The praise is baffling, this movie is completely inept (SPOILERS)

Rating: 3/10 (15 December 2017)

I love Star Wars and I went into this optimistically. Didn't take long to see this movie is a mess.
Poe's whole character is problematic. He disobeys a direct command to take out a huge First Order ship at the cost of what appears to be about half of their remaining 50 resistance fighters. They call him "hotshot" and "flyboy" like that excuses a major military failure at a critical juncture in their survival. He should have been thrown in the brig for that massive loss alone, but no, they leave him to mutiny at the slightest disagreement with a superior officer. Once again Leia and Laura Dern just laugh it off. In fact, there's a lot of laughing and joking and worrying about nonsense like necklaces by the main characters while literally dozens of their rebel friends are getting killed on screen. Like no one seems to really care that they're all being chased to extinction, they're just like "well this is inconvenient!" Even when Leia gets blown into space she just floats back inside and everything is cool (and this scene accomplishes nothing, except to give Laura Dern control and lead to the mutiny, but that didn't lead to anything either so what the hell?)
On that subject, Finn and his painfully boring sidekick accomplished absolutely nothing in their side plot (which starts with a bad CGI character giving instructions to find a "master decoder" like the start of a video game level), yet we had to suspend disbelief that they could conveniently go to a nearby casino planet while being chased by a First Order fleet, then break into a First Order ship. And of course the whole First Order army is more focused on these 2 losers than the space battle in progress. Everyone, EVERYONE in this movie is terrible at their job, except the soccer ball droid who apparently swallows 50+ gold coins and is able to fire them at guards (THIS IS A PLOT POINT, NOT A THROWAWAY GAG). It also reuses the 'blowing on the lighter' gag from the last movie.
There is 0 character development from anyone, no chemistry of any kind between any 2 characters. Characters' motivations are weak (when present) and are prone to change for no reason other than plot convenience. There's no reason to care about anyone and no villain compelling enough to pose a threat. There's not a shred of tension through the whole movie. The movie betrays any tension building by throwing out stupid comic relief elements every 10 seconds. We never get backstory on Snoke and there's never a clear reason why he had to be stupid-looking CGI. His red throne room set piece was a little cool but still looked like a movie set, and his guards moved around like fashion models. Lots of unintentional laughs from this setting. And how could Kylo Ren kill Snoke if Snoke could read his mind and all?
This movie reuses quite a bit from Empire and Return of the Jedi but doesn't know what to do with any of it, such as the cave scene where Rey sees a mirror and the scene just kinda ends. The scene blending between Rey and Kylo didn't work at all. It's like Rain Johnson wanted this as the emotional core of the film but wasn't competent enough to even convey two people communicating. Rey endangers the aliens around her and we can't tell how much to blame her for her reckless endangerment because we can't tell what she's looking at. Then it devolves into teen melodrama when Kylo conveniently takes his shirt off. I assume they'll pursue this relationship in the future, because it went nowhere here. The promotion for this movie gave the impression that there would be some moral ambiguity, maybe Rey or Luke would go to the dark side. Just when it's suggested that Luke may have made a mistake in the past by preemptively trying to kill Kylo, the film tells us that Luke wasn't actually going to kill him. So don't worry, kids, no moral grey areas here, just a needlessly convoluted plot trying to create intrigue out of nothing.
Speaking of empty subplots, are we still supposed to care about Finn and Phasma's relationship during that climactic battle? Theirs really highlights how shallow every character relationship is yet this movie seems to really hang its hat on notions of hope and love. Benicio Del Toro's great but his character didn't go anywhere, either. Laura Dern's great too but there was no reason for her character to exist. Just use Ackbar rather than killing him off-screen. Yoda shouldn't be burning Jedi texts and joking about them being boring, that is horribly out of character and it makes no sense that a Jedi master would act within the Star Wars canon.
There's some obvious green screen work in the scenes with Hamill and Rey, plus some inexcusably bad editing in their scenes together. A lot of this movie feels like it was chopped down from bloated material. This movie's only contributions as far as new ships/vehicles are that they made the Imperial AT-ATs look like they're frowning, because I guess Kylo and his overacting ginger friend think that looks scary.
The finale includes Luke appearing. I wondered how he got there, and as it turned out it was just an astral projection. So the twist was that it wasn't a plot hole after all. Great. Then after Kylo fails to kill his hologram and we the rebels get that 1 small victory, Luke dies for no reason anyway and there was no point to the hologram thing. Perhaps Luke "lost the will to live" (more likely Mark Hamill wanted out). The original Star Wars movies gave the idea of a much larger universe. Somehow this movie makes the same universe feel tiny. I can accept that this is the Disney Star Wars era and kids are the target audience, but this is uncharacteristically poor quality from Lucasfilm.