If you removed three things from the beginning of the film, that terrible "phonecall" to Hux by Poe, the stupidly dumb appearance of Finn staggering onto the flight deck leaking water everywhere and Luke tossing the lightsabre you'd probably have killed alot of the critisisms or moderated it for the rest of it.
But what Rian managed to cause by including them was a " cascade" effect of dislikes that has provoked a fair portion of the fandom. To have set that tone so quickly was a mistake and many things after that just increased the irritation. It stretched the ability of some to accept the film as a credible SW story and pulled them out of it.
I thought the intially set up with the Star destroyers was terrific , it looked fantastic and when the dreadnaught appeared it blew my socks off. I actually felt my heart rate go up.
And then one X wing ,Poe, who managed to shoot down ten TIES in ten seconds in TFA, appears and his single tactic, to go into single combat against the entire First Order fleet, is to make a phonecall?
I was staggered. My immediate thought was just how stupid do you think your audience and me is going to be to accept this?
If it had been Poes squadron plus several A wings (which we barely saw in the end!!) in a desparate attack as we saw in Rogue One I'd have been cheering this . Instead I was left slightly bemused and annoyed and it hugely lessened the impact and sacrifice of the bombing run had afterward.
Then next, when we should have been feeling the cost of the impact that decision had on Poe , we have Finns reintroduction. The guy who was left virtually for dead at the end of TFA , slashed in the back by Kylo.
Unlike most people waking from a severe injury he leaps immediately into conciousness , bumps his head, "comically" falls out of bed then staggers semi naked (except for a plastic bag costume leaking water everywhere) out into Poes arms. It was a terribly cheap comic reintroduction of a character and made all that Finn had gone through in TFA a poor throwaway. And that pulled me out of the movie again.
And then we have that hugely significant moment , when Rey, probably the most important character to carry the story (and franchise) forward meets Luke. And it, like the lightsaber, was just tossed away.
My immediate reaction was "What?????". Not laughter. Not even anger. I was actually left utterly bemused by the choice and I thought "Well that was rude and more than a little disrespectful" .
It simply felt like the director had indulged himself and his ego, rather like a child, by drawing attention to what he had deliberately chosen to do, rather than invest in what in truth the real character would have done. And that didn't just nudge me out of the movie a bit, it threw me way out of it.
And everything after that, all the faults, both the great and small continued to antagonise me and kept trying my patience. Much like "The Phantom Menace" ,those three early foul balls made it significantly harder to like alot of the actually great stuff after it. And then the Leia scene just capped it off.
By the end of it I just sighed and thought "Good grief, what kind of a mess will Han Solo be like for them to reshoot that, if this is what gets a huge pass from Lucasfilm and Disney" . And that it didn't really bother me because there are now a significant number of other films and TV series that I actually preffer to the Star Wars series was a bit of a sobering and sad moment. " The Last Jedi" simply "forced" me to acknowledge that fact.
