Star Wars Episode 9

[Dogfish]

Not gonna lie. This one got me like a pound of chopped onions. I usually don't do that sort of thing. I think it was seeing Carrie Fisher that did me in. Also the sense of finality. This won't be the last Star Wars thing, but it's the last Star Wars thing I will care about. It's the end of the story for the characters whose story has unfolded over my lifetime. So, kind of a big deal for me and it hit me in the feels.

Also the idea of bringing a Tie Interceptor to a lightsaber fight is fricking awesome.

Also damn that John Williams, man's music plays emotions like a xylophone.

Weird year isn't it. Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Avengers, all wrapping up. I mean they might still be around afterwards but this is probably going to be the high point for nerd culture, this is a once in a generational biggie.

[Visitor]

May the Farce be with you.

Just because you're dead doesn't mean you can be in a movie.

[Dogfish]

May the Farce be with you.

Just because you're dead doesn't mean you can be in a movie.

Yeah some of the bringing dead people back stuff is sinister. I can just about live with it for something like Rogue One, faking an actor for a role that they had already played, and for Episode 9 most of Carrie's scenes were done already, but we're definitely on the cusp of being able to do messed up stuff.

[Femina]

the title is dumb, all damage control......... BUT, many a Star Wars movie have stupid names so I don't hold that against it...

I just don't think this movie can be anything more than damage control. It can't be an epic conclusion to a trilogy because its the conclusion of two films that have nothing to do with one another besides that they happen to have the same characters in them. You can't have two tonally dissonant films in front of a conclusion because then the conclusion can never be a finale of a solid through line.

It can be a sequel to TFA, or a sequel to TLJ, but not a true sequel to BOTH, which is what it logically needs to be in order to be a proper conclusion to a trilogy...

To be clear though, If it sucks, I still blame Rian Johnson. In my opinion he left a mess so terrible that nobody could clean it up, so unless JJ shows clear signs of incompetence, I'm not going to shit talk the guy saddled with mopping up the accident. TLJ was a disaster of a film to have to somehow follow, a bad sequel, and a worse prequel... just an incredibly selfish film to make as a director for whomever had to come after him.

[Dazzle1]

I have figured out a way to deal with my disgust with episodes 7 and 8 like Star Trek Discovery I am going to pretend it is an alternate time line

The true sequal for me is Timothy Zahn's trilogy with Grand Admiral Thawn and Mara Jade

[Dogfish]

the title is dumb, all damage control......... BUT, many a Star Wars movie have stupid names so I don't hold that against it...

I just don't think this movie can be anything more than damage control. It can't be an epic conclusion to a trilogy because its the conclusion of two films that have nothing to do with one another besides that they happen to have the same characters in them. You can't have two tonally dissonant films in front of a conclusion because then the conclusion can never be a finale of a solid through line.

It can be a sequel to TFA, or a sequel to TLJ, but not a true sequel to BOTH, which is what it logically needs to be in order to be a proper conclusion to a trilogy...

To be clear though, If it sucks, I still blame Rian Johnson. In my opinion he left a mess so terrible that nobody could clean it up, so unless JJ shows clear signs of incompetence, I'm not going to shit talk the guy saddled with mopping up the accident. TLJ was a disaster of a film to have to somehow follow, a bad sequel, and a worse prequel... just an incredibly selfish film to make as a director for whomever had to come after him.

TLJ is the Empire of the trilogy. It's always going to stand out and look like it's hard to follow. It will probably be the best of the three.

I don't think he left a mess either, I think he sorted out a lot of the important stuff. He killed the pointless bullshit baddie that nobody cared about. He severed Rey from the pointless bullshit hereditary space opera which needed to be done for the story to have any resonance. He made Luke into The Best Jedi Ever Who Does The Most Jedi Thing in a way that was so refreshing and effective that even the actor didn't clock it at first. He brought back snarky puppet Yoda.

He did everything right except maybe the false finale on the dreadnought leading to the second finale on the planet, that still feels odd to me.

When you consider that The Force Awakens is almost the same movie as A New Hope except all the things in it have different names it's impressive he managed to make anything substantial enough to divide opinions out of it. Force Awakens was the safest movie I ever saw. Had The Last Jedi been equally safe then there really wouldn't be any point in seeing this new movie. A trilogy needs to have a hard curveball in the middle or it's just not going to work.

[Femina]

TLJ is the Empire of the trilogy. It's always going to stand out and look like it's hard to follow. It will probably be the best of the three.

I think you misunderstand me. It's not hard to follow because of its greatness, it's hard to follow because it explicitly burns its own bridges.

I don't think he left a mess either, I think he sorted out a lot of the important stuff. He killed the pointless bullshit baddie that nobody cared about. He severed Rey from the pointless bullshit hereditary space opera which needed to be done for the story to have any resonance. He made Luke into The Best Jedi Ever Who Does The Most Jedi Thing in a way that was so refreshing and effective that even the actor didn't clock it at first. He brought back snarky puppet Yoda.

A baddie is only pointless when you fail to provide a point. If you can't find a point for your baddie, than don't use him. If nobody cared about Snoke, his death wouldn't be a 'controversy'. Rey doesn't have to be someone's child for her to be interesting, but the fact is the 'question' of her parentage was continually put to the forefront, WE didn't invent the question, they asked it, so they failed to deliver. No script should HAVE to explicitly state 'your parents are no one special' that should be implied on every character unless given reason to believe otherwise... it was a messy resolution. He made Luke into a failure of teacher and Mark Hamil has clocked nothing, he clearly hated everything to do with the film...

Snarky puppet Yoda is the best Yoda I agree...... but he's also a sham. A sham he used to trick Luke until Luke knew who he actually was, so while its fun to see him again, it doesn't actually make a lot of sense... but I'll give you this one because normal Yoda's a bit boring.

He did everything right except maybe the false finale on the dreadnought leading to the second finale on the planet, that still feels odd to me.

The movie did nothing right in regard to it's primary purpose as a BRIDGE film. I'll be the first person to admit that as a stand alone film I find it decent. But it isn't a stand alone film, it's the centerpiece of a trilogy. As a sequel that takes nothing from its prequel except what it takes to destroy, and as a prequel it leaves very little to work with in order to craft a SATISFYING finale. It doesn't get to be a film that stands on its own, that's not how a trilogy is supposed to be designed. If you want to make a great standalone movie, go do that, but a trilogy requires careful setup to make the last entry WORK, and all TLJ does is knock blocks over leaving half as much for the third films creative team to work with than this creative team was given from TFA. Say what you want, but to me, especially in a trilogy that was expecting to have different directors for all three films, that is just an increadibly selfish way to make a film.

When you consider that The Force Awakens is almost the same movie as A New Hope except all the things in it have different names it's impressive he managed to make anything substantial enough to divide opinions out of it. Force Awakens was the safest movie I ever saw. Had The Last Jedi been equally safe then there really wouldn't be any point in seeing this new movie. A trilogy needs to have a hard curveball in the middle or it's just not going to work.

TFA similarities to ANH are glaring, but it still acts as it should. The first entry of a trilogies job is to set the scene for whats to come. It introduces the major players and sets the stakes. I've said it before and I'll say it again, 'curve ball/shock/surprise' storytelling IS NOT STORYTELLING. If all you care about in your film is to surprise the audience, then you're making something that has no structure. A surprise has to be built into the cake or else its just another sort of deus ex machina. Narrative harmony is what separates storytelling from being just a listing of random events that happened. TLJ threatens ITS OWN narrative throughline with its many 'shock' moments but juuuust manages to squeak by without being just a bunch of random pointlessness FOR ITSELF... but as an entry to a trilogy, the third film has a LOT of work to do if it wants to make this whole thing look like a story arc and not just thee large, but mostly random events in these peoples lives. I say this in the hopes that the finale film doesn't just do what TLJ did and completely ignore its predecessors of course, nothings all that hard to make 'your own' if you just don't care about anybody else's preceding works.

Example: Rey's parents are nobody? Than don't indicate they were somebody EVER, and we don't have to waste screen time on an explanation that her parents are nobody. Oh but somebody else indicated Rey's parents are somebody in the last film but you aren't interested in that? In the Rian Johnson school of film making this means it's a good time to wipe your ass with somebody else's hard work. He could just as easily have left the whole question of parentage out of his film entirely if he didn't want to deal with it... instead we have riveting film of a man explaining to a woman that her parents are no one... a question not built up enough to warren't the screen time, but just built up enough to be disappointing.

[tallyho]

I would just point out that its the darkside who have told us her parents were nobodies and not just nobodies but fairly worthless pieces of humanity.
That could easily just be a tactic to get her to turn as ...ya know...the darkside aint known for the truth. It probably isnt but thats what I would have done as a writer. I would just not accept it 'as is' at the moment is my point, given theres another film to come. 'Your folks were mysrerious!' 'Your folks were garbage!' 'Your folks are amazing! 'Fits into a 3 part trilogy rather nicely is all Im saying

I still cant get over the most pointless and slow chase in film history. And the terrible Carrie Fisher in space moment and Finn and the chubby girl making it back wounded on foot to the base ahead of the imperials, and oh hell there were shitloads of things wrong with TLJ.

[Dogfish]

The reason Luke fails as a teacher is the same reason Yoda fails as a teacher and Obi Wan fails as a teacher and holy crap it's almost like there is a recurring theme here of teachers who fail because they withhold truths, or they don't own up to their own flaws. Every teacher fails in Star Wars because they don't understand their students, or they think they're smarter than they are, or they underestimate the opposing side of the Force. Even on the dark side, Palpatine misjudges Vader, Snoopy (or whatever he is called) misjudges Ren. You say the movie made Luke into a failed teacher, I say it remained true to the series because it's Star Wars, and in Star Wars your teacher is going to fail. If there's an enduring motto of Star Wars it isn't "May the Force be with you" it is, "You can't learn this shit in a classroom".

People wanted Luke to be out there chopping Star Destroyers in half with the Force and shit like that but as Han Solo observed in Force Awakens, the Force does not work that way. Also, and more importantly, Luke isn't a successful teacher because his arc hasn't ended in RotJ, he is still learning, still growing, and that's why he fails as a teacher, but that's why he gets his shit together and does the Most Jedi Thing Ever, which is not obliterating the First Order Fleet with space magic, but mind tricking everybody within about a square kilometre with a force projection and saving his friends at the cost of his own life.

I think once Mark Hamill figured it out he liked it a lot more, not seen or heard any evidence other than a snibbet here or there that he didn't like the film. It definitely needs more than one viewing but it's an incredibly layered and clever film, far more so than Force Awakens which is perhaps why it feels odd. Empire had the exact same impact and was just as surprising when it came out.

Rian Johnson did a way better job than he got credit for. He also had to deal with the forerunner of the ridiculousness that Captain Marvel would eventually get. Largely from the same people it should be mentioned.

It's the little subversions of the original I love. Rey being told her parents are nobody is an inversion of the I Am Your Father scene. The space casino full of rich scumbags is a nice inversion of the Mos Eisley Cantina. Admiral Holdo pulls the Yoda trick of confounding expectations based on her appearance. The last time Leia sees Luke is as a projection, another callback to the first time he saw her. The movie is made with a love and attention to detail that Force Awakens just didn't have, let alone the prequels. The prequels idea of a callback is something like, "Darth Vader made C3-PO!" and then folks are like, "Why? Does it come up later?" and the movies are like, "No, they all forgot."

I'm a little bit worried that Rise of the Skywalker will be used to retcon some parts of Last Jedi, but I hope not. It took a while for people to warm to Last Jedi but it's probably the second best movie in the whole franchise and the best move at this point is just go with it and see what happens rather than fretting. I mean it's the third movie in a trilogy, all they really need to do is have a couple of massive fights and kill the baddies, hand out some medals and we can all call it a day.

Must confess I kind of didn't buy the slow chase entirely either, in the sense that 'okay there's a slow chase but also we've got time to go and do a couple of secret missions in a casino', that was sort of odd. I am a sucker for an interesting twist on a space battle though. Reminded me of the episode of Battlestar Galactica when they were jumping over and over and over because they had a ship with a tracker on in the fleet.

I assume Finn and Rose just ran really fast. It's not like the First Order guys were literally giving chase. By that point I think they were too busy being shouted at about the Falcon.

[Dazzle1]

The reason Luke fails as a teacher is the same reason Yoda fails as a teacher and Obi Wan fails as a teacher and holy crap it's almost like there is a recurring theme here of teachers who fail because they withhold truths, or they don't own up to their own flaws. Every teacher fails in Star Wars because they don't understand their students, or they think they're smarter than they are, or they underestimate the opposing side of the Force. Even on the dark side, Palpatine misjudges Vader, Snoopy (or whatever he is called) misjudges Ren. You say the movie made Luke into a failed teacher, I say it remained true to the series because it's Star Wars, and in Star Wars your teacher is going to fail. If there's an enduring motto of Star Wars it isn't "May the Force be with you" it is, "You can't learn this shit in a classroom".

People wanted Luke to be out there chopping Star Destroyers in half with the Force and shit like that but as Han Solo observed in Force Awakens, the Force does not work that way. Also, and more importantly, Luke isn't a successful teacher because his arc hasn't ended in RotJ, he is still learning, still growing, and that's why he fails as a teacher, but that's why he gets his shit together and does the Most Jedi Thing Ever, which is not obliterating the First Order Fleet with space magic, but mind tricking everybody within about a square kilometre with a force projection and saving his friends at the cost of his own life.

I think once Mark Hamill figured it out he liked it a lot more, not seen or heard any evidence other than a snibbet here or there that he didn't like the film. It definitely needs more than one viewing but it's an incredibly layered and clever film, far more so than Force Awakens which is perhaps why it feels odd. Empire had the exact same impact and was just as surprising when it came out.

Rian Johnson did a way better job than he got credit for. He also had to deal with the forerunner of the ridiculousness that Captain Marvel would eventually get. Largely from the same people it should be mentioned.

It's the little subversions of the original I love. Rey being told her parents are nobody is an inversion of the I Am Your Father scene. The space casino full of rich scumbags is a nice inversion of the Mos Eisley Cantina. Admiral Holdo pulls the Yoda trick of confounding expectations based on her appearance. The last time Leia sees Luke is as a projection, another callback to the first time he saw her. The movie is made with a love and attention to detail that Force Awakens just didn't have, let alone the prequels. The prequels idea of a callback is something like, "Darth Vader made C3-PO!" and then folks are like, "Why? Does it come up later?" and the movies are like, "No, they all forgot."

I'm a little bit worried that Rise of the Skywalker will be used to retcon some parts of Last Jedi, but I hope not. It took a while for people to warm to Last Jedi but it's probably the second best movie in the whole franchise and the best move at this point is just go with it and see what happens rather than fretting. I mean it's the third movie in a trilogy, all they really need to do is have a couple of massive fights and kill the baddies, hand out some medals and we can all call it a day.

Must confess I kind of didn't buy the slow chase entirely either, in the sense that 'okay there's a slow chase but also we've got time to go and do a couple of secret missions in a casino', that was sort of odd. I am a sucker for an interesting twist on a space battle though. Reminded me of the episode of Battlestar Galactica when they were jumping over and over and over because they had a ship with a tracker on in the fleet.

I assume Finn and Rose just ran really fast. It's not like the First Order guys were literally giving chase. By that point I think they were too busy being shouted at about the Falcon.

I think the problem is that Luke from the innocent farm boy to the Jedi who faces Emperor Palapine was never a coward and with all the spin, they ruined the main character in the orginal trilogy

[Dogfish]

Running away and hiding from your mistakes is the most Jedi thing there is. That's why Obi Wan did it. That's why Yoda did it. Luke did it too. It's a trilogy of trilogies and the patterns repeat.

The writer did something extremely brave which is instead of taking a character we last saw in his twenties and telling us he hasn't changed but now he is in his sixties, he said, "Luke got old" and wrote him accordingly. This isn't Die Hard or Rambo where the crinkled up old dude does the same things he did in the first movie just more ridiculously. Luke grew up, he ran from his mistakes, but ultimately he overcame his fear to do what was right at the end, even got a bit of his youthful swagger back. It was a beautiful moment.

I mean they're pretty dumb kids space adventure movies but they're not that dumb. There're patterns to this stuff.

Weird that folks were following a forty year old franchise and just thought it was about space wizards and blowing up Death Stars.

[Femina]

I'm a little bit worried that Rise of the Skywalker will be used to retcon some parts of Last Jedi, but I hope not. It took a while for people to warm to Last Jedi but it's probably the second best movie in the whole franchise and the best move at this point is just go with it and see what happens rather than fretting. I mean it's the third movie in a trilogy, all they really need to do is have a couple of massive fights and kill the baddies, hand out some medals and we can all call it a day.

People HAVEN'T warmed to TLJ... that's the problem. It's a straight split. Love/Hate with very few in the middle ground. The biggest problem? Those who love TLJ don't tend to like TFA, and those who like TFA tend to hate TLJ.

JJ has to either make a sequel that caters to ONE of those crowds, or else find some way to make two films that basically don't work as a single 'story' thread... and somehow make a conclusion that retroactively makes them SEEM like two films connected as a 'saga' and not just things that happened to occur in the lifespan of these characters.

TLJ doesn't BUILD on TFA, it kicks TFA's building blocks away and started building its own thing, frankly if that's Rian's style, it's only fair that JJ can walk in, kick those blocks down and start fresh again... but by that point we need to start asking ourselves just what the hell a TRILOGY even is anymore.

My problems with TLJ have nothing to do with surface level, non-problem trollup like 'oh there's bombs dropping in space nyaaaa!' or 'Ew Leah space walks bah!' because frankly, those things make as much sense to the logic of the Star Wars universe as anything EVER HAS, people are only turning into Trekkies about Star Wars right now because they didn't like this particular film.

My problems with the film is that its a film that doesn't do its JOB, and threatened to (and may HAVE, we'll see) break the back of this trilogy by deciding to do its own thing rather than be a part of a SAGA, as it was envisioned to be.

[RedMountain]

Personally I haven't enjoyed either of the "new" Star Wars films, though I did like Rogue One and truly enjoyed the fun ride that Solo was, but this got me a little hyped mainly just because of Lando and hearing Palpatine laugh at the end. One of the fun things they did in the SWTOR game was essentially making the sith emperor immortal, and he could transfer his essence/spirit around and keep manipulating things to his will. Obviously Palpatine survives in the EU books/comics, but Disney did away with most of that. Would love to see him make a return in this.

Honestly I wish they would consider making an "Old Republic" era film. It was much more wild west back then when the sense of good and evil was a bit more blurred and the whole light/dark side of the force was more of a disagreement in how it should be used vs. the whole good vs. evil thing. A lot of cool history and fun characters they could explore.

[Dazzle1]

Running away and hiding from your mistakes is the most Jedi thing there is. That's why Obi Wan did it. That's why Yoda did it. Luke did it too. It's a trilogy of trilogies and the patterns repeat.

The writer did something extremely brave which is instead of taking a character we last saw in his twenties and telling us he hasn't changed but now he is in his sixties, he said, "Luke got old" and wrote him accordingly. This isn't Die Hard or Rambo where the crinkled up old dude does the same things he did in the first movie just more ridiculously. Luke grew up, he ran from his mistakes, but ultimately he overcame his fear to do what was right at the end, even got a bit of his youthful swagger back. It was a beautiful moment.

I mean they're pretty dumb kids space adventure movies but they're not that dumb. There're patterns to this stuff.

Weird that folks were following a forty year old franchise and just thought it was about space wizards and blowing up Death Stars.

Change is fine but this is not the character of Luke Skywalker any more than Chris Pine's James Kirk represent the real Captain Kirk as envisioned by Gene Roddenbury and played by Shatner

[Dogfish]

That's bunk. Nobody was out there saying the prequels didn't count and they were far worse.

[Imagineer]

Captain Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan wasn't the real Captain Kirk as envisioned by Gene Roddenberry and played by Shatner.

Shatner wanted to keep playing the virile man of action, and had to be convinced to play a character getting older. It turned out all right.

I know Mark Hamill has expressed disagreement with the path The Last Jedi gave to Luke Skywalker, and he's probably right that audiences would have eaten up a Luke Skywalker Epic Hero trilogy with a spoon, me included... but I like the Luke that I got, and the themes The Last Jedi considers.

I also like the themes of The Force Awakens. Yes, it repeats a lot of beats... but history has a way of repeating itself. And a villain that actually tries an almost-worked scheme again is refreshing. After all, third time's a charm.

So put me down as the guy that likes both TFA and TLJ, and hopes TROS will develop an emotional story with interesting themes.

This is the only Star Wars I'm going to get. I can't not be critical of it -- on some level you can't un-see how the sausage is made -- but I'm going to try hard to get the most out of it, because it's more important to my happiness to enjoy it than to be right about how they screwed it up.

But that's not what I intended to say when I hit the Reply button, so... I think criticism of the third Star Wars trilogy as a fractious set of movies and not a SAGA is interesting, because it touches on the evolution of onscreen storytelling.

TV is more like movies used to be -- and vice-versa, as Star Wars is demonstrating. We might wish they'd mapped out a whole trilogy and then taken the better part of a decade to implement it from a unified vision, but the guy who did that last time had mixed results -- and it was in no small part because of how much the guy he was. And anyway, the milk's spilled.

Of course nothing feels quite so wonderful as an epic saga done right. But it ain't easy -- and given all the challenges of the modern blockbuster business, Star Wars might never find its way back. Indeed, I wonder if the magnified tribalism of social media makes it impossible for anyone engaged with it to reach that old-fashioned wonder. Idle hands are the Devil's workshop, and every tribe has idle hands to hone its bogeymen and dominate every campfire with tales that consume the whole tribe with nightmares. How many of us approach things like Episode 9 and Endgame with anxiety? I bet a lot of us. How fucked up is that?

Indeed, now I feel terrible for having spent time on this post instead of trying to crack my current storytelling problem. So I really hope somebody gets something out of this. Not that I have anyone to blame but myself. I think. I don't know.

Maybe the Jedi's trademark of running away and hiding is actually brilliant.

[NoonShadow]

Man, so many issues that fail to capture how the problems of the current trilogy are the result of strengths from the OT

Running away and hiding from your mistakes is the most Jedi thing there is.

This is completely inaccurate. There's two datapoints here from the original films, which isn't enough to make a pattern. What's more, in the galaxy that existed at the time, the Empire had won, overthrown the Republic, outlawed the Jedi, and hunted them to near-extinction. Sure, Jedi were hiding then, since they had already lost and been destroyed. And yet, for some reason, Luke went to hide in solitude as well, even though he's a hero of the Republic and the savior of the galaxy and widely respected in the universe as it exists at that time. It makes no sense for him based on what we know, while it did make sense for Yoda and Obi-wan.

I could come up with interesting ideas for Luke to be in seclusion, perhaps, but it would take doing something to grow his character, which TLJ really didn't do. TLJ just made him different, different enough to be an unrecognizable character. There's no continuity between who he was and who he is, which is what the audience requires to accept change.

TLJ doesn't BUILD on TFA, it kicks TFA's building blocks away and started building its own thing, frankly if that's Rian's style, it's only fair that JJ can walk in, kick those blocks down and start fresh again... but by that point we need to start asking ourselves just what the hell a TRILOGY even is anymore

This is entirely the problem. There's no reason to get invested in the this franchise right now. There's no momentum. It's fine if Rey's parents are nobody, it's fine is Snoke is unimportant, but you're not giving us anything else! You're just knocking down the building blocks and saying, "HA!" See, clever writing would turn a problem into an opportunity. Maybe Rey's parents ARE nobody, but she didn't need them to be special, she just needed them to be her parents. That's all she wanted. So maybe they could have shown up somewhere, and had a scene with her. People might have been disappointed that they weren't Han Solo or Obi-wan's nephew or Plagueis' force ghost, but you'd be adding something to the story by having her actually meet them. And then we might have an opportunity to explore Rey as a person by how she reacts to finally reconnecting with the parents she's been looking for.

Instead it completely destroys the idea that there's anything to look for.

Likewise with Snoke. You don't have to pay off the mystery of who he is in order to make him useful to the story. Perhaps you don't learn who he is, but you learn that his motivations aren't at all what you might think.? Perhaps he's intentionally setting himself up as a figure-head in order to expose the fascist tendencies within the Republic and help prevent falling back into Empire? Or just any other half-assed idea I could create right here while sitting on my ass, to help give us somewhere to go with the next story instead of telling us nothing matters.

And then the trailer comes out for the next film, and it's completely the wrong message. "No one's ever really gone" is just another way of saying that nothing matters. Nothing is going anywhere, nothing is building toward anything because there's no consequences. I mean, everyone knew that Luke would likely be back as a Force Ghost, especially when you factor in the IRL stuff-namely, that there's no other characters to help carry forward the trilogy. But really, is the Luke we got in TLJ a character who deserves to linger around as a Force Ghost? He'd already divorced himself from everything. What's he trying to hang around for? He surely didn't establish a rapport with Rey. I don't know if I've seen a mentor/student relationship I've ever cared about less in any major film production.

[lionbadger]

Man, so many issues that fail to capture how the problems of the current trilogy are the result of strengths from the OT

The key issue with Star Wars is that everything looks super cool but the galaxy is populated by complete and utter retards. Then fans freak out when they try to reconcile the cool stuff they like with actions of the complete morons using said cool stuff.

[Femina]

The problems of TLJ and the strengths of the OT don't really matter in conjunction with one another. TLJ ISN'T the OT, so comparing what it was doing against what the OT was doing is really only a discussion of 'choices' than one of quality or 'should of/would of'' TFA was very much a film banking on the OT's strengths so fiercely that it made me demand to never see a spherical death machine in another Star Wars movie ever again... a demand they immediately threw out the window with the terrible Rogue One (The single worst Star Wars film of all time IMO... yes, underneath even TLJ for me)

TLJ's problems deserve to be analyzed for themselves without necessarily always concerning what it did and didn't do that the OT did or didn't do... obviously this isn't always possible... questions of 'what is Star Wars' and 'what should a Star Wars movie have' probably require looking back at the past TLJ tried to kill SO hard that it smacked the series right back around to the start of the whole thing again (Rise of Skywalker). But once more, I find that most peoples issues with TLJ aren't as valid as they think they are.

The VAST majority of complaints I see about TLJ are issues those same people have ignored and accepted in many other Star Wars films back when they understood the series was a FANTASY series and not a Science fiction series... but when someone doesn't like a film, their willingness to suspend their disbelief suffers and suddenly they turn from Star Wars fans into Particle Physics Scientists dead set on defending the laws of the universe... I mean it's okay if Carl Sagan notes that gravity doesn't work this way in space... it's not really smart though to take exception to how a bomb is working in space if you are perfectly fine with the fact that fighter ships in Star Wars have been operating as though space has gravity by banking their turns since the series began.

I really just wish people took a deeper look into why they didn't like the film, rather than the surface level junk that they latched onto in reaction to the deeper problems of the film and what it means for its series as a whole.