have been ruling the galaxy after the Empire went down.
Chewie - does indeed have greying hair.
Finn - is a Stromtrooper out on his first mission but can't follow through on orders when he sees the horror of a massacre of innocents. He decides to run away, rescuing X-Wing flying ace Poe in the process. IMO these guys make a great buddy pairing as good as the Luke/Han angle. He takes a fancy to Rey and they sort-of fall in love in the Star Wars kind of way. He gets to wield the lightsaber for a bit, but it's clear that it isn't his thing.
Kylo Ren - is the son of Han and Leia. He is force-sensitive and trained under Luke but it all went wrong and he went to the dark side under the tutelage of Snoke. He is wavering though, and clearly not in control of his powers and emotions. Some funny reactions to his tantrum scenes.
Luke - ran away after Kylo went bad. The whole movie is effectively the hunt for Luke, with the final piece of a map showing his location being the MacGuffin that everyone is chasing after. We do see him again, but not much, and in a heart-thumping cliffhanger.
Han - eventually has a showdown with his errant son. It's emotional, in a grown-man-blubbering kind of way.
The only original cast member who doesn't come back in this one is Lando, there isn't any mention of him either. Ackbar gets a couple of lines, being his miserable defeatist self as usual. There are lots of call backs to the original trilogy, possibly too many as it begins to feel a bit like a parody after a while, but it's never to the point of being a distraction.
If there's anything specific you want to know about, just ask!
Darn it! I read it all! I told myself I wasn't going to! Curse you!
You came into a thread marked Spoilers and ignored all four warnings? That is some commitment to being a 'Truth Seeker' right there!
Would it help if I told you that everything above is total lies? 
Maybe I should delete that post, just in case anyone else falls into this Sarlacc's Pit of spoilerage. In fact, Rabit why don't you use your mod-power to delete it after you've read it? I am feeling guilty already.
No, I was kidding. I can't resist reading spoilers when they are in an area that I visit often. I haven't gotten around to watching the most recent seasons of The Flash and Arrow but know a lot about what is going on purely because spoilers!
So if I didn't read the Star Wars spoilers here, it would have just been somewhere else.
Many thanks, Mezike! 
Mezike, I can delete it if you want me to, but -- as you pointed out -- this area is specifically labeled for spoilers and you did a wonderful job of protecting your spoilers. I see no reason to do so, but will if you want.
Yeah, you're right, there's enough warnings on there. Anyone who opens the box gets what they deserve!
I have some thoughts on some things in the movie, some of which are based on things I've heard mentioned elsewhere. Eventually, I'm sure that somebody else will get around to watching this 
I'm going to color tag these for the time being in case wandering eyes walk in where they shoudln't.
First some fun easter eggs on the cast that I've seen reported!
The Stormtrooper that get's the "These are not the droids you are looking for" treatment is apparently none other than Daniel Craig. It's known that he took some time on set for a cameoduring the filming of Spectre; I'm taking my son to see the film next week so I'll listen carefully to his voice this time.
The Junkyard owner is voiced by Simon Pegg.
One of the X WIng pilots is named after a Beastie Boys album, and has 'Born to Ill' written on his helmet in Klingon or whatever the alien language is that they use, which references both the band as well as Full Metal Jacket.
Snoke = Plageus Snoke is clearly strong in the force if he managed to sway Ren to the dark side. He is also training Ren so must be able to pull off some force tricks at least as good as Luke to have done this. He is also clearly very old, so must have been around since the OT and possibly even the prequel period. Plageus managed to learn how to cheat death which would support this and just look at that big gash on his head. So I think there is a strong and very interesting case to say that Palpatine thought he had killed off Plageus but, like the Black Knight in The Holy Grail, it was just a flesh wound. Recognising that Palpatine had risen in power beyond his control, Plageus remains in the shadows and comes to the fore once the empire topples. It could also explain why Luke went into hiding, perhaps he realised that his Jedi powers alone would not be enough to tackle Plageus, and with the loss of Ren he has been biding his time until Rey cam of age?
Rey was one of Luke's Jedi padawan One of the big questions is the identity of who it was that abandoned Rey on Jakku. The general thought is that she is the daughter of either Leia & Han or Luke. I don't believe that either option is credible; Leia and Han wouldn't have conveniently forgotten about their own daughter, and I just can't see Luke having children and then disappearing as a hermit. There could be an argument for Han abandoning Leia without knowing she was pregnant with Rey but then there would be absolutely no sensible reason for putting her on Jakku. Plus she was old enough at the time to be able to recognise her own mother even after those years apart. I think that the reasoning for these rumours is that every Jedi has to somehow be related to a Skywalker, which doesn't hold any weight. So I think that she was one of Luke's surviving Padawans who he set down in a 'safe' place when he disbanded his Jedi school. This would also explain why Leia sends her to meet Luke, as she would know who Rey was (why on earth wouldn't Leia otherwise go herself? It's her brother who she hasn't seen for several years!)
Luke has been communicating with Rey It's surprising how quickly Rey learns the ways of the force. This supports the Rey as Padawan argument as she may have had some nascent training that is coming back to her. Could Luke also have been doing some Obi-Wan action by sending her "use the force" type comments? Clearly, Luke will have recognised Rey's awakening as much as Snoke and Ren felt it. If he already knows who Rey is (and I think that he does, regardless of the reasons why) then could he also have been mentoring her in some way from afar?
Ren's lack of power/control There's a good reason why he is a bit crap with that lightsaber, which is itself poor in construction when compared to the ones we've seen before (I have seen an interesting suggestion that the two jets on the side could be vents rather than a crossguard, needed as he is unable to properly harness the crystal inside), and that is because he has not completed his training. He might not even be at the level Luke was before he went to Dagobah as he couldn't grab that lightsaber using the force - and that tug of war also supports that Rey has had some form of prior traning, either that or she is going to turn out to be the mostest powerful Jedi evar tm. Moreso, he has big tantrums every time things aren't working out for him, is greedy for power, and can't handle being bested. It suggests that Ren may not be particularly strong with the force and that he is drawn to the dark side in frustration and desperation to wield the kind of power his grandfather once had. This potentially sets things up nicely for the real bad guy to be Snoke.
The Knights of Ren only alluded to briefly, and the big question is whether they existed before Ben turned and accepted him into their ranks with the title of Kyloe Ren, or whether they have been assembled by Ren after turning. I'm leaning toward the former, and there are some interesting musings going around that, should SNoke = Plageus be true, they could be Snokes secret army of Sith apprentices that he has been training during the years of the Empire. Other thoughts are that they were trained as apprentices by either Palpatine or Vader as these Sith Lords always have a secret apprentice stashed away somewhere.
Maz Kanata - who, what, why? Apparently there is quite a bit of footage cut from the scenes with Maz Kanata, as evidenced mainly by imagary and soundbites from the trailers that did not make the theatrical cut. There is more to the story of how she got hold of Lukes lightsaber, with a popular line being that Lando went back to cloud city to retrieve it before somebody gave it to Maz for safekeeping, and she has some form of force sensitive power in being able to sense the feelings of others. I think that she may have had some contact with Luke, possibly he was the one who gave her the saber, but it does seem a little convenient that the gang had to track her down (unless Han knew he had to do this.
Why was R2 powered down for so long? It's not like his battery had run out after all. Here is something significant though; the moment he wakes up coincides with the first appearance of Rey in the rebel base. THis suggests that R2 is aware of who Rey is and further supports the notion that she is connected to Luke in some way. Only bringing Rey and R2 together activates the map that R2 has.
How does Rey know so much about the Millenium Falcon? Pretty simple I think. She's lived in Simon Peggs junkyard for several years, I have no doubt that she has spent plenty of time fixing it for him even though it's not much more than a junk-rider.
What happened on Jakku? Apparently this is covered in the playstation game that is coming out; there is some big battle there about a year after the end of Jedi which trashes the remainder of the Imperial fleet as well as seriously impacting the military power of the rebel alliance. The context of this is that it creates a power vacuum that allows the FIrst Order to rise. My understanding is that there is a power balance between the First Order and the Senate, with star systems under the control of each faction. The remains of the rebel alliance are formed into the Resistance movement which basically does dirty black ops work within First Order space. This highlights the significance of the use of the Starkiller weapon on the base planet of the republic, a move which wipes out their power base and which will now swing power into the favour of the First Order which is set to rise as a new galactic empire. Much of this appears in other media, some of it is only hinted at, so I am just going by what I have found out as it adds some context to the breakneck pace of the film.
I have more things to add but I've written enough for today!
I just walked out of the movie with my wife. Was it good? Did I like it? Well, when I finish writing a little here I think I'm going to go swoosh a Lego TIE fighter around, and not care that I'm over thirty.
Color-tag commences!
[color=white]The material of the movie is stuff that the Expanded Universe has dealt with for a long time. Luke tries to train a new generation of Jedi, but one of them turns against him. About the time I left off the EU books, they were making that Jedi who turns dark be Han and Leia's son. I can certainly see why they reset the EU in order to make this movie. I'm not surprised they went in the directions they did, and I'm glad they kept the drama "in the family." I don't think I've ever watched a space battle in a Star Wars movie and [i]not cared how it went[/i] because I wanted to see [i]what Han, Chewie, Rey, and Finn were doing[/i], dangit! Even in Return of the Jedi we have Lando in the Falcon and we know that the entire Rebellion hangs in the balance of that battle.[/color]
[color=white]More than anything else, this was Han's movie. By jumping ahead 30 years, we get the opportunity to demonstrate how he has grown, lost, regressed, hid, and finally confronted his demons. Coming out of an original trilogy re-watch right before going to see The Force Awakens gave the new movie a terrific context: in Return of the Jedi, Luke walks straight to his father in the hope that his unconditional belief and love will help turn Vader to the good side - [i]and he succeeds[/i]. In this movie, we see how Luke's greatest failure (resulting in the deaths of his other apprentices and, presumably, enabling the rise of the First Order) destroys his confidence to the point that he goes completely into hiding. We then see Han do [i]exactly[/i] what Luke attempted at Endor: he doesn't [i]have[/i] to reveal himself to Kylo Ren. He chooses to. And he chooses to show the unconditional love of a father for his son. But where Luke succeeded, Han failed - at least for now. I imagine that confrontation on the bridge is going to burn inside Kylo Ren until he either destroys or redeems himself at the conclusion of this new trilogy.[/color]
[color=white]Speaking of which, [i]Kylo Ren is such a wannabe[/i]. Vader himself always maintained complete control. When he killed his officers, it was callous. When he lost the Millennium Falcon, he stalked away silenty. But throwing lightsaber tantrums? Whining that he's tempted by the light side? Ren's clearly suffering some kind of inferiority complex and trying to fake it till he makes it. It's telling that even his stormtroopers notice! I agree with Mezike that he doesn't have full control of himself or his powers; his lightsaber is poorly made and he's not able to call on the Force when he wants to in some cases. I bet Rey was able to resist (and dominate!) him in their Force confrontation because while he may have strength, he lacks control and finesse. I imagine he's going to suffer visions of killing his father for some time to come, and I imagine that even though he thinks killing Han was The Thing He Needed To Do To Prove His Strength, it will do the opposite. I hope this trilogy ends with a Force confrontation between Ren and Leia that has him blubbering.[/color]
[color=white](By the way, slightly disappointed we got no Force use out of Leia here! We all know she can do it.)[/color]
[color=white]So, Big Question: who are Rey's parents? I think there's a strong implication that Luke is one of them. It's possible Han and Leia are, though I don't really think so. Whoever they are, I am pretty sure that Han, Leia, and Kylo Ren know the answer. Ren in particular seemed insistent on finding out "WHAT girl" was in the company of the Resistance fighters.[/color]
[color=white]The scene where Rey and Finn run into the Falcon's corridor shouting "how did you [i]do[/i] that?!" at each other certainly presaged Rey's Force use, but it also hints to my mind that Finn is a Force sensistive.[/color]
[color=white]I liked the plethora of aliens in the movie. That's one thing that the original trilogy did well at a few notable points, to suggest a populous galaxy bigger than the one on screen. The Force Awakens pushes that even further, in a way I suspect is CG-enabled, but darn it, it's [i]good[/i] CG this time. I loved the scavenger camp, and I loved that they put more alien pilots in Resistance X-Wings. I was on the lookout for familiar species - Rodians, Gran, Quarren, and so forth - but all I spotted were the Mon Calamari commander and Sullustan pilot. (IMDB says they were actually supposed to be Ackbar and Nien Nunb, though I didn't take them that way while watching).[/color]
Aaaaah, I think more than anything else what I liked about The Force Awakens is how I'm still thinking about it, and how it fits into the mythology of the original Star Wars trilogy! This is good. This is what Star Wars [i]is[/i].
Now, if you'll excuse me...swooshing time!
[i]Vvvvrvvrvvrrvrrrrrvrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr![/i]
I greatly enjoyed this movie. It wasn't a perfect or horribly sophisticated movie, but neither was the original Star Wars. It was exactly what it needed to be and did exactly what it needed to do. I am actually really looking forward to episode 8. I just hope the sequels can keep up the momentum that Force Awakens has started.
I liked some of the little nods, like Finn rifling through stuff on the Falcon and coming across the training remote, but at the point when some stormtroopers on the Death Star Starkiller tromp by, saying "we think they may be splitting up…" I thought they might be trying a little too hard to provide "cute" references.
Honestly, all the action seemed like a framing excuse for us to find out the key points that happened between "Return of the Jedi" and now, as well as for Han's character and the confrontation with Kylo Ren. I didn't really mind that they were mimicking the story of "Star Wars," and at least in the film it seemed to make sense as they moved from plot point to point.
Edit: I think Phantaskippy just deleted the post I was replying to!
It'll be frustrating if they keep up that level of callback in the next movie. For this one it was fine, almost a sense of 'history repeating' given the arcs of some of the characters specifically Ren=Darth, Rey=Luke, and the roles of Han/Obi-Wan, Finn (and maybe a bit of Poe?)/Han). I suppose it works as a way of passing the torch, so long as the trilogy goes it's own way now and is independant of paying homage to the OT - no 'Khan' please JJ, I guess is what I'm getting at.
Ren's struggle with, and submission to, the dark side was far more interesting than the crappy descent of Anakin. The moment on the bridge has become the focus of some nerd rage online but I think it was done really well. Yes, you can totally see what is going to happen, but the point is that so can Han. As soon as he sees Ren he get's this look that is a mix of resignation and determination, he is compelled to follow through despite knowing how it's going to work out. As a parent myself I could totally sympathise with everything in that moment, this is his son and there is no way he can walk away even though he understands the futlity of confronting him. My hope as a viewer that it would turn out differently was every bit as futile as the encounter itself.