Wow!

Rating: 7/10 (19 December 2019)

I would put it somewhere above Jedi, FA, and TLJ, but below A New Hope and Empire.
The film is purely, balls to the walls, Star Wars. It is so Star Wars, IT HURTS. The plot moves at lightspeed. The action is INTENSE. I was on the edge of my seat with my jaw in my lap for the majority of the film. As predictable as the plot ends up being, every choice is so satisfying, I could find few complaints. The only considerable depreciation in plot development I felt was with the forced bits of depth/ backstory added onto Poe with his masked former spice liason, and Finn's new confidante found in a fellow Imperial-turned-rebel orphan. It was as if JJ was struggling to retcon a blooming romance with more traditional, cisgendered love interests, when Finn and Poe so obviously want each other.
Apart from that, this major retread of Return of the Jedi felt so amped up and exciting, I really didn't care that it was an amped up and exciting retread of Return of the Jedi.
Start to finish, the best time I've had at the movies since Fury Road.
One coda of regretful criticism is that the final scene did leave enough evidence to (hopefully unintentionally) imply that Rey was an incestuous love child of Luke and Leia, which kind of gives the whole saga a weird vibe in retrospect.