Star Wars: The Force Awakens - 9 Mistakes Episode VIII Can't Afford To Repeat

8. Thinly-Drawn Characters

That's right: a lot of the characterisation in the movie was thin. Take Poe Dameron. He does have a sense of character, but he's not really a fully-formed individual. He has mannerisms and aspects of a personality, but we don't learn anything about the man. When audiences first met Han Solo back in 1977, there was a sense of this guy as a human being with a real history; you felt like he'd been places and done things. Poe, on the other hand, is billed as "the best pilot in the galaxy" and that's kind of all you get; J.J. Abrams doesn't bother to go any deeper than that, which becomes even more apparent when you watch the movie for a second time. And Poe isn't the only character who suffers from a case of the one-dimensionals; Rey isn't really given a whole lot of personality, either - she's all of a sudden way too good at everything to feel like a real human being. You could also make complaints about Finn, who appears to be well-drawn, but is actually a pretty scattershot character; the film doesn't know whether to make him cool or bumbling. This is something that Rian Johnson needs to correct in Episode VIII; we need to get a sense of Poe as a human character with his own wants and desires and needs, whilst Rey - in danger of being a bland protagonist - needs to show more than one side.