Great visuals poor story telling

Rating: 2/10 (1 January 2016)

I tried to like this, I thought it had some great features, visually it was beautiful, I thought Daisy Ridley and John Boyega played there roles well. Han and Chewie were great.
Unfortunately as story telling exercise go, it's a mess.
They seem to have been seeking to avoid the excessive exposition and talkeyness of the prequels but went too far in the opposite direction, there is more action in the force awakens then all the OT, but without any plot or character development it all just became monotonous for me.
In order to allow the action to keep coming communication, travel and organization across the galaxy all seems to be instantaneously possible, this makes the movie feel weirdly claustrophobic and lacking in scale for a galactic adventure.
Rei is the ultimate Marry Sue, she figures out how to fly the Millennium Falcon in minutes as well as Han every did, she outfights trained soldiers, she is better engineer then Han, she speaks Wookie on planet without Wookie's for no apparent reason, and worst of all she learns everything Luke learned in the first 2 movies in a matter of minutes to set up her final showdown with Ren.
All the other characters suffer because Rei is better at everything.
The worst is the villain Kylo Ren who we are introduced to as total bad ass able to stop a blaster bolt in mid air without even looking at it, but who is defeated by two totally untrained opponents at the end of the movie, I understand the argument about the Bowcaster hit but overall his arc seems to make him weaker over the course of the movie which kills any sense of dread of the villain or anticipation of future developments.
Adam Driver also lacks the physical presence and voice to make a convincing Villain he looks and sounds weak. I knew he was playing Ren but still couldn't help feeling a huge sense of disappointment when he took the helmet off.
The Central plot points are all problematic.
There are three primary Arc's
The quest to find Luke
The fall of Ren and Han's quest to save his son
and The quest to stop the Death Star 3.0
The last one should never have been in the movie it serves no overarching point in the narrative, is incredibly derivative and makes the villains look stupid and incompetent because we know they failed at this twice before. Its also emotionally empty they kill multiple planets but there is no emotional impact cause we never meet those planets or there inhabitants.
The quest to find Luke and the connected fall of Ren are also problematic because they essentially just complete revert the world to where we were at the beginning of the OT which erases everything gained by Luke, Leia, Han and the resistance. The republic is given lip service but never seen, and Luke's accomplishments are completely erased he has basically been useless, when faced with the rise of the dark side again he just ran.
The fall of Ren is terribly handled because we are never give any emotional anchor for Ren's relationship with Han, Leia and Luke, the only scene that Ren shares with Han is were Ren kill's Han this was a horribly unemotional scene for one of the greatest characters in Sci Fi to go out on. We have no idea what their prior relationship was so we have no idea what we are losing. Harrison Ford does an amazing job of trying to salvage the emotion of the scene but Driver is as bad as Hayden Christiansen in this scene.
I found this really sad because I enjoyed the first third of the movie and looking at the story Arc's introduced its easy to imagine a very compelling narrative built from these elements, but it was not done, the desire to make the movie as much like the originals as possible and to pack as much action into the movie as possible destroys any attempt at meaningful story telling.
I can not think of single question I am interested in seeing answered in a sequel, a single showdown that intrigues m