The First of the Worst

December 2025 was the ten-year anniversary of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Then, in January of 2026, Kathleen Kennedy stepped down from Lucasfilm, and, over the Memorial Day weekend of 2026, Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu had the worst opening of a Star Wars film to date. I had debated about starting this review series either during the ten-year anniversary of Star Wars: The Force Awakens or during the ten-year anniversary of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, but given Kathleen Kennedy has moved on to other things and the most recent film’s failure, I judged that now was a good time to start.

Disney officially bought Lucasfilm December 2012, but I didn’t get wind of the news until Disney began advertising The Force Awakens in 2014. I remember thinking, “They’re going to kill my favorite characters and replace them with teeny boppers.” Little did I know how right I was.

When evaluating the quality of a film, I try to look at two things. The first is immersion—the suspension of disbelief—how well does the movie hold my attention and keep me from analyzing the plot. This is where things like stakes, continuity, and plot holes come in. These details exist on a sort of gradient. A couple details are likely to skip my notice unless they are major, but the more continuity errors and plot holes there are, the more likely I am to disengage from the story and start evaluating things.

Graphics and overall production quality can play into this too, but I consider them secondary to the writing. The second thing I look at is the overall effect the film has on the other films in a franchise. This is the reason I consider Alien 3 to be far inferior to Alien Resurrection. Both are filled with errors, but Alien 3 strategically killed the setups laid out by the sequel and any potential for future films. Half the reason for Alien Resurrection’s flaws was the fact that it had to fix what Alien 3 had broken. So, although Alien Resurrection did worse at the box office, Alien 3 was the worse film because it jaded the fans before they ever had the chance to see the fourth installment. Frankly, the Alien franchise has, in some measure, struggled ever since. It has never fully recovered from Alien 3.

Based on these two criteria, Star Wars: The Last Jedi is far and away the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Its lack of immersion and lasting effect are devastating for itself and the franchise. But The Force Awakens is in an odd place. It has plenty of immersion issues, and those alone place it among the worst movies I’ve ever seen, but what keeps it from being among the worst of the worst, so to speak, is its lasting effect on the franchise.

On the one hand, it set the precedent for killing off Star Wars’s original characters, but on the other, fans were still cautiously optimistic once the movie was over. Part of the reason they were able to avoid alienating the fans was an interesting rumor about Harrison Ford insisting on being killed off so he wouldn’t have to continue acting in the films. Looking back, I suspect this rumor wasn’t true, but it kept fans from believing that Han Solo’s death was an omen. I could never prove it, but I believe someone at Disney knew exactly what they were doing.

Still, The Force Awakens left people willing and even eager to see the next movie, which probably saved The Last Jedi when it experienced a massive drop-off in turnout on its second weekend. At the time, I heard the number 80% being floated around, but IGN puts the number at 68.9%, which, according to Forbes, was more than any other film “by a lot.” To be fair, other movies have broken or tied this record since that time. So, I can’t say that The Force Awakens is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen because it did leave audiences excited for the next one. But I believe there’s a very specific reason why.

The main problem with The Force Awakens is that it’s the most strategic—and by that, I mean cynical—films I’ve ever seen. The reason there are so many problems in the movie is that JJ Abrams was so eager to place an audience insert inside a bunch of memberberries that he gave zero thought to the connective tissue leading from one scene to the next. A memberberry is a colloquial term that describes some scene or detail that audiences are bound to have a fond, nostalgic connection to.

Remember the lightsabers? Remember the trench run? Remember this or that and so on. In fact, Abrams basically recreated Star Wars: A New Hope beat for beat, but he seems to have no understanding of what George Lucas was actually doing. He didn’t seem to understand that Lucas was basing his story on Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, or hero’s journey, from the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He didn’t seem to understand that Lucas was influenced by the serial films he’d seen when he was younger. Abrams saw the scenes in A New Hope, but he didn’t seem to understand why they worked.

What moviegoers got was a collage of random beats reminiscent of a better film. But those scenes were now filled with wildly inconsistent characters, innumerable contrivances to get from one place to the next, and zero backstory to give the new scenes any sort of context. Then Abrams added some modern graphics to give his collage a polished feel. He also made a critical mistake. He left far too many questions unanswered, leaving it to the next director to fill the gaps.

Not only did the next director fail to do so, but he seems to have contemptuously burned down every story thread Abrams had set up. And this makes the situation for my criteria even more complicated because, on the one hand, Abrams gave the audience so much nostalgia that they were eager for more, but on the other, if Abrams had bothered to answer a few of his own questions, The Last Jedi might never have happened, and Star Wars might never have lost so many fans.

In the next review, I’ll begin by covering the title crawl. This movie is so terrible that even the opening paragraphs of exposition are filled with issues.