I feel like I've finally zeroed in on why I liked this movie so much. As much as I hate to say it, I think a lot of it was rooted in nostalgia. Normally, I like new things, new stories, new characters, new adventures, yadda yadda yadda. But this movie really did root itself in A New Hope. And it didn't really tell any kind of a new story. But I feel like this movie reached out to all of us "old" Star Wars fans in that it gave us a 'grown up' movie with dire consequences, conflicts, power struggles and everything else. But all it really did was fill in some inconsequential gaps without altering the overall story arc.

 

It did give us new characters, but ones that we would be familiar with. My peer group and I could easily wrap our heads around why Galen would not want to help build a Death Star to help the Empire, and why a Science Officer would view it as being his key to the upper echelons of power. The movie showed that the Rebel Alliance wasn't all buddy buddy with one another all the time and that there were real power struggles and conflicts of interest going on as you would expect. There was none of this in Episodes IV through VI, because there probably didn't need to be. 

 

And mostly, I think it was a sharp contrast to Ep VII in that The Force Awakens was trying to bring in new fans to an old story but couldn't get out of their way when trying to come up with something new. 

 

Also, Vader.

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