Little late to the party here, but we saw it yesterday once our daughter was out of school, and loved it. Now I of course wasn't a fan of losing my all-time favorite character in all of fiction, but at the same time, I sort of thought that it would be coming and I'm sure that is as Harrison Ford wanted it as well. The movie itself was a lot of fun. As others have said, very A New Hope-esque, but in a very good way. It didn't feel repetitive to me. I thought the new cast was all pretty great, and the ending definitely left me anxious for Episode 8. My daughter and I are heading to see it again tomorrow.
The best part of this whole Force Awakens experience has been sharing it with our daughter. She has been, and even more so now, completely obsessed with Rey. She was so excited watching this movie, and I love that she has a strong role model in Daisy Ridley's Rey. She is in total Star Wars mode now, and it is a lot of fun.
We were discussing this last night, so are we to assume that Ren, Hux, and Phasma all escaped? I'm pretty sure that Phasma was already confirmed as returning, and I assumed the other two escaped as well going with the dialog. My daughter was asking about Maz as well, and I would assume she survived since they didn't show here getting offed in that raid on screen (or mentioned). So many thoughts to try to put down, but overall, I really enjoyed it a lot. Can't wait to see it again (and again and again). We picked up the Visual Dictionary as well, so it is fun to go through that today and also pick out "I want a toy of that, and that..." I'm glad now I held off on thing like that Speeder Bike and Sand Speeder to see if they were actually in the movie. There are several characters (like Maz, Luke, Leia, etc.) that I hope we see in both the Black Series and basic scales.