I liked the movie, although I did have a few issues with it:
1.) The pacing:
It felt way too fast-paced for a Star Wars movie. I think some more breathing room could have helped it and given my brain more time to process the things that were happening.
2.) The plot becomes less interesting & more nonsensical after the first half:
From the moment the crawl came onto the screen, I was hooked by the story. “Luke Skywalker has vanished”. Immediately my eyes were wide open and I wanted to know what would happen next. The film kept this level of intrigue up for a while. It also introduced new, enjoyable characters like Rey, Finn, and Kylo Ren (who I find to be the most interesting character in the movie).
But then, there were some boring parts and things that didn’t make sense. It was a bit too convenient that Rey & Finn just happened to run into Han Solo in the middle of space. I was scratching my head as to why Han just randomly showed up. Then there’s the whole boring sideplot of the Rathtars. It was so out of place and felt like a distraction from the story I was really interested in. I felt the same way with the Maz Kanata pitstop; I didn’t understand why they even went there. Why couldn’t Han just take Rey & Finn to the Resistance himself without stopping to talk to Maz? It just felt like the tightly focused plot of finding Luke and learning more about Kylo Ren & Rey was lost and the film was stalling. Then, the movie changes gears completely to being about stopping Starkiller base. I didn’t care at all about the trench run because none of the main characters were involved with it. I was, however, interested in the character stuff between Rey, Kylo, and Han during this act.
Overall, despite my criticism, I enjoyed the film. However, I couldn’t help but feel a sense that the meat of the story was being circumvented for more boring story-lines instead. I think this was done intentionally in order to mirror ANH which also didn’t reveal the entire backstory. But with ANH, Lucas probably hadn’t even thought of the entire backstory and so the movie was able to stand on its own. With TFA, it feels like things were intentionally withheld and replaced with less interesting things. Oh well. I enjoyed the characters and look forward to learning more about them and their backstories in future films.