Finally watched this a second time tonight and was able to form a more thorough opinion. Overall I like it well enough. It’s got some major flaws but I found more of its runtime enjoyable than not.

I do have a few issues though. The worst is that Finn’s “I need to tell you something, Rey” bit never pays off. I don’t care that he never actually gets to tell Rey. I care that they intentionally build this up over the course of the film and then never lead to ANY kind of payoff.

The other thing that bothered me, of all things, was that Kylo took a standard imperial TIE fighter, the kind they explicitly point out that has no hyperdrive in ANH, across the whole galaxy to Exogol. It’s particularly irksome because there are many other tiny details in the movie that show the filmmakers were really paying attention to little details (such as the way Kylo points just like Han). It’s a small detail but feels like a blatantly obvious oversight.

Everything else works well enough and several of the things I questioned on the first viewing actually have enough detail/thought put in that they worked for me this time (the storming the star destroyer on horse back, lando’s call for help to the galaxy, ben’s redemption). It’s definitely not the story I would have come up with and I think there are other possible stories that could have been much better. But for what it is, I’m able to accept it and enjoy it.

Jedit:
I caught one detail I liked that I missed in the theater. When threepio is saying how he can’t translate the Sith language he’s cut off as he’s mentioning something about it being an old (or new?) republic law that droids programming restrict them from translating Sith language. It’s a little detail that makes that whole subplot work better IMO and I kinda wish they made that line a little more obvious.