Quick recap; I can definitely see what people are talking about when they say this is a remake of A New Hope. There are a lot of similarities between the two movies, and most of them were probably intentional. But I don't think it was detrimental to the movie as a whole because contrary to A New Hope, the rest of the movie was very good. I might upset a lot of Star Wars fans here but if you look at Ep.IV from a story and dialogue POV, it's not a very good movie. Parts of it are down right terrible, like the dialogue and some of the characters (common flaws among all George Lucas films). The Force Awakens takes everything good about Ep.IV and ups the quality on the parts that are bad the the point that the similarities become irrelevant to me.

 

Additionally, I think the fact there are at least two more movies to follow plays into the plot of Ep.VII in that this movie is essentially one big setup to the episodes VIII & IX. So the reason most of the plot resembles Ep.IV is because the goal with this movie is not bring about a whole new plot, but introduce new characters such as Finn, Rey and Kylo Ren as well as establish the current state of play for the universe as a whole with the Resistance, the First Order and (eventually) the Jedi Order.  

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