Overall, a fairly weak effort

Rating: 3/10 (31 December 2015)

I was going to give this film 4/10. However, way too many people clearly walked out of this film and gave it 10/10 on IMDb without proper objective assessment and were too caught up in the hype. One thing I can say for sure: this film should not be in the top 250 films of all time and should not have an overall rating of 8.6. To bring balance to the force, I'm going to slightly under-rate it.
On a positive note, the opening was fairly good and action scenes involve ships battling it out were fun. At times, shades of the original trilogy came through.
But what others say is very true. It's almost like they took the base story line of Episode 4 (A New Hope) and "reworked" it. What's worse is that they also seemed to have their version of the bar scene and as expected, it was like a Jim Henson eye candy festival of strange looking characters, some playing music. Both broadly and in the detail, there was a real over arching lack of creativity and too much revisiting of previous films.
There seemed to be a bit of conflict in the imagining of the new trilogy, as the writers wanted to preserve ties with the old, but roll in a new generation of heroes to push the story forward. Harrison Ford looked too old for playing Han Solo again and didn't add much to the film by being included in it. Leia seemed tired and weak overall. Luke Skywalker: well here's my big spoiler: I can't believe how much he was billed as a leading cast member, yet is in the film for about 90 seconds at the end and doesn't say a word.
I'm afraid that the lack of character development and patient story telling was obvious as well. Alec Guiness sitting down and recounting "before the empire... before the dark times" was part of the original Star Wars magic. With this film, it seemed that they tried to cram lots of action in for no good reason and this came at the expense of the audience learning more about the characters' backgrounds and recent history of their universe. Most characters seemed stressed and few had charisma.
After the dust settled on the initial reactions to this film, I saw a lot of people being very critical of it and I started to suspect that it might be like Attack of the Clones: initial reactions were big, but it was ultimately a forgettable Star Wars that one really doesn't bother re-watching. With this in mind, I'd have to say that it's better than I thought it would be.
But after all other criticisms, the big one that annoyed me was the implausibility and stupidity of the character's capabilities. Poe was able to jump into a tie fighter and outrun and out-gun experienced pilots. Rey suddenly knows how to do a Jedi mind trick and fight (and nearly defeat) Kylo in a light saber duel with no training. Finn was strangely able to land blows as well, when Kylo seemed powerful enough to Jedi choke them without a fight. And why exactly did he bother wearing a mask at times? I wouldn't really bother watching it again, but I felt it was just good enough to entice me into seeing the next one.