I thoroughly enjoyed myself, but still...

I couldn’t stand when Luke basically told Kylo the same thing Obi-Wan told Vader, even though Luke wasn’t really there.

Hilariously, none of the stuff you describe comes even close to the inconsistencies between four and five. I agree it isn’t a great movie, but I don’t think that’s why.

She was able to turn it around and plot a lightspeed course. You’re telling me she couldn’t have turned it to block the laser-fire?

How?

That’s an interesting take. I thought it felt pretty obvious that they wanted to kill off Leia - to up the stakes, like you said - but then Carrie died and they felt the whole “dying in an explosion” thing would’ve been too distasteful.

Lucas was very good at world-building and telling his stories. He was also good at framing the scenes of his movies and setting the pace. What he wasn’t good at was curbing his eagerness to try new things so they didn’t get in the way.

The movie isn’t really start at square one; The resistance is almost completely destroyed, and all they have is seeds of heroes past -memories fixed in the mind of innocent youth, and a small group of heroes to move forward with only...hope.

They were hardly teaching scenes. Luke basically ranted about what he thought about the jedi and the force. There was no training, yet Rey was able to fight off Snoke’s guards like an expert swordsperson - she looked better than Kylo Ren which was ridiculous. Kylo Ren comes across as a spoiled whiny brat - and now…

But “bad guy becomes super bad guy” and “good girl becomes super good girl” isn’t really compelling. It’s not really a change in the status quo. They set the groundwork for a more interesting balance in the Force, yet at the end left us with “The bad guy is bad and the good girl is good” so really, nothing changed.

One of the things that occurred to me upon exiting the theater was that I couldn’t remember any names of any of the new characters and locations... there was purple hair girl, asian girl, casino looking planet, hacker guy, salt planet, etc, etc. I think this is down to nothing really ever having time to develop any…

Really puts some perspective on just how good George Lucas stories where huh?

Rian Johnson was out of his elements in this one. Say what you will about J.J. Abrams and The Force Awakens but J.J. has a lot of experience handling big budget blockbusters franchises.

Kylo was doing two things at once with the lightsabers, which is why Snoke didn’t see it coming. Maybe watch that scene again.

*spoilers*

Everything is miniaturized, yet it isn’t. How careful does the First Order have to be if they still seem to have an endless supply of troops and TIE Fighters? They apparently have multiple of those Dreadnoughts. They don’t seem to be running out of Star Destroyers. Or money to buy more weapons.

So if they can still do…

The entirety of the new trilogy seems so...parochial.

Yeah, that’s ultimately why I don’t like the movie very much. There was a lot of stuff I liked and hated along the way, but I left basically wondering what the point was.

SPOILERS

The movie had a really cool take on a lot of things. So many things were surprising and seemed to be going down crazy new roads. Then the movie basically ended back at square one.

I realize that’s the nature of these kind of things. There has to be a constant struggle between good and evil or else there’s no…