Hey, remember that time we had high hopes for every well-dressed new character in The Force Awakens?

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens! The previous entry was the requisite MCC review-not-review, but lighter on details this time for the benefit of those fans who want a fighting change to see the movie with as few surprises spoiled as possible. According to my son, some deranged Expanded Universe fans were invading random YouTube comments sections for videos that had absolutely nothing to do with Star Wars and were posting major TFA spoilers because they are bitter and they are twelve. Between the heavily armed loner gunmen we fear are waiting at the crowded theater lobbies and the entitled trolls waiting to type furiously at innocents at home, the cinema experience is strangely more challenging and less fun than ever.

That didn’t stop us, though. We had thoughts and I remembered to write down many of them. Here’s a COURTESY SPOILER WARNING in case you somehow overlooked the title.

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WHAT I LIKED BEST ABOUT THE FORCE AWAKENS:

* ACKBAR ACKBAR ACKBAR! With original puppeteer Tim Rose still under the hood.
* Everything about abandoned but self-sufficient Rey, Finn attempting to redeem himself for his upbringing and employers, and that darn expressive BB-8, all from start to finish.
* The 21st-century camerawork, not afraid to change up the series’ staid visual style.
* Kylo Ren as a de facto Sith apprentice who refuses to sublimate his emotions through harsh glowering and finds himself prone to evil tantrums.
* A MOCAP’d Academy Award Winner Lupito Nyong’o as Orange Yoda.
* Stormtroopers successfully committing unredeemable evil.
* Best spaceship battle: Rey/Finn swerving through the Star Destroyer husk in the Millennium Falcon.
* Second best spaceship battle: the one with the longest tracking shot down on Planet Endor-With-Businesses.
* The numerous intentionally funny parts, of which the prequels had not nearly enough.
* The lightsaber battles won’t enter the Ray Park Hall of Fame, but at least some of them were supposed to appear rough and untrained.
* Finn’s loose, any-guy-from-the-audience patter and demeanor, which would’ve gotten him banned from the prequels.
* Han Solo: still one of the best.
* Chewbacca: better and more vengeful than ever.
* Fun bit parts for Max von Sydow, Heroes‘ Greg Grunberg, Ken Leung from X-Men: The Last Stand, and the two greatest fighters from The Raid.
* The complete lack of discussions about trade negotiations, intergalactic taxation, imports, exports, and other dull topics from Space Social Studies class.
* Catching the faint, mandatory Wilhelm Scream during the tied-down TIE Fighter sequence.
* The fact that not all questions were answered right away, leaving some toys for writer/director Rian Johnson to play with in Episode VIII.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE BEST ABOUT THE FORCE AWAKENS:

* Complete lack of preamble before the Star Wars theme kicked in. Obviously they can’t use the 20th Century Fox Fanfare anymore, but the moment of silence for the lonely Lucasfilm logo started things off on the wrong foot.
* My wife’s complaints at various points that “The Expanded Universe already did this.”
* The Indominus Rex of Death Stars.
* Gwendoline Christie as the new Boba Fett.
* Andy Serkis as the Great and Powerful Oz.
* Third best spaceship battle: all the rest, because thousands of CG spaceships flitting about pell-mell and going pew-pew-pew at each other at the same time doesn’t do much for me. Space dogfights haven’t changed much since Babylon 5 or Deep Space Nine‘s final season.
* Still unclear on the differences between the First Order, the Empire, the Republic, the Resistance, and the Rebel Alliance.
* The New Cantina with the magical Jedi Temple basement that no one ever stumbled across before Rey showed up.
* Seeing the catwalk over the chasm and thinking to myself how nothing good ever comes of bridges over chasms.
* Seeing Han looking forlornly from hiding at Kylo Ren on the bridge and knowing exactly how the next five minutes would play out, beat for beat. I love seeing a film without suffering any major spoilers in advance, but there’s a different kind of dissatisfaction when I can predict where a major scene is going without them.
* The two best fighters from The Raid got to do exactly zero martial arts.
* “We have this partial star map with Luke’s whereabouts, but we can’t find it without the rest of the map!” Or you could go to a planet where someone’s invented astronomy, let them peg exactly which constellations are showing on the map fragment, and plot a course straight to Lukesville without worrying about how that stubborn R2 is holding out on crucial info and ought to be tried for droid treason or robot contempt or whatever.
* A dead stop at lightspeed should’ve wrecked the Falcon so many times over.
* The two best fighters from The Raid got to do exactly zero martial arts.

WHAT I CAN’T DECIDE WHETHER I LIKE OR LOATHE IN THE FORCE AWAKENS:

* Domhnall Gleeson as an emphatic commandant glad to be done with his Argentina hideaway for good.
* Kylo Ren with his mask off, nervous and afraid, looking less like Han or Leia and more like Johnny Utah.
* The cameos I didn’t or couldn’t possibly have spotted, including Warwick Davis and several mentioned in a helpful article.
* Fifteen whole seconds of Luke. His lips said nothing, but his eyes said “To Be Continued”. ARGH.

We have plans to see TFA at least one more time in the next two weeks, so I’ll be curious to see what changes or gets added to either list. If nothing else, I’m hoping to better savor Ackbar’s big scenes, because our commanding fish-man totally got the short shrift here.