I know it's become fashionable over the last 20 years or so for people to downplay Lucas' involvement with TESB since it's the best SW movie to date, though a lot of those people seem don't seem to realize that that movie and ROTJ were made with more of a TV hierarchy (i.e. the Exec Producer is the one with the vision instead of the director, who's just there to do the legwork; a practice that's become fairly popular in big-budget movies). That said, I won't deny Lucas' success kind of made him lazy in some aspects. It's like a person who's only ever driven a Model-T suddenly trying to drive in a world full of Corvettes but not making all of the necessary adjustments.
Anyway, now that I've finally seen TFA, I can say I definitely enjoyed it, but it still felt like a missed opportunity to me.
CAUTION: MILD SPOILERS AHEAD
As Mike said, there was a little too much fan (lip?) service and definitely too much borrowing of situations/plot lines from the ANH (opening Stormtrooper ambush, valuable info for 'good guys' getting stored inside a droid, said droid ending up on a desert planet and discovered by a Force-sensitive individual, good guy getting tortured to learn location of aforementioned valuable info, yet another planet-destroying battle station, heroes stopping at a cantina, beloved hero from numerically-previous SW trilogy killed off in front of other heroes, X-Wings doing trench runs to hit battle station's one vulnerable spot in order to destroy it, etc.).
I also felt a lot of the aliens didn't really look 'Star Wars-y'. And no sign of any classic aliens like the Rodians or the Twi'leks anywhere (save our favorite respective Mon Calamari and Sullustan, Admiral Ackbar and Nien Nunb in bit parts)? ???
The biggest problem, though, apart from all the scenarios lifted directly from the OT was the major disconnect between this movie and ROTJ (something that doesn't really exist between ROTS and ANH; if anything, there's more of a disconnect between TPM and AOTC). We definitely needed more background on how things went to hell so quickly after the fall of the Empire. Maybe (and hopefully) this will happen in these latter 2 installments of this trilogy
And overall, while a lot moments did genuinely feel like Star Wars, the majority felt more like someone doing a good SW impersonation. Finn often came off like Will Smith in "Independence Day" to me, and some of the dialogue felt too contemporary and thus anachronistic to the SW universe (even if it WAS less clunky than a lot of PT dialogue).
I'd also just like to express my relief that there IS a next generation of Skywalkers in this trilogy, and appears to possibly be more of an examination of the grey areas between the light and dark sides of the Force (mostly what little we actually know about Lucas' original brief VII-IX outline).
