See, the problem with comments like this is that you're justifying what you watched. Obviously, there's nothing wrong with speculation, but it gets to a point where you're making up stuff that should've been somewhat obvious. People keep making comments like, "This is Star Wars, not Citizen Kain!", and I'd like to use that exact same argument against them. If this isn't Citizen Kain, then the movie should actually explain things to ensure the movie makes more sense than trying to be overly mysterious and obtuse. It's about the movie equivalence of that guy that reads a thesaurus just so he can make people think he's smart by using big words. The movie is trying to look deep by keeping things mysterious, but it's just hiding its poor storytelling... or trying to keep stuff saved to sell us in a book.
Having also seen it twice, I highly disagree with that. Now, on the other hand, I think the companion visual novel answers a lot of questions.
At least you made it that far. I couldn't even make it past the opening scene before I started questioning the movie.
What ample evidence? We're given a 30 second flashback scene and that's about it. Albeit, there's no real evidence that those are Rey's memories as I get the feeling that Rey was never in some abandoned Cloud City.
Yes, Rey is 19 and Ben Solo is about 30.
It was stated in the visual novel that she has a Y-wing computer on which she ran flight simulations.
I also don't like films that don't tell a complete story with their running time, and certainly that require some exterior source to understand them--you mention some grpahic novel. Something that should never be required and I know I will never read that.
However, everyone knows his is a trilogy, so you pretty much have to expect some gaps. It isn't going to be tied up nice and pretty like Star Wars which, while written as a potential trilogy, was scripted, produced, and cut to be a one-off because no one knew at the time that it would ever be profitable.
For that reason, I say that New Hope is still the best version of a New Hope, because it is a complete story. It needs nothing else.
Having said that, I still don't have a problem with the holes in this one because we know there will be more explanation later. I still think there is enough evidence or hints given us to explain away these so-called issues that people are having--either they work for you or they don't, or they aren't quite the correct interpretations, but the information is there to put these explanations together.
For a one-off--yeah it would suck leaving details out the way they have. But this is a trilogy.
Hell, I HATED LOTR in the theater because I just sat on my ass for 3 fucking hours and those bastards only managed to start walking over some hill after all that time. Talk about a shitty, unfinished film.