...Giant death star with only one weakness that everyone seems to find? Check...
At least this time people had to physically infiltrate to exploit (bomb) the weakness. I liked that.
...Here's this storm trooper that was designated as waste management but was wearing a storm trooper outfit and was out on mission with a gun. Seriously?
I wasn't clear on whether he was a sanitation engineer AS a stormtrooper, or was that his job BEFORE becoming a soldier? Or are all these stormtroopers both fight-trained AND given specialist training?
Said storm trooper just happens to pick up a light saber and finds himself mysteriously good at it instantly.
Best theory I've heard on this (and I might have read it here, IDK) is that, as suggested in the fight scene between Finn and the trooper with that switch-blade electric riot baton thingy, maybe all stromtroopers are trained in hand-to-hand / melee weapons? Besides, he really wasn't that good with it as I recall.
My only other complaint is that it's been 30 years. Thirty...freakin...years. Everything is the same! I don't know about the rest of the galaxy but after years of war on Earth we've gotten really good at fighting with always new and better weapons. But it's 30 years later and they're still using the same type of weapons, ships and what not.
Oh I dunno, our own military likes to find a weapon--whether an M-1 or M-16 rifle, or an F-15 fighter--and stick with it for 30-50 years. Plus the troopers had some new weapons (that riot control baton, flamethrowers), I seem to recall more variants of the TIE fighters, and maybe this explains why Poe's X-wing can maneuver so well, it's the X-wing Mark 2!
And Death Star 3? It's weapon could jack a whole system in one shot right? Death Stars 1 and 2 would have to circle countless 80's-era vector-rendered planets before they could do that.
Plus they have guns that shoot frickin' lasers! How ya gonna improve on that for arming your soldiers!
I will say this, Ren stopping that blaster shot with the raw force...instead of deflecting it with his saber like he was playing badminton...was really, really cool.
If you find a copy, I'd be interested.
