Non-stop pacing, space MacGuffins and forgettable character plots makes this a disappointing ending to a discordant series of films. Spoilers below the fold.
The movie starts at a thousand plot points a minute and doesn’t slow down for a second. It’s a Gish Gallop in movie form, by the time you’ve processed one plot point, ten more have flashed you by. Ren is fighting some troopers, wait, the Falcon is landing at a port, no wait, Ren has the pyramid MacGuffin, back to the Falcon being chased by X-Wings, Ren hanging out with Palp, is that a new character on the Falcon (doesn’t really matter as we don’t see from them again) and so on for another 2 hours. There were interesting plot lines that just needed room to breath. It’s difficult to have deep introspective about where man stands between good and evil in 45 second chunks. The one time the movie slows is for a heart-to-heart with an underworld character from Finn’s past, but even that scene only lasts for about 5 minutes before being inconsequential to the rest of the movie. The character miraculously survives without the one item that they’ve explicitly told us they require to survive.
The plot moves disregarding everything that has been previously said and done previously. This begins at about 5 seconds in as the opening title crawl informs us that the voice of Palpatine can be heard all across the empire. That’s immediately forgotten until it becomes relevant to the plot. A significant plot hole develops in which a character has information they shouldn’t which is hand waved with “I have a feeling”. Consequence is made irrelevant as numerous characters are fake-deathed, and the minor characters are given nothing of interest to do.
Soundtrack was standard Star Wars affair but this seemed much more jerking, although this is more a fault of the discordant pacing. Not sure if it was Odeon bass boosting but there were moments the music overwhelmed the scene.