I liked it in general.
I didn't like the very not subtle emphasis of the named heroes having plot protection.
I didn't like some moments of over-the-top bad physics.
I liked the epic hyperspace splatter scene and Luke's late performance.
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That bomber run at the start was just plain bad space physics even by star wars standards of magic space flight. Dropping bombs while over a ship? Come on.
The Leia un-blowout scene was rather unexpected in every way - i totally expected that to be the point they write her out of the story, and since she does not do much afterwards it was just odd. Ok, maybe they weren't able re-shoot the scenes by the time she died, and cutting them out completely would have broken the movie, but the scene does not make much sense even if she wasn't dead for real.
Oh, and then there is the matter of death.
The movie started with a very interesting scene of Leia looking at the not so large in the typical scale of a star wars battle losses and mourns. Scolding the commander for the losses at a small gain. This all seemed right.
Then, in the next battle, she gets blown out and magically saved. None else does.
Then ships get picked off one by one, with an occasional mention of "everyone evacuated", sure, but still.
Then the shuttles leave, and get picked off one by one (what "anti-radar"? They were in plain sight visual range!).
That protracted pick-shuttles-off-one-by-one, one per second, for half an hour part was really jarring - once again, we have a cruiser-full of people, most got killed, but guess which shuttle never got blown up?
Then we have the battle on the ground. Finn tries to sacrifice himself, but is prevented from doing so by the tech girl.
The scene is brilliant in it's mocking of the deaths of nobodies.
"why have you done this?"
"cause you are too main a character to die!"
*rebel base gets blown up in the background*
The life of one main character is worth more than lives of hundreds of nobodies.
In the end, the cruiser-full of people got reduced to the main cast and a few random people, all fitting into the Millennium Falcon.
So, yeah. Can't quite point out a precise moment when the movie got me kicked out of the universe and into the spot-the-absurdity mode (ghost-Yoda throwing lightning bolts?), but apparently it happened somewhere half-way through it.
I do not find "Phantom Menace" too bad. Is it (fan hatred) because of Jar Jar Binks?
Perhaps.
Having seen PM before the original trilogy, i had no reasons to hate it, only to find it being a regular meh movie.
To me the prequels feel like a draft, something incomplete on many levels.
The graphics reminded of a game - something game-CGI-shiny, fastly-done and devoid of details. The story sounds like a high level overview that was quickly padded with cliches that were supposed to be fleshed out later, the script looks like it's full of padding that never got trimmed off through an editing phase, etc.
The potential is there, often a few minor edits away, but it looks like no one bothered to do that editing pass.
won't be available for IX
Well, giving the pace of CGI these days i wouldn't bet on that. We have a fairly good precedent.
However, i think they announced that they won't do that this time a few month ago.