Prefacing my opinion with the statement that I think Star Wars movies were permanently ruined by Lucas' ego. He is a terrible writer, and he proved it in Ep 1-3. On top of that, he threw out some really good writing that he had already sold to the fans as authorized stories. All so that he could be the one to write the screenplay. I hate the man for it, and frankly, you can't even recover from what he did even with a time travel reboot.
So, that being said, I go into each Star Wars movie with the goal of being entertained. There is no way it can be "great" again, so I just want to be entertained.
In this movie, I started out disappointed. Then I was further disappointed. And it got worse....
Then suddenly it started getting good again. The action and effects were entertaining, and despite the simplistic and underwhelming plot, I still found myself on the edge of my seat. And there were actually some scenes that surprised me. In the end I walked away from the theater in a good mood, happy to have seen it and in no way upset at the money I had spent. Even my girlfriend who is not a Star Wars fan at all enjoyed it.
Now for a couple comments with spoilers:
I liked that Luke finally "stepped up" in the end, and I can see him being so devastated by his failure that he shut himself off from the force completely and stopped caring about the rest of the universe. He accepted that his "saving the galaxy" was really just a fluke that only resulted in more people dying in the end. When you think about it, his actions, and the actions of his sister, resulted in so many more lost lives than if they had just let the Empire reign. And even after winning back the galaxy and restoring the Republic, look how quickly the galaxy let another "emperor" take over. Granted, he blew up a few hundred billion people, but the weapon he used to do that was destroyed and yet all the other planets kept supporting him. So while it was great that Luke and Leia defeated the emperor against all odds, in the end it only meant a lot of lives lost. Add to that the fact that their own father was pretty much responsible for the Empire coming to power to begin with and you can say that the Skywalkers pretty much totally ---fouled up beyond all recognition--- the whole galaxy up and killed hundreds of billions of people. You can't tell me that a legacy like that wouldn't make you want to become a milk drinking recluse...
The funny thing about that whole scene with Luke and Kylo is that I figured it was plausible that he could survive the maelstrom of laser cannon fire without a scratch and didn't even blink at the absurdity of it. I completely missed that he was not leaving red footprints, and I didn't even consider why he suddenly looked 10 years younger. It was when he popped the blue lightsaber that Kylo and Rey had just destroyed that I realized something was up, but I wasn't thinking about it really hard because the whole scene was so enjoyable. I think it was all because I expected this fight scene. And although a real fight between them would have been the height of shallow story telling, I still wanted it to happen. So badly that although I was on my guard about the blue lightsaber, I still didn't expect that he wasn't even on the planet until it became completely obvious. With so many obvious hints, it takes an engrossing scene and a bit of emotion to still not notice it. I like movies that can do that to me - not just a suspension of disbelief, but making it so enjoyable to watch that I stop thinking about what they are doing wrong.
Speaking of wrong, there were so many scenes that screamed "wrong" to me that when Luke popped the blue lightsaber, I actually thought they were so stupid at Disney that they completely forgot they just destroyed that light saber and that Luke's was green, not blue.
So despite all the really REALLY bad writing, the terrible pace of the first 60% of the movie, the horribly awkward scenes, the worst failure of suspension of disbelief since 6 shot revolvers could fire 50 times without reloading, and some cases of feeling like the entire Star Wars universe was being openly mocked and disrespected, it got damn good in the latter half and I walked away enjoying it.