I’m basking in the positivity in this thread, please keep it up!

For my part, something that TFA gets absolutely right goes back to a strength of the originals - it keeps moving forwards. In Star Wars the action constantly moved on from planet (to station) to planet, never looking back; this constant sense of ‘but wait, there’s more’ enthralled me as a young viewer. The initial sequels pretty much followed this trend (barring Jedi’s stopovers on Tatooine and Dagobah), but that momentum pretty much stalled in the prequels, which hit a mundane cycle of Tatooine, Naboo and Coruscant (indeed, I distinctly remember my dismay when it became apparent that the climax of TPM would occur on a planet we’d already spent half an hour on at the start).

TFA hops from one environment to another at considerable speed, but never feels like it’s rushing around - no mean feat when a brand new location is even introduced in the closing minutes. I can but hope this giddying sense of an endless universe is maintained in VIII and IX.