The Force is powerless against bad editing.

Rating: 8/10 (1 January 2020)

Dark things to the Force bad editing does. In fact I think everyone's gripe with this movie comes one way or another from the awkward jumps and lack of explanation for what we see from one scene jump to another. A disjointed viewing experience that makes it look like incomplete and badly started vignettes where you miss the first few seconds asking, wait! How did we get here? What's this? Where did that come from? and then you give up trying to figure it out so you don't miss what's going on with the script running at amok speed. The major problem with this 2-hour 12-minute (plus end titles) movie is that it could not possibly be told in less than 2 hours 45 minutes.
So... what about the story? At this point, 42 years and nine films later, we just wanted to find out who Rey is and go home to get even older, Force willing. I don't want to write a review with spoilers, so all I can tell you is that we do find out who Rey is, and so does Rey, and in my opinion at least, the answer is very, very satisfying and takes the prize for a worthy multi-dimensional resolution of the eternal fight with the dark side, all this long time ago in that galaxy far, far away. Well done, writers! Now, go beat-up the editors and the Executives who wanted a short movie for ticket maximization.
OK, maybe some of the staff we saw was a bit over the top, even for Star Wars, maybe a few too many battle cruisers in that big fleet and, not giving anything away, I want to say I may watch it again just to make sure I didn't really see lots of people running around on the outside of a space ship without space suits or oxygen...
Carrie's archival footage worked really well. And the old trio we came to love did save the franchise. Even the new characters were redeemed.
It was a good story that started out by making you wonder "what the..." but it righted itself and delivered. JJ had a very deep hole to climb out of after The Last Jedi and he did, just barely.