A LOT of potential; bad execution

Rating: 6/10 (15 December 2017)

***SPOILERS AHEAD***
Overall, I didn't think this movie was BAD. I didn't think it was all that great either. I felt that the plot was pretty good...the slow-mo chase throughout the majority of the movie, interspersed with other events such as Rey's training, etc., made for a story with a lot of tension and uncertainty. It was also a neat dose of reality to see that Luke is not completely infallible. I thought the Kylo/Rey connection was very well done. And it was nice that Luke and Leia were (somewhat) reunited, however briefly, which was made even more bittersweet due to Carrie Fisher's passing.
The problem comes from all the unnecessary fluff and character injustices. For instance, it would have been sooooo much better to have Captain Phasma embarking on a personal vendetta and hunting down Finn throughout the movie. But no...instead she shows up for a 30-second fight only to (almost certainly) get killed. She was such an intriguing character in Force Awakens, and deserved much more (and better) than that. Additionally, Snoke was made out to be this great big-bad in TFA, and we got no more insight into his character or backstory before Kyle (too easily) defeats him. And THEN...at the climax of the movie, they set up this huge, ESB-style ground battle with all these "gorilla walkers" which look amazing, and...do practically nothing with them. They were only there to shoot at Luke, so he could display his badassery. They were cool, but way under-utilized.
As for fluff, the Finn/Rose mission to get the code breaker was dragged out WAY too long. We got a little bit of insight into Rose's character and motives, but otherwise the whole thing was uninteresting and unimportant. On a related note, Maz's scene where she sends them to get the code breaker was also unimportant, and quite frankly, just stupid. While all this is going on, Poe stages a mutiny on the Resistance cruiser because Hondo and Leia kept him in the dark about their plan......for what reason? There was no need for that to be kept secret, especially knowing how much of a "fly-boy" he is. The only reason I can think of is that Poe's attempted mutiny was necessary to keep the story interesting; otherwise it's pointless and wouldn't have been needed if other things weren't dragged out so long.
To sum up, this could have been much better if it was stripped down to the more important scenes, and kept around the 1:45 mark instead of 2.5 hours. Personally, I'm glad JJ will be taking over again for IX, and I doubt I'll be very interested in Rian Johnson's trilogy.