I guess people are entitled to their opinions...

Rating: 9/10 (5 January 2020)

I'll preface this by saying I've been a big Star Wars fan since the original release in 1978. I've seen all the movies multiple times, read some of the fiction and watched the Clone Wars, Rebels and Mandalorian through and through. My son and I saw it today with no expectations but with a keen awareness of all the hate this is getting. We walked out after it was over and could not understand for a minute what all the bad reviews were about. It was a very good movie.
The pacing was quick for a Star Wars movie in the beginning, at least for the movies along the main trilogy line. A friend said the pacing toward the start was similar to Solo. I agree with that, but thought it was even faster. Not a big deal for me as I had no problem following everything from start to finish, and it found a rhythm fairly quickly.
I have a hard time contextualizing it within the structure of the first 8 movies. It feels like it's own trilogy, and I don't even think I could rank it along side the other films. It's that big in scope. It stands on it's own as an epic, but you need the rest of the anthology as primer. There are some absolutely jaw dropping moments, as well as some very emotional scenes. I had a tear in my eye at least 3 times.
Long story short, don't believe the low reviews. There's plenty of character development, especially around the origins of Rey and her connection to Ben, as well as with Leah and the deeper underlying influence of Palpatine across the entire story arch for the series. I don't by into the argument that The Last Jedi was retconned for a second. If anything, it was fully realized. I also took no issue that some characters were passed over. They had more screen time than they needed and fell outside of the core story arch anyway.
It isn't perfect, but with the exception of ESB, none of the Star Wars movies were. ESB set a very high bar. With RoS, there was a moment or two where I questioned some of the action (I need to see it again as I may have missed something), and a few of the digital facial reconstructions fell deep down the uncanny valley, albeit fleetingly (hello young Leah with a light saber).
Anyone saying they walked out of this is either a troll or needs to have their head examined. Anyone else rating this lower than a 7 needs to get a grip and learn how to pay attention.