Really not great.

Rating: 5/10 (27 January 2018)

This once again shows that the critics have lost the plot, and that they'll throw out high ratings to anything Disney dumps out on our screens. The plot was filled with problems and the movie prefers to stand alone rather than develop the series as a whole.
The plot is somewhat incoherent. Rey, for example, is a character with exceptional strength with the Force, but she's pretty much entirely untrained. How does she have the ability to control the Force like a Jedi Knight who must study for years to attain similar power? How did she defeat Kylo in 7? There's not really any explanation. Raw power doesn't mean that she can focus it to achieve the things she does. This was one of many problems I had.
Mark Hamill was right about Luke's characterisation. His whole character doesn't really make much sense. This was surely a result of the movie-makers intentionally avoiding fan expectations to try and make the story unexpected. They'd rather have an unguessable plot than a good one.
We didn't get to see any epic lightsabre duels, no real training from Luke Skywalker, and no explanations for what happened in 7.
Snoke was cool, yet unexplained. I'm hoping that he turns out to be Darth Plagueis (the Sith who could supposedly cheat death) and returns in the next movie. This would be a way to recover from the badness in this movie, cuz they'd have a chance to give the character a background and to make the plot more coherent. Sadly, I doubt they will, cuz all good ideas fans have had have been rejected on the basis of wanting to create an unexpected plot. Look, I agree that a movie/show should not be manipulated by the fans (like how the most recent season of Game of Thrones just gave the fans what they wanted), but going exactly against what the fans want is still a result of the fans.
Honestly, I prefer some of the prequels to this. 3 is definitely better. The prequels at least tried something new, and had epic lightsabre fights which are now absent in the sequel series. The whole Jedi lore that was developed in the prequels is almost completely dumped in this. 7 and 8 attempt to imitate the original, but it should've been an equal balance between the styles of the prequel and original, or just a completely unique style. I wasn't a fan of 7, but I thought this could at least pick up the pieces of that. I was wrong.