I think Burneko’s got a great point. It’s not that TLJ set out to make the other movies in the series look stupid, and it doesn’t do that. What it does, though, is to scrape away some of the layers of religiosity from what was once just a feel-good kickass kid’s movie. I was 8 when I saw the original 1977 film, and it…

To me the bigger deviation there was the movie treating space as space. For the most part the Star Wars movies tend to treat space as the sky, or as the ocean—battles arrange themselves along horizontal planes, like naval engagements, and the fighter jets are, well, fighter jets. Being reminded in the middle of a Star…

and it was like, dang, actually you can tell a fresh and surprising story in this Star Wars universe

It was perfect. And the suggestion that Rey had known it all along, but had been telling herself a different story, was a great touch.

• When Kylo Ren, with like ten seconds of icily savage dialogue, revealed that Rey’s parents were nobody-ass losers, pissing on both George Lucas’s sole storytelling move and all The Force Awakens’s hints about Rey having a mysterious and auspicious background.