I saw the movie on Friday with my 9-year-old daughter - both of us loved it. I didn’t have any particular expectations – having largely avoided spoilers for once – but it was fun and felt like Star Wars to me, which is all I really wanted. The humor felt like it was dialed up a bit more than most Star Wars movies – more like an Avengers movie in that respect. But that style of humor – mostly driven by the characters being wise-asses, or occasionally klutzes – didn’t feel out of place to me, in contrast to the farting animal or two-headed race commentator from Episode I.
In general, I’ve realized that silliness in a Star Wars movie is OK with me, as long as it’s either cute or awesome. Porgs, much like the Ewoks, are silly but cute (incredibly cute, actually), so that’s cool. In contrast, Gungans are silly but annoying and not cute. The non-sensical physics (and at times, logic) of the space battles was silly in a different way, but not atypical of a Star Wars movie, plus it gave us some awesome scenes (especially the audio-cuts-out hyperdrive suicide run), so that’s also cool with me. What is Star Wars about, if not things blowing up in ridiculous but awesome ways, in space? 
(And I’m not someone who generally likes “things blow up” movies – I have no interest in, say, whatever the latest Michael Bay film is – but Star Wars has always had a way of blowing things up with style, and this movie lived up to that.)
And yeah, it would have been cool if Leia were the one piloting the ship instead of Vice Admiral Purple-Hair (Hodor, was it?), but they didn’t know Carrie Fisher was going to die, and evidently chose not to re-edit her scenes when she did. (I don’t actually think it would have been that hard to re-edit her scenes to put her at the controls, if they had wanted to, especially if they re-filmed a little of Hodor’s dialogue.) I thought Fisher and Mark Hamill were both great in this, as were the younger stars.
Given Fisher’s passing, I had actually expected them to re-edit the movie to kill off Leia, which meant I was constantly waiting for it to happen in all her scenes. The part where she saves herself with the force probably worked better for me as a result – otherwise I think it would have seemed like a bit of a deus ex machina, even though we knew her father and brother were Jedi. When she was floating in space, my daughter whispered to me “Is she dead?” and I started to tell her “yes,” and then was totally caught by surprise when she wasn’t.
The bit where Luke dies, which I think someone above said was unexplained, was actually foreshadowed when Kylo Ren said to Rey “You can’t be doing this yourself [force projecting across interstellar distances], the strain would kill you”. And Luke had a good send off, so no complaints there.
They fixed one thing that bothered me in The Force Awakens, too: that Kylo got beaten by a totally untrained Rey, which made it hard to take him seriously as a threat. Snoke tells him, roughly, “And you were so upset about having to kill your father that you got beaten by an untrained novice?”
One bit that bothered me a little at the time (even though it was funny), but which I’m retro-actively un-bothered about upon learning what I missed, was the bit where Yoda more-or-less said: “Yeah, those were boring books anyway, and Rey [with basically no training] probably already knows all that stuff, so lets burn it down.” But it turns out there was a shot I totally missed of those books on board the Falcon, meaning Yoda’s “Rey already has the knowledge she needs from them” (I forget the actual line), was just him epically trolling Luke while speaking the literal truth – I love it!
Did I mention how cute the Porgs were? Like penguin guinea pigs with giant cartoon eyes. As soon as Disney’s genetic engineering department figures out how to make one I can take home as a pet, they can have all my money.
