Yup, saw it yesterday. I went in as blind as I could (only saw trailers; tried to avoid opinions about it, though that was pretty impossible).
SPOILER AHEAD! probably...
My notes:
Pacing... It moved, at times, too fast forward, not giving me enough time to digest the scenes. There was generally little room to breathe. This kind of movie making (or writing in general) isn't inherently bad, but is often used to "a-muse" the audience. As in avoid them from thinking too much, or rather, do the thinking for them. As there were plenty of filler material in the movie they should, imo, remove those parts and add some "slow-the-hell-down" scenes in.
Too much action and "ohmygodwesurvived" moments. Kinda related to the point above as much action = fast pace. The action was good. However, in my case, it got exponentially harder to buy that these guys could survive it all. The latter point is, in some sense, true for the original Star Wars as well, but the original didn't have all these "amazing" action scenes to make them even less believable. The above being said, the action was pretty solid, imo. You truly felt the blasters. If sci-fi action is all you need (which I know plenty of people are content with), then you can't go wrong by this movie.
Plot holes, bad writing and such. Probably the movies biggest sin. SPOILER: For example. R2D2's conveniently recovering at the end just to serve the plot. I could buy it if there was any explanation at all, but there was none. "Oh time to find Luke, R2D2 activate!". And how did Poe (was that his name?) escape from Jakku again? Luckily the movie has plenty of characters, action and setting to salvage (at least some) the bad writing etc, for many people. But if you're like me, a consistent story without plot-holes should be the framework to fit the other parts in. Bad writing isn't automatically forgiven by the beforementioned. This point, however, is more or less true for all Star Wars movies.
Characters. To be honest I was pleasantly surprised by the characters. Most of them felt like Star Wars characters. I see many people digging Finn, and i can see why, but imo, it was really hard to read this guy. SPOILERS As i see it, he was supposed to be the face of doubt as a storm-trooper, however, all his actions and motivations felt kinda forced. Probably because he had no back-story. Maybe that was the point? Beeing an infant-minded grown-man, confused and scarred?
The part i feared the most was that SPOILERS Kylo Ren would be a Darth Vader clone. Luckily he wasn't. May be debatable, but to me he turned out very different than DV. But that silver cloaked storm-trooper captain was a waste of space.
The nostalgia catering. Ok, it's fine to pull on the nostalgia string, but, my God, did they have to copy the original? I wouldn't mind a few scenes, but when they blatantly, in-your-face, not hiding it at all, copy the overall structure, to me, that is very cheap. I don't know what else to say. Sure they did it on purpose, and obviously sold it that way. Still, it's cheap.
Despite all the crap I've said, I'm glad I saw it. Not being a huge Star Wars fan, I don't really care that much if there are inconsistencies with the other movies, the expanded universe, etc. I've always viewed Star Wars as simple, sci-fi action flicks with some deeper elements to them. As such, episode 7 was good fun (unlike episode 1 and 2). My favorite moment in the movie was the SPOILER final light-saber fight. It felt real and personal. Too bad they conveniently got split up by the planet splitting haha!
TMTDNR:
I'm not in fan of numeric ratings as pretty much everyone scales differently, but if it helps as a visual representation of my opinion: on a bad day: 4/10. On a good day: 7/10. On an average day 6/10. But I've only seen it once, so, yeah, shrug.