Even worse than I expected.

Rating: Null/10 (17 December 2017)

I really wanted to like this movie, but it's terrible. I honestly can't think of a single good thing about it other than the music (almost all of which is from earlier Star Wars films) and that it isn't a remake of The Empire Strikers Back. Besides that, there's almost nothing good about it.
The pacing is terrible, and it jumps between scenes with completely different emotional tones and, despite being the longest running Star Wars movie ever, seems to constantly be speeding through everything. Extremely important story moments are covered in only a few minutes, while unimportant scenes seem to stretch on as long as possible. Most people I talked to had little idea what the plot even was, aside from the information provided by The Force Awakens.
The plot makes no sense either, and would be avoided if the characters weren't complete idiots who make mind-numbly stupid decisions, such as hiring shady criminals in a prison to help them, or wanting to escape on ships that they know don't have weapons. There's also no explanation as to the current political situation, and it's unclear what's even happening in the Galaxy at large. It's not even hinted at as to who's funding the inexplicably recreated Empire, and it's not even clear if the New Republic still exists. Worst of all, everything was reset and everything that ever happened in the original movies means absolutely nothing now. Every victory ever won by the Rebellion, every superweapon destroyed, every system liberated - are all meaningless. Han Solo returned to being a smuggler and divorced Leia and was murdered by his son in the most obvious trap imaginable, Luke Skywalker became a failure and ran away to pout on a deserted island and also ultimately died, and the New Republic the rebels fought and died to create was destroyed in five minutes of screen time by a new Empire which is inexplicably strong enough to build a planet-sized superweapon which is now left to be opposed by a new Rebellion which itself will ultimately be destroyed when they inevitably make another trilogy.
The writing is insulting. There's one scene where Leia is sucked into the vacuum of space and somehow survives floating through it for several minutes and pulls herself with the Force to her ship. The dialogue is filled with "jokes" which are always as out-of-place as possible. When the entire Resistance is evacuating there's a scene where Leia turns to C-3PO and says to "wipe that nervous look off your face", or something to that effect. Rey is still a flawless Mary Sue, while Luke Skywalker's character was completely ruined, and he went from leading the Rebellion to victory against the Empire and being set to recreate the Jedi Order to a failure who attempted murdering one of his own students and burning down the original Jedi Temple. Yoda's ghost shows up to burn down the temple for him through the Force, which begs the question of why force ghosts have never interacted with the physical world in such a way before, and if they can why Yoda doesn't just go stop Snoke and Kylo himself, who wouldn't be able to fight back as Yoda is already a force ghost.
The cinematography and directing are also terrible. Even though the sets and environments are beautiful, the camera seems to have no idea what it's supposed to be doing. It will randomly cut away from the characters for two seconds to the top of a mountain or something else nearby and cut immediately back to them as if nothing happened, and other times will cut between different characters, forward in time, or even to dreams or hallucinations without giving any indication that it switched to something else. The film also seems to have an obsession with randomly making things slow motion and silent during action scenes, which feels out of place in a Star Wars movie and also extremely overused given its inclusion in seemingly every action scene.