Finn is a Stormtrooper, who pretty much loses his fights against all the other stormtroopers, can't seem to really contribute anything to the team (even his idea of breaking into the base is partially a lie) and is pegged by his superiors as a flake from the very first moment. His plan to escape the First Order is woefully inept and is only successful because Plot Reasons. He didn't even have to disable the tractor beams that grounded the falcon in the first movie.

How did he even get past stormtrooper quality control?
In 99% of the scenes he's in, he's there to make Rei look good. Would it kill the script writers to have him use any of his insider knowledge of the first order and stormtrooper protocol to help? Or to not be terrible at everything?

Ford at least finds the Falcon, tends to hit the people he shoots at, lands the Falcon with a crazy maneuver that no one apparently thinks possible, and gets good lines throughout (like the trash compactor one). When he's not shooting stormtroopers or his son, it is actually because he's having a character development moment.

Yes, Poe gets a great background scene where he shoots down tie fighters, and another one later that is predictable. It's too bad those scenes are pretty much just background filler to the main action that you know he'll live through because every time we see him the movie screams "ACE PILOT".

Tempertantrum Ren nearly loses to I don't know which end of the lightsaber is up Finn, then gets taken out by a novice who didn't know she had Jedi powers till 5 minutes ago. He kills his dad for no discernible reason other then Gollum told him to. He acts like a 4 year old angry about not getting dessert. At no time did I find him scary or intimidating.

The first order blows up random planets we know nothing about, know no one on, and don't care about. The fact that they have a giant plant deathstar and big star destroyers makes the Rebellion's disarmament look even stupider.

Yeah, pretty much incompetence everywhere.

I think you and I have very different ideas of what "incompetent" means :)

Han is. He can barely run his own ship, and for a smuggler, he sure gets caught a lot.

I've made the argument before, whether here or somewhere else . . .

Han is a BAD smuggler, period. We've literally never seen him be good at it. When we first met him, he had just botched a job so badly (or it's just one of so many times he's done so) that he has bounty hunters after him because Jabba's tired of dealing with him. I'm not sure where anyone got the impression that Han Solo is a bad ass smuggler, because it's the exact opposite of the impression I always got from him in A New Hope. He's a great pilot, but a slightly dumb and incompetent smuggler.

I'm actually not excited by that stuff. I think the new movie relied too heavily on the nostalgia for the 1970s and failed to innovate, which is something I really liked in the prequels.

Obviously, this movie is set between episode three and four, and so it makes sense to make the stuff look exactly like the stuff in Star Wars, but I hope it doesn't push that too hard.

I completely agree in terms of VII, but in that case its not just the art direction that reuses New Hope and Jedi out of nostalgia - its factions and plot do too. That's the part I find distracting. It's cool that the X-wings are based on Ralph McQuarrie's original concepts; it's not cool that they keep flying down trenches on Death Stars 3 out of 4 films.

Rogue One, on the other hand, looks to be telling a different kind of Star Wars story while nailing the art direction of its setting perfectly.

(I don't know if hoping for innovation is a great idea with Star Wars anymore. Heck, even A New Hope is a based on 30's and 40's serials, french sci-fi comics, and fantasy archetypes! :) The Prequels DID do new things, which I appreciated, but it did them with little charisma and...well, acting. I have a feeling trending audience opinions and the general stigma attached to the prequels will mean Disney wont let an experiment like that happen again, which is sad. The best I can hope for now is a story driven by the characters and their emotions. So I don't think we'll ever get another Star Wars or even a Phantom Menace, but on the bright side, I think it's still possible to get more Empire Strikes Backs.)