Profoundly disappointing

Rating: 2/10 (19 December 2017)

First off let me share my Star Wars fandom credentials: lifelong enthusiast and collector of all things Star Wars. I have every action figure ever made, I've read every expanded universe novel and all the comic books. I've watched every episode of The Clone Wars and Rebels. I can name any cantina character, quote any line, describe every scene down to the finest detail. I even love the prequel films if I force myself to ignore jar jar.
Now on the movie:
Incoherent. Preposterous. Ridiculous.
There were some extraordinary missed opportunities that were one second within the director's reach.
Kylo Ren murdering Leia like he murdered his father would have been a glorious death for her. Instead, some random tie fighter pilot blows her away but she survives the vacuum of space and floats back to a resistance ship. I almost walked out at that point. I just could not believe it. She has no further purpose.
Last Jedi could have ended in a shocking way like ESB did, leaving us begging for ep 9. The moment Kylo Ren and Rey could have joined forces. Instead she retreats the same way Luke did in ESB. The story is all too predictable now.
In Star Wars films some respect is usually given to plausibility and timing. But they have 18 hours to travel an untold number of light years to Monte Carlo (I can't even be bothered to google the name of the place), pick up a code breaker who apparently spends 24/7 at the craps tables, come back, and run some crazy heist. No. I refuse. Oh, and you need gravity to drop bombs btw. Ramming one of those bombers with full payload into the dreadknought would have been much more effective as well.
Then there was the over the top attempt at humor. This is Star Wars, not Iron Man. The "I'll hold" bit went on for what, one minute? The "who talks first?" moment in ep 7 was okay but this is ridiculous.
The director inhereted some truly awful characters from ep 7 and made them much, much worse. That is, Hux and Snoke.
Hux is a horrible character. Over-the-top, not believable. Too young. Does not have the gravitas or silent menace of a Tarkin or the class and subtlety of any of the imperial officers in tos (think Admiral Piett.) He looks like he's barely concealing a laugh.
I don't even know where to begin with Snoke. Who is this guy? Is he a Sith Lord? Where does he come from? Is he actually Darth Sidious resurrected? Is he Darth Plagueis? Where did he get the scars? Nothing is answered. He's just there to repeat some of Palpatine's lines but without any meaning. He's characterized as some omnipotent force wielder who can read Kylo Ren's mind. Yet he can't see Ren's little lightsaber trick? And the name is horrible, "Snoke" sounds like a little penguin. He looks like Gollum. I do appreciate he got Kylo Ren to lose the mask though. That's an acknowledgment that the mask was a mistake to begin with,
Then there's the praetorian guards. Very cumbersome outfits. There's no way any non-force wilder should be anything other than lightsaber fodder for a force wielder. That these guys had Kylo Ren on the ropes is preposterous.
Poe Dameron is just too good a pilot, and too reckless.
BB-8 is cute but he makes R2-D2's achievements in AOTC look like nothing.
Benicio del Toro's character is pointless. We get no time to get to him, we have no way of knowing who he is, what his motives are, and at what point did he get the opportunity to make a "deal"? Why would the First Order honor it anyway?
Captain Phasma. Sigh. Complete waste, again.
Luke is great but his magic trick at the end is just several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything any other Jedi has ever done. If he was capable of that, he should have been capable of taking down the entire First Order just by thinking about it. Maybe he just didn't feel like it.
And I could go on and on and on. I'm not even going to see it a second time. I might wait for bluray for ep9. I usually see new Star Wars movies at least 5 times in the theaters.
SHAME!!!!