After giving it over a week to soak in, I watched this for a second time yesterday. I enjoyed it far more, and that's mostly due to having acclimated to the fact that I had seen the first true Star Wars sequel in over 30 years. This time I was ready to simply sit back and enjoy it. There are certainly still some things to nitpick. I still don't love the X-Wing assault on Starkiller. There's no real punch or suspense to it. It's very well-done X-Wing versus Tie Fighter action, but it's all rather generic. Phasma's "big" scene could have been done better; it was just too easy and clunky given a character that at leastlookslike we're supposed to believe she's a badass. The editing was off in certain spots, and I imagine a lot of that can be laid at the feet of the cuts that were made. I'm really hoping for a Lord of the Rings style extended edition of this, assuming the excised scenes aren't garbage.
I appreciated Driver a lot more. He truly was an inspired bit of casting. It makes me mad that we didn't get similar character depth and acting performance for Anakin in the prequels.
As to the complaints around the final duel, I think most are unfounded. Ren's fight with Finn made sense when you consider - first of all - that he took a direct hit square in his side with a weapon that was tossing stormtroopers backwards fifteen fucking feet. Second of all, he was clearly toying with Finn a bit, although I think he was attempting to look that way more than he actually was, as a means to gain a psychological edge over Finn to help make up for his wound. All nonsense was over when Finn snuck in a blow. After that, Ren destroyed him.
In the fight with Rey, he was much more aggressive off the bat, but I definitely got the sense that he was pushing only far enough to clearly hold the upper-hand, but not enough to kill her. This is made more clear when he has her on the ground and he tries to seduce her to his side. Once Rey does her little Force meditation and pulls from her "hidden" Jedi training, she is able to best the now twice-wounded and exhausted Ren (the guy that had just murdered his dad, by the way) who wasn't expecting that level of skill. I think a fully prepared and healthy Ren beats Rey in a lightsaber duel, but perhaps she was some kind of lightsaber prodigy during her training. Who knows? We don't yet, and that's the point. It's enough for now to be given the clues pointing to her training by Luke followed up with a memory-block.
After my first viewing, I went back and watched the OT. While there are certainly a ton of call-backs and many shared elements with ANH, they didn't bother me a smidgen this time (with the possible exception of Starkiller as Death Star 3.0). Almost all of it worked beautifully considering this movie's role in transitioning from our old favorite characters to the new leads as they move forward into the next two films. And whatever peoples' thoughts on Abrams and his Star Trek reboots, this is a massively better Star Wars film than they are Star Trek films. Had I been in a coma for the past three years and was suddenly shown this, I wouldn't have any idea that Abrams was involved. When I see people slinging shit his way over TFA, it just sounds like the baggage talking. This was an awesome Star Wars movie. It's not the best, no, but it's firmly OT-quality. Someone else above said it's actually motivated them to dip into the ancillary materials, and I agree completely. I've been enjoying reading through the Visual Dictionary and some of the other books. That was something the prequels never managed to make me want to do. I bought a couple TPM books right before TPM came out, but they were the last two.