I said "books" for a reason, the stuff you are referring to where the emperor comes back are from the comics, which I despise. Star wars comics are nothing more than crap written by lazy fan children who want to make a name for themselves by writing twists into the star wars universe thinking that other authors will continue their stories. Luckily this didn't happen and if you stick to the books you never even hear about the emperor being reborn, unless you read the comics or wookiepedia.
I would have loved them to make a movie about Thrawn and that time period. So much good stuff happened there. All the rogue squadron stories, the rebuilding of the jedi, the rebirth of the republic.
Anyway, I found the new star wars movie extremely disappointing due to the lack of originality and not making sense. Its almost the exact story line from The New Hope movie. The main character starts out on a desert planet and finds a droid on a secret mission with secret plans. The bad guys come and they have to escape the desert planet in the Millennium Falcon. The wise old guy takes them to a cantina to find a ship where there's bounty hunters. The new superweapon is just a plantet sized deathstar that shoots a laser to destroy planets. Upon escaping the bad guys again the goods guys go to the good-guy base on some forest planet and formulate a plan to destroy the deathstar before it is ready to fire and destroy their base. They get in their ships and fly towards the superweapon and attack it. They have to rescue the female protagonist from said superweapon by infiltration. They have to deactivate something on said superweapon for completion of plot line. The bad guy senses the presence of the old guy who he used to have an attachment to, goes to find him, and ends up killing him. To destroy the superweapon the goodguy pilot flies down a trench and exploits a small hole to attack and damage which creates a chain reaction to destroy the superweapon. Luckily they destroy the superweapon last-second before it fires its deadly beem and save the good-guy base. Upon the destruction of superweapon all heros are seen flying away and all key bad guys have escaped. Upon returning to the base people rush out to celebrate with the pilot who made the critical hits on the superweapon. Oh, and stormtroopers still suck at aiming
Now, which movie did I just describe? If you guessed episode 4 or episode 7 you would be correct.
Moving on, I also had alot of other problems with the movie, just with stuff making no sense. So, like episode 4 this movie starts out with so much backstory but little explanation on events leading up to the movie. There are several factions mentioned and little explaining done, as to their roles. We had The resistance, the first order, and the republic, none of which were explained very well.
Then there was the force. Darth Ren used the force at the beginning of the movie to freeze that one guy and the laser blast, after releasing his grasp the laser continues its current trajectory and velocity. I mean laser bolts aren't self-propelling or infinite. Later in the movie, rey was able to use the force and pick up on things with no training. All other movies have suggested that using the force takes great concentration and practice. Luke is barely able to use telekinesis with basic training from Obi-Wan, and Rey is able to overpower Ren's telekinetic grip on the lightsaber with no training after Fin falls (what's with all the one syllable names in this movie?). She was also very emotional, which would have made using the force, without falling to the dark side, nearly impossible at her level.
Talking briefly on Kylo Ren. His character really made no sense. There was no reason for him to go all evil and have some tragic fall to the dark side, at least none was mentions other then Snoke seducing him to the dark side. From what we see there is no tragic life event, no hate relationship, or no cravings of power to lead him down that path. Only conclusion I get is it's teen emo problems as all the young actors look and act like teenagers. So, star wars, the teens strike back, puberty awakens?
Talking briefly on Fin. He obviously has no connection with the force, so idk why they wasted time to give him a lightsaber other than for not making the lightsaber-time-quota initially, other than for cutting down trees. He was as out of place as the stormtrooper he fought with the baton thing, because blasters are too mainstream now I guess and while all the other stormies are going around shooting people, we wanted to beat them with his stick. I guess stun setting on the blasters are a thing of the past to.
Then there was the part where Han said "Those are explosives" and Fin like, "Now you tell me". Seriously, that guy is supposed to be part of the most elite fighting force in the galaxy, trained from young age to fight, and doesn't know what explosive charges look like?! He also had all this knowledge of the bad-guy base that was supposed to be valuable even though the resistance had a technical readout of the base. Like when he said the weakness was that one thingy *points* *pop-up hologram comes out showing the weakness*, so unless he had the blueprints memorized, all the information Fin gave, the good guys already had...
Now for everything else that didn't make sense. The destruction of those planets was pretty much pointless as the audience was give no information on them. So, when they blew up we were like "Oh no! Not.....those planets, wait what?"
Abrams seems to like his indestructible space ships. In the second star trek movie he pulled the same crap and in star wars he kept throwing the Millennium Falcon around like a brick. IDK how space ships work where he's from but they don't work like that....anywhere. You can't just smash something into the ground and still fly away in it later. There was also all the technical mumbo-jumbo they added in for the sole purpose of confusing people and to get the point across that Rey knew how space ships worked from scrapping stuff back in Jakku. But anyways, at the end of the movie I was wondering why they didn't just crash the millennium falcon into the important thing to destroy it. Also, at the beginning when Fin is on the quad-gun he well established that the gun had limits and did not point backwards, yet for some reason he was in the bottom gun turret shooting backwards when the Falcon was staying low, skimming the ground. How is this supposed to be effective?
On the subject of space ships, I'm not sure why on a small tie-fighter you need both a pilot and gunner. Has flying and shooting become too difficult for imperial pilots, Also, if you are cramming to people int he cockpit of a tie-fighter where the heck are the engines, guns, fuel/power cells for this thing.
I'm also not sure how stars work from where Abrams is from, but again, they don't work like that...anywhere. Seems also ineffective if your superweapons is that big couldn't you just have multiple superlasers and reactors to power them and get the same multiple planet destruction effect without risking turning the star you are orbiting into a supernova, clasping into a black hole, or risking all the star energy destabilizing within your planet. Guess it puts the star back in star wars at least. How did they build it unnoticed over what would have been many years.
The emotional droids thing was really annoying, ran out of dogs so droids take their place. C-3p0's red arm just to make the you-don't-recognize-me joke, seriously. Then the whole thing with artoo shutting down because Luke left. He survives all previous movies, the death of all jedi, anakin turning into darth vader, padme dying, the empire, but goddammit Luke left, so artoo's shutting down. Oh yeah, Luke's 10 seconds of screen time...lol
Leia hugs Rey even though they had never even seen or met each other, awkward hug time. Rey is proficient with a blaster without ever using one before an is hitting stormtroopers accurately every time. Rey speaks droid?! Rey can pilot a ship without ever doing it, just from scrapping them?! It's like what Lucas did with Anakin in episode 1 except Anakin was actually smart, smart enough to build a podracer and drive it, which is still more experience then Reys had. And people thought Lucas' ideas sucked, what does it mean when they get re-used. To quote a famous character, "who's more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?"