The whole opening scene was just a tease. Starts off with the Brewmeister and Poe with that funny exchange, then Ren catches the blaster shot, and you never see Brewmeister again and Poe only shows up for like 2 min total in the rest of the movie. Then you read up on the characters online and Brewmeister was apparently like the Indiana Jones of the SW universe, but you'd never know it from the movie. Anyways, Poe was really a throwaway character. They could have removed that character and it wouldnt have really mattered. Finn could have easily escaped on his own when he decided storm trooper life wasnt for him.
They'll probably use Poe more in the sequels, but 75% of TFA is like that.
Poe was originally supposed to die in the movie, J.J. had told Oscar Isaac that much at the beginning. And then J.J. decided that Poe should live on, and will likely become a prominent character in the sequels.
Also, am I the only one that doesn't like Poe...at all? He was so 2-dimensional and completely boring in this flick. He has no personality. Not yet, anyway.
Probably the worst I've ever seen Oscar Isaac and it seems to me he just phoned it in with this underwritten stand-in of a character.
I didn't think he was that one dimensional. Frankly, I thought he and Finn had a good on-screen chemistry and you could sense a kind of charismatic quality in Poe, but of course his screen time was so minimal that Isaac couldn't really imbue the character with a ton of energy. I think he'll be a fine character and a great actor for the part as they take the story further.
Unfortunately, like so many other things in this film, it's either poorly explained, needing the next movie, or you need to read the books or magazines to understand anything. This movie was very poorly written.
I don't think they are intending for it to be a requirement to read other material just to get the backstory. They were very vague with TFA, throwing a lot at us with little background to explain why... but I reckon it is getting set up so that the backstory will get filled in with the sequels and potentially a little in the anthology movies.
But as with any massive saga, only so much information is actually put into the movies. The original movies had the benefit of being the creator of the story, and really, characterizations within novels came later to provide story that didn't exist in the first place.
Now, they are creating new books right away with the new sequel trilogy, mostly erasing the previous canon but adopting some of it and starting a whole new post-Lucas canon. So I think it is fair to expect some additional details, perhaps entire backstories, to be only skimmed in the movies but find themselves painstakingly detailed in the books. What else are books for if not additional character story?
So, do we want to have to read a book to get the backstory on some new characters? Not really, but it's that or no book and still have new characters with hardly any background on them. In a big universe like SW, you just cannot possible contain everything that you need to know in the movies alone. Of course, you don't NEED to know that information, it's a treat, a bonus on the side if you wish to explore the story further. But the movies will stand alone, though some characters will likely be a little thin. As if that didn't occur in any of the previous SW movies.
In other words, don't worry - this is the first movie with new characters. They will be fleshed out in time.
I doubt Ren is going to be the big baddy in the films, he'll evolve and things might make more sense, but really, what you have right now is an emotionally immature adult who aspires to be what his grandpa was. And with that, said grandpa was really the first to utilize a mask/helmet. Ren doesn't need that mask, but he wants it, wants to try and live up to what Vader was in his mind. He wants to emulate him, so with that comes the mask. But it seems he still wants to have the emotional connection of having face to face interactions with foes, it has more weight. So he's trying to kind of have both worlds - we'll see how that turns out, but I don't get the hate - it fits the character IMHO. I thought it all made sense. Maybe it was created solely to further connect this movie to A New Hope, but even so, I think the characterization fits perfectly.
If Anakin had a prior mentor or family member wear a mask like that, he probably would have chose to wear one too once he fully embraced the dark side. It just so happens that that full embrace came at the same time as the need for the mask. It's the emotional immaturity and lust for power and meaning, and to create an image for foes to fear. For Vader it just came with the territory but he also fully embraced it, just as others may want to embrace it without having a real need.