The Force Awakens was the movie that convinced me to abandon the Star Wars franchise. I despise every part of it.

For starters, the modern cinematography is absolutely nauseating. The camera angles are tilted and skewed instead of straight. The camera keeps shifting, rolling and shaking to create a fake sense of movement instead of focusing on what needs to be focused on. And the lighting is terribly dark. This kind of camerawork makes me seasick. I don’t want to look at the screen when that happens, and I haven’t even started on the actual content of the movie.

The plot is a badly recycled version of the original classic A New Hope, but with heavier action sequences, more nauseating CGI, and all the life and soul sucked out of it. The older members of the returning cast have all degraded into broken-down, less confident, less moral, more awful versions of themselves for no good reason, as if all their heroic deeds from the original movies have amounted to nothing. The new cast of characters I’m supposed to be rooting for have personalities so out of sync with their backstories, it’s as if they have no idea what galaxy any of them are living in and were likely transplanted there from a different movie. Our heroine, Rey, routinely goes from having zero experience in many advanced skills such as flying, holding a blaster or using the Force, and instantly is able to outperform veterans and do impossible feats with no training or even trying. By itself, that would be annoying. However, the irritation is compounded by Rey having no desire to be a hero. Many characters drop hints and suggestions that Rey should become a hero because it is her destiny, to which she replies “no” or “I don’t want to”, and yet the plot railroads her into taking the hero path almost completely against her will. Her companion Finn is supposed to have been trained from birth to be a stone-hearted stormtrooper, except he spends the whole movie cluelessly stumbling around for comic relief that isn’t even funny. And our villain, Kylo Ren, is barely even a threat. He’s a pretty-boy with no self-control or self-determination, parading around in a stupid costume, making big, over-the-top displays of villainy to convince himself that he isn’t a total failure at life who could benefit from a good, swift kick in the pants to knock some sense into him. He is a loser and a poser. If Darth Vader were alive or Anakin Skywalker’s ghost could see him now, I am certain he would be ashamed.

Beyond that, the plot is loaded with all sorts of needless spectacle and over-the-top, melodramatic “emotion traps”, as if the film makers were all too cognizant that the audience had certain expectations and intentionally played us all for fools. That part where a dying stormtrooper we never met leaves a bloody hand print on his comrade’s armor? That’s an emotion trap. When Finn finds a crashed starfighter in the desert that subsequently explodes violently and then sinks into the sand, leaving no hope for rescue, only for the pilot to have ejected beforehand and survived? That’s an emotion trap, and I saw that twist coming. When Han Solo suffers a prolonged assassination and fall at the hands of Kylo Ren? Not only did I see it coming, but I was yelling at the screen that Han should have seen it coming, too.

By the time the movie was over, I had a sense that the franchise was headed in a bad direction: rather than telling sincere and interesting stories, they now only cared about exploiting fan loyalty and then stabbing them in the back just to watch them squirm. When a franchise starts down that dark path, forever it would dominate its destiny. So, I had to make a choice for myself. I left the Star Wars franchise behind.