And it’s theoretically a neat inversion to have Rey desperately want to stay on Jakku instead of making like Luke by trying to escape her boring, dusty planet. But whereas Luke’s journey was about losing everything and then seizing the opportunity to move on and make something of himself, Rey has surprisingly little control over the plot. Scene-to-scene, she’s a badass, the kind who can overpower Kylo Ren without any real training. But her overarching narrative throughout the movie is about being either pursued or kidnapped (and then escaping and surviving). She wants to go nowhere except home—except for at the end, when she meets up with Luke. I suppose you could argue that this is a more realistic depiction of what it would take for someone to uproot their life and try and become an intergalactic hero. But it also contributes to the feeling that the plot moves mostly because of the story requirements of the screenwriters—aided by the catchall plot powers of the Force—rather than because of the decisions of characters with defined goals.

Sims: What I love in this film is the idea of a makeshift family being formed, an echo of the first film but one of the faintest. In Star Wars, Leia is already a hardened Rebel commander, Solo is a salty space dog in his 30s, and Luke is the only wide-eyed innocent, cast into a dangerous world and a movement he gets swept up in. Here, the three main characters have all been ripped from their families. Finn was raised from babyhood to be a brainwashed Stormtrooper. Rey is waiting for the people who abandoned her on Jakku, believing a lie she’s told herself so many times it’s become the truth (that they’re going to return). Kylo Ren, the son of Han Solo and Leia (gasp!), the grandson of Vader, and the former apprentice of Luke, is tortured with the weight of that legacy. The force that’s pulling Finn and Rey together is that need for family, that desire to not be alone—and that’s the same force Kylo is seemingly resisting.

Man, just thinking about Kylo Ren gets me excited to see this movie again. Compare him to the prequels, where George Lucas had three bites at the apple to try and create a similar character, a powerful Jedi crushed by the burden of expectation (Anakin Skywalker). He came off as a soggy dweeb when he was supposed to be tormented. Kylo Ren’s tantrums feel like privileged whining, to be sure, but there’s real edge and fear and weight to Adam Driver’s performance, and his climactic decision with Han Solo, his turn to true darkness, feels much more earned. Abrams has returned to those simple storytelling beats that Lucas once used well, then used badly, and the notes are familiar—but they’re still well-played.

Kornhaber: Oh, damn: “The force that’s pulling Finn and Rey together is that need for family, that desire to not be alone—and that’s the same force Kylo is seemingly resisting.” That’s good stuff, and probably even true! I saw the movie again on Sunday, and this time I noticed how the script itself seemed to acknowledge its own implausibilities. When the two young heroes start squealing to one another about their unlikely success piloting the Millennium Falcon, or when Rey puffs, “That was lucky” after saving Finn from Rathtars, it’s both an example of Abrams making like lots of other 2015 filmmakers and going meta, and also of the characters paying attention to what’s going on around them. It got to the point that when the ground opened up between Kylo and Rey after their big lightsaber battle, the deus ex machina didn’t feel cheap at all. It would be weirder if, after all it had done up until then, the universe suddenly decided not to intervene.