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In the prequel trilogy, lightsaber combat is an elaborate cirque du soleil ballet of showstopping choreographic wizardy. The jedi had numerous different forms of saber combat and many of them practiced at them all their lives.

In the original trilogy this is not the case. Obiwan stalls for time, and verbally spars with Vader rather than actually battling with him. Yoda does not train Luke in saber combat and even advises him to eschew his Saber in the cave. And it is only in eschewing his saber in the cave like lower levels of the Death Star Throne Room that Luke eventually wins. When Luke fights Vader in Empire, he is relatively ineffective, a novice and out of his depth. He has clearly practiced more in Jedi, but his style is still a high swinging immature and often adolescent approach, but he builds more evasions into his tactics, overall, he tries to avoid getting into long series of blade exchanges with Vader. He only shocks and overcomes Vader when rage and the darkside suddenly fuel him in a bludgeony and clumsy but effective surprise attack.

All the old forms of saber combat die with the final practicioners at the end of Return of the Jedi. Luke is untrained in it and was never that great. Kylo Ren reflects this perfectly in The Force Awakens. His style echoes Luke's from Return of the Jedi, particularly the bludgeoning and clumsy qualities of his movement. His skillset is broken and at best half formed--like Luke's--and he clearly hasn't encountered anyone else wielding a saber since he fled his training. Rey's time with a saber is similar, you see her adapt some of her staff skills to the saber (I'm expecting her to build a darth maul type of weapon in episode 8 or 9) but ultimately she also reminds one of Luke in her style and usage of the saber.

So I think it's great they didn't try to shoe horn in prequel style saber ballet into these films, instead choosing a deliberate evolution from what one would expect to grow out of Luke's incomplete training and lack of of a lifetime of practice.

Additionally, Luke was something of a mechanical genius (like Anakin), he repaired the droids, ran all the farm equipment, was an intuitive natural pilot and without instruction was able to build a perfect lightsaber. Rey seems to share many of these engineer's abilities and intuitions.

But Ren, once again, is broken and half formed, reflecting his training, and probably his feelings of inadequecy. His saber is clearly of his own construction and it does not function normally throughout the film, it's overlarge, a bludgeon, rather than a finesse weapon, and it sparks and spits and seems on the verge of malfunction throughout the film. even the now iconic shape, I suspect, was a malfunction bug that Ren decided to turn into a feature.

So it then makes sense that Ren is not very good at saber combat, having never fought someone before, anymore than Rey is. He's also not that great with the force, similar in skillset to Luke at the End of Empire Strikes Back. Oh the parlor trick of stopping a blaster bolt in midair is absolutely stunning, he does a wicked force push multiple times, his fall back choice, but he struggles with technique and usage equally often as he uses the force effectively. I love that he is inconsistent like Luke was! it's such a different take on a star wars villain. (and sets up well parallel lightside and darkside training sequences for Ren and Rey in episode 8)

And my final note reflects back to my earlier comment about the original trilogy providing material that become successful Payoffs (not rip offs) in this film. My favorite moment in the film is the lightsaber, in the snow, at the end of the film, and how that scene resolves, a moment that has so much resonance because of its connection to the earlier films. Just brilliant, it works so very very well.

I just wish I knew how and by whom a lightsaber was recovered that went tumbling towards a gas giant when Luke fell out the bottom of the Cloud City ventilation system.

I think Luke was training him on Dagobah, sent him into the cave, thinking Ren would have a similar experience to his own, learning the lesson that embracing the darkside was killing yourself, and instead the experience Ren had was so traumatizing that it ultimately led him to break bad (and flee the training process, which may have also been prompted by his parents splitting up (akin to how Luke fleeing the training process was prompted by the torture of Han)).

and the equivalents are used here to get around this or that problem in the narrative. Jump to hyperspace from inside a ship, Jump out of hyperspace on a planet. Gah! it's the only thing that really bothered me (other than the hyperspace traveling laserbeam and seeing planets go boom from another planet, or a sun getting deflated having no effect on gravity, but that was just a sort of eyerolls, and relatively shrug worthy all things considered) JJAbrams just is incapable of conceiving distance on the scale of outerspace and seems to think we'd see an enormous explosion if Mars or Venus went boom). Still, I'm not even really mad at all the Abrahms thank you for smoking nonsense he put in because the movie is so damn good.

If there was any nagging doubt about why Harrison Ford came back to this franchise, this pretty much settles it. Ford gets the death he wanted in Return of the Jedi and it limits his involvement with future films, and Disney manages to get him back AND get a big tragic payoff that takes the film to a dramatic height only matched by Vader's revelation in Empire Strikes Back.

Luke went missing but...there is a map leading directly to him? So he's not really all that missing then. And once the map is restored, it takes Rey all of five minutes to find him, but the First Order never bothered to look for him while they had the map intact? Also, while they're attacking the Death Star planet, shouldn't acquiring the rest of the map have been part of the plan?

Once again, for God knows how many times in a sci-fi action movie, all you have to do is hit one sweet spot and you vanquish the enemy. If only wars were won so easily.

He wasn't exactly "missing," as Han and Leia seemed to know that he had made a pilgrimage to "the original Jedi temple." They just didn't know exactly where that was. I inferred that the large, but incomplete, portion of the map to the Jedi temple was somewhat more accessible to a broader group of people, as the Empire had a copy in their archives and R2 had one stored. The Resistance was just unaware of it. It was the final few steps that were missing. Basically like Google Maps directions that just tell you how to get out of your neighborhood and on the highway, but don't tell you which exit to take or the actual address. Max von Sydow is either some old Jedi or friend of the Skywalkers who was one of the only living beings who had the final steps in the directions, which are really the only useful part. He wasn't supposed to share that information with anyone, but felt that the galaxy needed Luke or something, and so he put them on that big flash drive and gave it to Llewyn Davis and BB-8.

I don't the think Empire ever had the complete map. Kylo Ren mentioned only that The First Order had recovered an incomplete portion from the Empire's archives.

My understanding was that the incomplete map was left with a Von Sydow as an emergency only way of finding Luke, but just in case it fell into the wrong hands, it needed both parts, with the other presumably only shared by R2D2 when Luke uses his powers to turn him back on and "allow" himself to be found. They couldn't have found him with just one part

I guess I hadn't even thought about why R2 suddenly came back on, but I really like the idea of Jedi Remote Start. It's also possible that if Rey is Luke's kid, R2 had been programmed to wake up only to the sound of her voice or something.

R2 magically coming on at the end sort of bothered me, but I think I can buy that explanation.

Also, how does Kylo Ren sense Han's arrival on the planet? I thought it was only the force that was supposed to give people away (hence Luke's comment in an earlier episode that he had endangered a mission by tagging along).

(the lightsaber to be found, and more importantly the force had to awaken in Rey)

Especially Kylo Ren's parentage. I did really like how quickly the film reveals that, building the relationship up piece by piece and gradually filling in more characters as we go along. Good sense of dramatic irony gained throughout the film rather than just a single "shock" moment.