Disney is counting on you not spotting the many flaws

Rating: 3/10 (18 December 2017)

There's a moment at the beginning of this movie, when Rey hands Luke a lightsaber that numerous people fought and died for her to bring him... and he tosses it over his shoulder onto the rocks below with disdain. That perfectly sums up Disney's attitude towards the Original Trilogy, and all of its characters, history, and magic.
This movie was a series of bad decisions by its creators.
From a purely Star Wars standpoint: Luke is an immensely powerful hero who is deeply loved by fans. His character role was to pass on the torch to Rey, and make those same fans love her, as they do him. They needed to have him love her, so that we would love her. They needed to have him train her (actually train her) so that we would believe in her potential. They needed to have him die in her arms(figurative), heroically, and give her his blessing.
But instead, he did not love her, he didn't even like her. He refused to train her, and when he finally said he would, he spent five minutes, then re-decided he didn't like her. Instead of displaying his Force abilities physically, in destroying the First Order AT-ATs and ships, they gutted it by making him a Loki-like illusion, and then had him die quietly, light years away from the conflict. He never directly gave Rey his blessing, so we don't feel it. Hence, we now have an inexperienced, untrained, nobody that we're somehow supposed to love as much as Luke.
From a purely narrative standpoint: Payoff is the number one rule of storytelling. If you set something up, you must make it pay off. The Force Awakens set up some major questions:
Who are Rey's parents? This is significant not just because we don't know, but because it will define her character. It will inform both Rey and the audience as to who she is.
Who is Supreme Leader Snoke? This is significant because he has a face malformed by scars, and scars always have stories behind them. He is immensely powerful, despite being old enough to have been alive when Palpatine was in power. So where did he come from?
But they cut off both major questions without answers, and left us with a vacuum. We will never know who Snoke was, and his character is now a footnote in the universe. We will never know who Rey's parents were. That will now probably only be fleshed out in some crappy comic book a year or two from now. That is TERRIBLE, unsatisfying storytelling, and shows that they knew they could not deliver on the promise they made in TFA.
Character is the number one ingredient of storytelling. You first define who the characters are, their motivations, what they each care about, and then every action they take from then on MUST flow from that. That is actually what creates great tension and authentic feeling conflict.
Luke, we know, is a hero, with a pure heart, who believes in the good in people (Han, Anakin, etc). That's not who was in TLJ.
Rose is a hollow, uninteresting nobody who is somehow supposed to be a worthy love interest for Finn, who already has a legitimate bond with Rey, who is more attractive, and more significant in every way.
Rey is at a point in her arc where she needs answers to lay a foundation for her to build into a hero. Luke's training, her parent's identity, and her face-off with Kylo should have all built that out for her, but instead she's just as unmoored and drifting as she was in TFA. Somehow reading old books is supposed to make up for this later???
Kylo Ren had a beautiful, conflicted beginning in TFA, and in this film he acts from that place when he doesn't kill Leia, and when he does kill Snoke. But then, without an inciting incident, he abruptly becomes a power-hungry megalomaniac bent on destroying the Resistance. Why? No one hurt him after Snoke died. Nothing happened that would change his mind. He logically should have tried to come back, but then been hurt a final, brutal time to send him all they way into the dark side.
Vice Admiral Holdo: First, she is leading troops in a ball gown. Where are the strong females of the Resistance? Second, she has a perfectly good plan, and only a small number of people with her to tell it to. BUT SHE DOESN'T TELL A SOUL. This is mind-numbingly illogical character behavior.
There are more, but let's move on from character issues, to the final problem:
In the world of making a good movie, everything has to happen for a reason.
There's an old saying in writing: "Murder your darlings". What this means is that no matter how badly you want someone or something to happen in your story, if it doesn't serve the story, it has to go, or else the story will be bad.
What was the reason for:
The twelve hours of slowly driving away from the First Order? Why didn't they send out the shuttles right away if the First Order wouldn't scan for them or see them? Because they wanted a prolonged engagement without the FO destroying them in the first 60 seconds
Holdo staying aboard the cruiser? If it required someone to pilot it, why was she standing on deck looking out the window? It's the future, with FTL tech, how do you not have autopilot? Because they wanted to make her seem heroic after hollowing her character with the stupid not telling anyone subplot. And they wanted...
Holdo being able to destroy the entire First Order fleet? If you can obliterate an entire fleet of enemies by jumping into them at lightspeed, why didn't they do that 100 times before? Why didn't they do that to the Death Star? Because they wanted all of the events on Snoke's ship.
Captain Phasma being alive? How did she escape the trash compactor, find a ship, and escape the planet exploding in time? Why did they bring her back, only to kill her again? Because if you make a big deal about having great female villains, and then portray them as weak and pathetic in TFA, you have to make up for that in your second film.
Finn going to Star Wars Vegas? American politics aside, this was a clumsy, overt liberal statement about war, wealth, and capitalism being evil that didn't serve the story. Oh, and also the Rebellion is a little evil too for funding them. It was also a clumsy attempt to bond Finn and Rose, and make us care about Rose. Which we do not. Another reason they had to have a 12 hour space-chase. The whole thing could have been cut.
So overall we got a VERY high-budget Star Wars film, with excellent cinematography, some great jokes, and some callbacks to the originals - but it was delivered by people who either do not love or understand Star Wars, and what made it great. They are trying to force an entire generation to accept new characters and storylines, while brutally murdering the characters and storylines we love so much. They might respect the source material, but they don't love it, and it shows.
Thanks for reading.
May the Force be with us all in the darkness to come.