Solid 7.5/10 film for me, much better than the prequels but it apes ANH far too much. That pulled me out of being fully engrossed in the movie.
Also, I really disliked how they ignored the implicit promise of the end of RotJ and the whole idea of the Republic of a more civilised time. 30 years down the track we have what basically appears to be the same status quo as the beginning of ANH, big evil Empire and small underdog resistance.
Supplementary materials reveal that theFirst Order is an Imperial Remnant stationed in the Unknown Region and that the Republic haven’t investigated that area really so we’re only seeing an absolute corner of the galaxy and the whole galaxy isn’t like this.
But the movie doesn’t hint at that at all. Everything we see basically points to the Empire being dominant again. It’s lazy and bugged me as well.
I thought Hux’s speech made it sound quite like (from their perspective) the First Order were underdogs trying to right things and that the evil new Republic was lying and spreading propaganda, etc. What was not clear was the secretive nature of the ‘resistance’ and how/why they were unofficially sanctioned by the Republic. I only caught Ren mentioning that fact on my second viewing. I get now that the official Army (which is presumably quite small as the new republic did not want to be a new empire) wasn’t involved, and probably took massive losses in the Hosnian strike, thereby being unable to help attack Starkiller.
But why the secret faction in the first place? Too many major targets from the old Rebellion? Are they actually viewed as terrorists in this time of peace? A special unit to deal with Sithy folks like Snoke?
I actually like the fact that we’re being dropped back into the Galaxy without all the answers. But we’ll see once the deleted scenes are released if there would have been some things better explained now as opposed to in the next two films.