I hope you all enjoyed your break, because I’m about to give you people enough contrarian commentary to make up for my month’s long absence. The Force Awakens was meh.

To be clear, I won’t go as far to say it was terrible – but it wasn’t great. Disney wanted to cash in on their $4 billion investment, so instead of taking the series into a bold new direction, they opted to take the safe route and hired J.J. Abrams to direct the copy-and-paste, 2015 rendition of A New Hope. It’s like Disney took the adage “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” to heart and figured the best way to satisfy their fans would be to just rehash what already came before.

Without spoiling the movie, although I’m sure everybody reading this has either seen the movie or has had the movie spoiled for them, I’d like to draw a handful of similarities between Episode VII: The Force Awakens and Episode IV: A New Hope. A droid lands on a desert planet where it is tasked with carrying plans of the enemy’s base to the rebel forces. The droid is greeted by a teenage-ish character that then runs into Han Solo who, in turn, helps them escape from the enemy. They then make their way back to the rebel base with the plans, where a group of rebel leaders stands around a 3-D image of the enemy base, which incredibly turns out to be a world sized weapon that has the capability of annihilating entire planets. Next, they form the plan to, get this, blow the thing up through one inherent structural flaw. In order to do this, they’ll have to send a flurry of X-Wings to go assault the base. Now, if you’ve seen Episode IV, you’ll see where this whole string of events is leading to. And I, for one, didn’t really enjoy the fact that I called the ending from the moment I realized BB-8 was carrying plans about the Starkiller Base.

I need to address this because I found myself with a (probably) pretentious, turned-off look on my face every time the movie tried to shoehorn some awkward humor into the already clunky and laughable dialogue. I heard that the movie had more humor than the rest of the series, which had me skeptical about the type of audience they were hoping to draw laughter from. It definitely wasn’t me, that much was clear. I can only say it was shallow and full of one-liners that didn’t land. Speaking of dialogue, I found myself shaking my head almost every scene where a character opened their mouth. The only scene where I found myself actually having fun with The Force Awakens was when no one on screen was trying to talk. I really can’t stress how weak the dialogue was.

I’ll stop here because I fear I’ll go too far with my rant. I’d rate the movie a C+. It doesn’t deserve a 94% approval on Rotten Tomatoes.