Yeah, I think the winking at the camera on the trash compactor thing was probably the most egregious "call back" everything else was much more subtle.
As for the GUI for the targeting system, I liked that it had the 1970s/80s computer graphics interface. It was consistent and just went to show how much of an old piece-of-junk the Falcon was seen to be.
And when I want to see that formula, I'll put on the first movie.
True. But there's still enough differences in this movie's plot alone to make it not a complete re-tread of ANH, but even just having new and different characters can take a direct rip-off of ANH a little more different and interesting.
It's only scantly similar to ANH in the "person more powerful than they may realize is put on a mission to destroy a world-annihilating spherical weapon."
It also sort of ignores that destroying the Starkiller wasn't even the plot or story of this movie. Our characters have almost nothing to do with it, at least not on the level of Luke in ANH. Their job was to simply go down there, turn off the shield, save Ray, and get out of there. They went off on their own to destroy the reactor more to help the squadron in orbit. The story is more about Rey's arc, Finn's arc and Kylo's arc, the ANH-derivative stuff was just the backdrop.
Yes, for the sake of the plot of this trilogy and for keeping the New Republic contiguous, yes, they needed to destroy the Starkiller for the story but this movie's story is really all about Rey and Ben/Kylo, to a lesser degree Fin and then to an even lesser degree Han. It's about the characters so what's going on around them doesn't really matter, seeing our characters deal with things and their personal journeys matter more.
Ray dealing with her past and moving forward with a greater goal in her life. (In ANH, Luke only wants to stay on Tatooine because of his family there, here Rey wants to stay on NotTatooine because of her emotional connections and delusions that her family is coming back for her there when she really has no tangible, or reasonable, cause to stay.) And it's clear there's more to her past than we, or she, knows. By the end of ANH for the most part Luke's arc is complete (since the ANH wasn't made with the notion of there being a sequel.)
Finn is a defected Storm Trooper is there anyone he's analogous to in the OT? So there's more to him, how was he able to overcome his conditioning and reprogramming? We know why he fears The First Order and why he wants to get far, far away from it but what else does he feel is out there for him? What's going to keep him around going forward?
Kylo Ren (and I'm sure I'm butchering his name, I can't remember these bizarre Star Wars names) is a vastly more complex character than his OT counterpart, Darth Vader. He's obviously conflicted when it comes to the Force but seems to have dedicated himself to going to the Dark Side. But he seems to want to hold himself back a bit from this anger, which may be why he directs his anger towards the walls and computers as opposed to his subordinates.) But what is driving him? What happened between him and Han or him and Luke that pushed him to the Dark Side? Or who lured him that way?
Han's a little more complex here too, from his failed marriage to Leia and him likely seeing himself as a failure to his son in how he raised him. Did *he* do something to push "Ben" to the dark side?
Leia dealing with her side of things with "Ben."
We'll likely get into Luke's side of things with "Ben."
There's a lot going on here characterwise than there was an ANH which was strictly "these people are bad, these people are good, this guy is sort of on the line" type of story. It was Good vs. Evil.
Here? We've got a bit more going on with the characters, yeah we're still dealing with Good vs. Evil, that's just story telling 101. But where are characters are and what they're doing is deeper than the characters in ANH. Luke wants to be a Jedi like his father before him, wants to join the resistance and save freedom.
Rey's on a deeper search for herself, her past and her future.
