Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to a special roundtable episode of FilmSack to start your new year of 2026, where we are sitting around said virtual table and doing a thing we promised a long time ago.

We said back in 2015, we were going to rewatch the Force Awakens from that same year, which we reviewed the weekend we saw it. We'd never done that before. And we said, let's see how we feel in 10 years. And a bunch of you reminded us, and gosh, dang it, we did it. We're here. It's me, Scott Johnson. It's Brian Ibit, Brian Dunaway.

Hello.

And of course, Brandy Jordan. Hello. It is. Hello. And thank you for giving us an opportunity to just talk about Star Wars anyway. Like, I feel like it comes up all the time. And sometimes I just want to talk about Star Wars. Yeah. Plus around Christmas time is it's kind of gotten synchronized into Christmas era time, right? So it was a perfect time to do it. Yeah, I agree. So we're going to get a chance to do that today. It was a little bit weird back in 2015 because, you know, we hadn't had Star Wars since the prequels. And it was this whole new, you know, era and Disney owned it now. And it was like all this excitement around it. Wait, were we optimistic or pessimistic? Do we, or were we kind of like waiting? I was optimistic. I remember that. I remember being very optimistic. And I remember being fairly pleased with it. It's the final chapter of that trilogy is what really soured me on kind of all of it because it made the other

two seem like what was the point of these other two and also I don't know in retrospect I think

they were just a little too safe we can get into all that in a second but it was unusual for film

sack to take a movie and do that yeah we'll definitely come back to back to it. Like we, before seeing this, before it existed, what we thought of J.J. Abrams, for instance,

was pretty positive, you know?

Yeah. Well, Lids Blair, but otherwise, yeah, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Although that second Star Trek movie,

although, did second Star Trek movie come out after Force Awakens or was it before?

I was after? I don't remember. Because that's where I started going, oh, that wasn't very good. It's starting to see some chinks in the armor, basically. Yeah. Yeah. I wish you had a monster. Star Trek Into Darkness came out in 2013. Okay, so just prior. It's not that that should have been a sign or anything

Because I also don't know that this is so much of an Abrams problem as it is a control at Disney problem, and their unwillingness to do much anything new. They just were so like, let's give everybody what they think they want. Well, this worked before. Can we just, let's just do that.

Can we just do that? Yeah. Were we wanting that, though? Were we kind of like, you took a few too many chances before? Some people do. Yeah. And I think, yeah, I mean, to the degree of the prequels saying, all right, we're just going to go off left field. You know, here's, here's Anakin. He's this kid.

Look at all these cool spaceships.

What?

Looks like they're flying backwards because we designed them all weird. we're just going to go off left field. You know, here's, here's Anakin, he's this kid.

Look at all these cool spaceships.

What?

Looks like they're flying backwards because we designed them all weird.

And, you know, this movie, this movie had an unfair disadvantage and maybe not.

But anyway, we all, some of us grew up in different generations of Star Wars.

I had a friend and another friend from two different eras have a discussion over the holidays at a holiday meal that I thought the first one

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