Vader worship, yeah...jeesh, needed a bad guy with the Dark Side, so hey let's worship a melted helmet of a guy who slayed his Master for his son and hope nobody asks any questions as to how that mucks up the story. Seriously, if a young girl can spontaneously develop Light skills the template is established to have Dark skills without mask worship.
And yeah the similarities in the story line to the original is eerily similar, it's like the motive for the entire move was to exorcise Lucas, basically saying he got the story wrong. But really the story is fine, where Lucas made an error was with giving dumbass Saturday morning cartoon critters bigger and bigger roles, all he had to do is cut that crap out and all this new episode had to do was not make the same mistake, which they did but they made all new ones by mucking up the fairytale story that harkens back to morality tales by Homer.
That and my already stated gloss-over of critical progression lines and so many shortcuts and ideas shotgunned at us killed this. I could have lived with some of the minor fails if they avoided big fails. In the end it is a muddle, not bad filmography and effects, great escape/chase scene, the new girl was probably the only performance that sucked the least...the whole First Order thing seems weak. This guy in the youtube commentary nailed that speech part, what a hilariously stupid scene!
All they had to do was not eff up the recipe. They effed up the recipe. As I stated before, it could be repaired in the next episode, but they just upped the ante on the stakes. Part of me thinks they don't care and will do whatever they want, because the thing is generating piles of cash.
