First and foremost, watching it a second time really improved the experience. Knowing the plot and the surprises beforehand really helped me to just let the story as-is play out, and not worry about all the ways it defied my expectations.
In the spoiler-free review, I had three criticisms. The foremost problem I had focused on the slow middle of the movie. The Finn/Rose subplot on the Casino planet could have been cut and reworked into something simpler and quicker-to-resolve and the movie would not have lost anything of consequence. Even the great performance by Benicio Del Toro could have been retained; just put him on the Resistance capital ship’s brig instead of a jail cell on a planet we didn’t need to go to. You can do the same plot in its basic form (Finn and Rose go rogue to find a codebreaker to break onto the First Order flagship) without so much bloat.
Watching it the second time, the bloat was still there, but it didn’t feel as pace-halting as it did during the first viewing. It’s still worthy of mention, but it’s not film-breaking the way some of the lesser parts of the prequels were.
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