Even though there is much to appreciate about Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I still didn’t care for it when I saw it for a second time yesterday. My wife hadn’t seen it yet and I wanted to reappraise it, as well as view it in the most conventional possible setting (a regular 2D auditorium on a Tuesday afternoon). I appreciated certain aspects a bit more this time while noticing other issues that bugged me even more than last week.

My wife had a lot of the same misgivings that I did, but she (like me) was so engaged by the new characters that she’s onboard for whatever comes next in the franchise. Yet as I watched the film in a theater three-quarters full of excited fans, I wondered to what extent I was seeing the future of movie going. Not just the same franchises reborn over and over again, but basically the same movies as well.

In brief, Abrams’s first two dogfight-ish action sequences (the outer-space escape and the Falcon introduction) are terrifically staged set pieces, and I should have noted as much in my initial review even if I wanted something a bit more “never seen that before.” Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren is indeed a terrific new character, and If you want to go all thinkpiece-y you can argue that he’s a giant metaphor for how every property you love will eventually be ruined by its worst fans. And once again I was amused by how weirdly amusing it was to see light saber battles with combatants who all were mostly untrained and kinda terrible at it. It’s a fun new dynamic compared to the slow burn fights in the original films and the Olympic-level events in the Prequels.

But the film is truly hampered by the inclusion of the older characters, and especially by the need to get them mostly back to their A New Hope status quo. It’s not just that the film is a glorified remake of the first film with bits of the first two sequels thrown in, but rather that said structure demands a narrative that renders the prior “original trilogy” films noticeably less enjoyable in hindsight. In short (and sans spoilers), The Force Awakens is basically the next chapter of the Star Wars saga that plays out like the much-hated series finale of How I Met Your Mother. The older characters will recede in importance soon enough, with the focus primarily on the likes of Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), Poe (Oscar Isaac), and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) where it belongs. And if this was a passing of the torch chapter in order to bridge the gap between new and old, a kind of Star Trek: Generations, then so be it. The future of Star Wars is secure.

Read the article “Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Why Its Box Office Victory May be Bad News for Hollywood” on forbes.com.