The semi-official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, has launched a backlash against the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, after complaining that its villains are not nearly evil enough.

The paper’s anonymous critic dismissed newcomers Kylo Ren, played by Adam Driver, and Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis via mo-cap) as pale imitations of the long-running space saga’s traditional baddies.

“The new director’s set-up fails most spectacularly in its representation of evil, meaning the negative characters,” laments the newspaper. “Darth Vader and above all the Emperor Palpatine were two of the most efficient villains in that genre of American cinema.

“The counterpart of Darth Vader, Kylo Ren, wears a mask merely to emulate his predecessor, while the character who needs to substitute the Emperor Palpatine as the incarnation of supreme evil represents the most serious defect of the film,” continues the unnamed critic. “Without revealing anything about the character, all we will say is that it is the clumsiest and tackiest result you can obtain from computer graphics.”

L’Osservatore Romano has been owned by the Holy See since 1861, but its reputation as a font of critical conservatism has taken something of a bashing in recent times. In 1960, the newspaper launched a full-scale attack on Federico Fellini’s classic of Roman indolence and debauchery, La Dolce Vita, labelling it an “incitement to evil crime and vice”, deploring its effect on “unsafe minds”, and roundly rebuking the film-maker for trying to “moralise through immorality”. But lately, reviewers have taken a confusingly liberal approach, even praising 2012’s Skyfall for its “extremely beautiful Bond girls”.

The Force Awakens has a 95% “fresh” rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, indicating near-universal acclaim, and has picked up five-star reviews from the Guardian, the Times and the Telegraph. But L’Osservatore Romano is not the only organ to rubbish it.

Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir labelled JJ Abrams’ movie a “simulacrum of something that was already a simulacrum of something else” made by a director he called a “one-man industry of cultural recycling and repurposing”. Writing in the New Statesman, Ryan Gilbey described Abrams as “a ceramicist producing a brand new model from a faulty mould”, adding: “The same flaws and shortcomings apparent in the rest of the series (the prioritising of plot over characterisation, the feeble humour and simple-minded morality) are beyond his power to correct.” Meanwhile, Time magazine’s Stephanie Zacharek complained: “Somewhere along the way, Abrams begins delivering everything we expect, as opposed to those nebulous wonders we didn’t know we wanted.”

Some fans have also complained about the movie’s numerous plot holes, which Abrams and his co-screenwriters Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt have begun the process of clearing up.

