The early “buzz” on Star Wars: The Force Awakens is very positive.

There’s a cynical part of me that thinks bad news on Star Wars: The Force Awakens is coming. Not that it deserves it, but when one person on a blog says something bad about the movie, it will be a sexy piece of information to pick up and scare fans and a few mean-spirited people will likely bask in the discontent it generates. I hope that doesn’t happen and my cynicism is misplaced. So far, I have not heard anything even close to that. Everyone is really pleased with the results so far. It doesn’t matter if they loved or hated the prequel trilogy, the feelings about The Force Awakens are fairly united.

First up, over the summer when they were filming The Force Awakens, I never really heard a bad thing. The most critical anyone from the set got with me was that it was reusing a lot of old elements from the Original Trilogy and was somewhat derivative in design but everything else was extremely pleasing. That’s a fair criticism, too. Eventually they would go into a great defense of the movie about how on track it feels and how it has good spirit. That was incredibly encouraging to me as a fan slightly fearful of Star Wars without George Lucas.

Now, we are starting to hear from people I am hesitant to call “sources,” but they have seen the movie. These are people in various walks of the industry around our favorite galaxy and it is thumbs up all around from them. I am hearing the same thing from friends of friends as well. Another section of friends at NYCC I trust have heard nothing but positive things about the last few cuts of the film.

At this point, if you had to bet, betting on a new classic film being born out of this new era of Star Wars feels on.

Related to this is the news that Abrams has nearly locked the movie. Rumor is it has to be finished completely by Thanksgiving. However, Disney has the right to alter the movie if they should feel the need to do so. Vanity Fair (about 35:00 minutes in) has an interesting conversation with Abrams about his cut of the film and even though he has final cut a company like Disney could legally run a truck through it if they wanted to:

Hopefully Disney lets the creatives control the film and they leave the movie alone if it works the way it is. I have a feeling it won’t be touched, and Abrams seems comfortable and confident they won’t mess with his film. However, even Abrams is the first to admit they spent $4 billion on it and have the right to come by anytime and make suggestions. Abrams seems to feel that Disney, Bob Iger, and Alan Horn understand what they’re doing by letting Kathleen Kennedy run Lucasfilm in the way she wants to.

On a side note, at about 50 minutes in it sounds like Abrams also experimented with the xLAB/ILM Oculus technology that Gareth Edwards used for Star Wars: Rogue One.

On another side note, ratings and runtimes are starting to come out now. I’m not an expert on this kind of thing, but maybe those are not final as they still have time to tinker with the film before its release.

The buzz being good is a great thing. Does it mean the movie will please everyone? I highly doubt it. By all accounts the movie is the best Star Wars movie that could have been made at this time and that’s all we can really ask for.