I've just seen it too:
- Gotta echo the part about the Resistance/Republic/First order relationships and powerplay. Being the first movie in a
planned trilogy (which ANH wasn't 100%), they missed the occasion to lay down some deeper/more balanced universe-building in there. They did kinda compensate by building the characters quite more deeply than I was expecting. It's possible they're keeping the main trilogy centered on the familly plot, and keeping the universe building for the side movies they plan to do.
- You know how I feel about humans, the fact none of the new main characters and only one of the returning characters is alien (assuming that moncal wasn't ackbar and that sulustean pilot wasn't the one from ROTJ) is disapointing, but not surprising : the last thing they needed was another jar jar. On the opposite end, BB-8 is a good nuR2 and they did well not to shoehorn a 3PO replacement.
- A pilot main(ish) character! This is something SW sorely needed (Wedge's character building in the trilogy was so abysimal he doesn't count) and I hope we'll see more of Poe in the future - probably not a tough thing to hope here, since it's pretty much guaranteed they'll bring back BB-8 and that implies he'll follow suit (on this note, I think something that's really missing here is a few shots of BB-8 actually doing something on the back of the x-wing, like R2 in ANH, or Poe interacting with it from the cockpit)
- Rey vs Ren. I've got mixed feelings about this, it seems obvious that even a newbie, at least partially trained to the force, should easily be able to defeat a trooper and a girl that discovered the force like half an hour ago. The way both Rey and Finn were about to land hits on him strongly diminish him as a villain (I mean, even a random stormtrooper with an electric stick did better than Ren with a lightsaber against Finn). However, I've also got that feeling of Rey being very, very strong in the force, in a way both reminiscent of and superseding Anakin, and that it lays down the terrain for her turning to the dark side (I really got early dark side vibes from her in the lightsaber battle) and Ren coming back to the light in future episodes. Just a crazy theory here.
EDIT: actually, I just remembered Ren took a full wookie crossbow blast to the chest prior to the combat. That would certainly weaken him a bit.
- What were they trying to do with Phasma? Maybe they'll build her up later but she's pretty much on the Boba Fett end of the character building in this episode.
And... "Snoke"? Snoke? What the hell kind of a name is "Snoke"? Yo Snoke, wazzup man? Seriously?
yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyup :|
And Luke doesn't say a single frakking word. He's just standing there, looking at Rey and that's it. They could have ended the movie right after the Falcon departing to search for Luke and there would not have been anything lost or gained.
My feeling with that is that they set up the meeting here so they can start ep8 several months later, way into Rey's training, without needing to put a flashback to set it up.