Honestly, its a good movie, but I'd probably give it about an 7 or 8/10. Not videogame scale 7-8/10, but actual 7-8/10.
Most of what it does, it does well. It is definitely an enjoyable movie to watch, and it had me laughing and gasping with excitement at times, and getting more into it as a movie than I have most other movies in history - I can count maybe 4 or 5 movies out of all that I've watched in my life that made me feel like this. It is the classics over again.
That said, that's one of its main faults - it is the classics over again. Basically, not spoiling anything, but if you've seen episode IV, you've seen episode VII. A lot of things are just beat for beat, even if done slightly differently and in a bit of a more complicated way. I view it more as what IV would have been if made today, than a successor to VI.
Additionally, it also has some pacing issues. It tries to fit too much in, and just skims over a lot of things because of it. A lot of characters, even main ones, get maybe 5 minutes of screentime. All but two non-returning characters have literally 0 background to them. Ok, main villain does too, but its brief and not really explored in depth in any way shape or form, more simply "He fell to the Dark Side and is bad".
A lot of concepts and such are also just jumped on for 10 seconds and then entirely dropped. There's very little worldbuilding outside the into section on Jakku or W/E. Often its more "Here's this planet we're going to and then leaving ASAP". I don't remember the names of any planets except Jakku because of this, because there wasn't really anything to associate them with outside of generic scenery.
Overall, however, these feel like minor faults in the movie, which is still a highly enjoyable experience, and to be honest I think that were I to go watch IV all over again, I'd probably notice a few of the same issues there. What needs to be done from here is that it needs to branch out in a non-derivative way. This movie was played VERY safe. Its almost more like a montage of 'greatest moments in Star Wars' than its own movie. And it worked. Its got a lot of hype, people feel Star Wars is back, and its raked in a ton of money. From here though, they need to do something new and different. If they keep treading the same path, not only will Disney no longer be cannon - there's only so much of the exact same thing happening over and over every generation that a fandom can handle, when other originally canon source material has more variety. Even if Disney is still officially cannon, true cannon will be what the fandom recognises it as, and constant repetition of the same plot won't sit well with them I feel - sales numbers will also rapidly drift off as the same movie is released year after year, just with different names for all its checklist items.
But yeah, great movie that's worth seeing, definitely flawed, though how much will depend on the next movie, and whether it redeems it and truly explores some of the many open plotlines left from this movie, or whether it kinda just latches onto the main plot and follows it through whilst ignoring many of the things that made the series as a whole memorable, instead opting to just tick checkboxes on Star Wars tropes to repeat.
