Huge pros but huge cons

Rating: 4/10 (26 March 2018)

The pros: awesome music and amazing cinematography!
The cons: Huge plot holes and the flow didn't make sense. This movie just did not jive with the previous one. All the major lead ups in TFA were let downs or thrown aside. Its like watching the first of the Lord of the Rings movie, then starting the second movie one only to find out the ring really has no point and doesn't matter.
More in depth with Spoilers:
The first big inconsistency that bothered me is that in this movie Luke has supposedly given up and gone away to be alone and die. Ok, but then why would he have left a map to his location in the first movie. A huge portion of TFA is about finding the map, and they find the final piece left by Luke in R2. While it is rather inconsistent with Luke's character to have put aside everything he believes in, if developed correctly it could work. However he gets put into this character persona as a bitter broken old man almost as an afterthought just to mix it up after the first movie.

Second, some of the subplots were time consuming and didn't do much to progress the story. Really the timing throughout the whole movie doesn't work. The different subplots are supposed to be going on at the same time. Yet what takes days for one group of characters happens in less than a day for others. The gambling planet and codebreaker scenes ended up being pointless. Then Luke training Rey didn't actually happen. This would also be fine if she then she wasn't suddenly a master at everything she does. Male or female, nobody is perfect at everything that they do without some training. I really like the character of Rey, but when she seems to master everything without any effort it really lessens her as a character.
There was a problem with character development overall. I never felt any attachment to either Holdo or Rose. I am female, I love strong female characters, but neither of these were developed enough to make one. I found Rose stunning Finn to be a hilarious scene, but that was about it. Then all the lead male characters were either evil or incompetent. It was like there was such a push for women over men, that the story took a back seat to that agenda. I don't care if the leader is male or female, I just want them well developed and interesting.
Finally, I am a huge Princess Leia fan, but the whole scene where she gets sucked out into space and flies back was really bad. She could have used the force in so many other ways and been a bad ass, but that whole sequence was just terrible.
I haven't thrown in the towel. I am really hoping they can bring this back together in the final movie. I am also really hoping that they haven't destroyed the whole Skywalker line by the end of it. This has been a story following the Skywalker family from the beginning, to finish by just killing the whole lineage off would be incredibly disappointing.