I finally got to watch the new Star Wars movie on New Year’s Day. Long story short, I actually really liked it. While Star Wars doesn’t have quite the presence in my life that Star Trek does, I still enjoy the original trilogy quite a bit, and I like to play The Old Republic quite a bit.

I am going to put the rest of this under the cut as there may be some mild spoilers.

One of the major things I liked about this movie was the diversity of the cast. The three major characters in the movie are played by a woman, a black man, and a Latino man, and one of the villains, Captain Phasma (Gwendoline Christie), is a woman who actually wears practical, boobplate-free armor. After ROTJ shoved Princess Leia in a metal bikini, that is actually quite refreshing.

As for the characters themselves, I liked more or less all of them. I didn’t care too much for Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) as a villain too much, but this is the first movie so there is still some room for him to grow there (this essay is a quite good exploration of the character, though be ware of spoilers).  Finn (John Boyega) was absolutely adorable, and I loved his interactions with the other characters (especially Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron). Rey, played by Daisy Ridley and who was basically the film’s actual main character, was delightfully fierce but also intelligent and, at times, vulnerable.

There is also the nostalgia factor in play. There are a lot of parallels that can be drawn between The Force Awakens and Episode 4, though this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Nor is it bad that characters from the original trilogy appear here as well, since it kind of feels like they’re passing on the torch.

Did I mention that Finn is fucking adorable? Seriously, look at him:

He’s like a big, human puppy.