Subverting expectations should not be the end goal of a director.

Rating: 3/10 (31 December 2017)

I happen to find all the characters in this new trilogy to be charismatic and enjoyable. Is Rey a Mary Sue? Yep. Best pilot, best mechanic, beats Kylo with no training, beats jedi master Luke with no training, everybody loves her, has no real conflicts or weaknesses, to overcome, etc. I like her anyway, just based on personal charisma. Was Snokes an abortion of a character/plotline? Yep. Mysteriously powerful figure, introduced in Force Awakens, was summarily deleted without any exploration of his nature. I guess I'm ok with that, since his CGI was really bad. I can also deal with Kylo being the big bad from here on out, since he's more interesting, except he isn't overwhelming in power compared to Rey, so it will be hard to make a confrontation scary in the future.
Supporting characters: Poe, Fin, Rose, should be allowed to be heroes, not made to seem foolish. Poe is supposed to learn a lesson to "trust your leaders" apparently, which is WAY out of line with the Star Wars ethos. And if you're going to do that, you'd better be damned sure the plot makes sense, which it doesn't. Admiral Holdo (military typically wear uniforms by the way, not slinky evening dresses and purple hair) had a plan she wouldn't share...then when she shared it, it was absurd. The whole "They won't track us if we're in lifeships" plan was just a retarded concept. Why would the audience think that was a thing? They were in visual range for gods sake, let alone sensor range. The questions pile up: Why does she self sacrifice when ships have autopilot? Why not have fleet all scatter into hyperspace since only one enemy ship has the tracking device? Why not use one ship to destroy the rest of fleet if hyperspace collisions are so effective? Why was Poe demoted for using the death of 20 soldiers to destroy around a million 1st order soldiers and a dreadnaught? It was seen as a loss when the "leadership" were sacrificing ships left and right for no goddamned reason? Since when do these ships run out of fuel? Never happened before in all the other episodes...never a concept. The hacker character betrays them for, I'm led to believe, enormous sums of money, for revealing the plot to destroy the tracker and telling them to "look out the goddamned window because they've got this really clever plan to leave by lifeboat. You should blow those lifeboats up." And do they really just reward escaped thieves with enormous sums of money when they could just shoot him? All these flawed and illogical story mechanisms are to what? Show the folly of 'seat of the pants' heroism the supporting cast were engaged in? Why is THAT a lesson we want our characters learning in the frickin' Star Wars universe? Are they going to peacefully negotiate and follow orders in the next installment? Sounds like a hoot.
Now granted, the whole franchise is not all that logical a 'verse, but it has its own internal messed up rules and logic that we've come to accept. When you break the internal rules and formulas, you draw attention to these flaws and pull the viewer out of the story. Bad idea in other words.
Final and most critical beef is Luke Skywalker: Ok, the guy's bitter and disillusioned. That's ok for a starting point. Gives the possibility for a character arc where he ends up someplace else. Well, it was a damned short arc. Went from "Jedi must end and I don't want to help anyone" to I'm going to use this power nobody ever heard of and go quietly "poof" in a way nobody anticipated after an anticlimactic battle scene that really accomplished nothing. The delay he was supposed to be providing? Wasn't necessary. The resistance left AFTER the cannon went off and destroyed the door anyway. Luke's death was such a missed opportunity to move the emotional needle of the audience, but I don't think anybody even welled up. We did't have time to realize he was even in peril. Nobody was there to witness him go "poof" and cry "NO!". Whether the power or the scene made sense or not, is the lesser sin here. There shouldn't have been a dry eye in the house and they'll never have that opportunity again. Anyone who liked this movie had no real connection to the old characters in my opinion, and had no expectations of it other than as an amusement park ride, which it did deliver, hence my 3 star rating.