If the phrase “Mary Sue” has any meaning beyond being a mechanism for fanboys to launder their misogyny — a big “if” — then Rey’s no bigger a Mary Sue than Luke, who has always been a whiny brat, was in A New Hope. Star Wars also has a long tradition of aging Jedi becoming hermits in exile, if you haven’t noticed. And…

Yep, definitely seems like I’m the broken one, of the two of us:

Sounds about right.

Yeesh.

I never said there’s no valid criticism of the movie. There is! While I find some of your points nitpicky — Star Wars has never really adhered to realistic space physics, so I’m not bothered by the bombs dropping in zero gravity; the ships not being able to catch each other is a narrative contrivance, but IMO a mild…

Between Rick and Morty and now The Last Jedi, 2017 for me was a year in which toxic fandom really did some damage to things I otherwise love.

They expected the full history of Snoke, including his favourite ice cream. They expected Rey to be the child/grandchild of some character from the original trilogy or prequels.

With great respect to Irvin’s force ghost, the mantle has been passed.

A lot of the complaints I keep getting hit with usually come off as overly nit picky, and just looking for a reason to not enjoy the movie. To go in already expecting failure.

I really, truly don’t understand what the fanboys wanted. I can’t imagine a more satisfying resolution to Luke’s arc, for example, other than not making any more movies after Jedi so people could choose to believe whatever they wanted. And if that’s it — if the criticism here is that these movies didn’t need to exist…

He succeeded in the latter, which was only possible by doing the former. Burneko over at Deadspin gleefully counted the ways yesterday and, for me at least, it reads as essentially a list of the film’s best moments. It was a perfect blend of the familiar and the unexpected. The Force Awakens had one moment that took…

Finally saw it last night. 1,000 percent disagree. Snoke was a red herring the whole time, whose death served to elevate Kylo Ren — now comfortably the franchise’s best non-Vader villain — into the role of the chief antagonist. Rey’s parents being nobody important drove home the film’s central theme, a departure…

It’s funny that you finished this reply with a tweet from a journalist, given that the entire rest of your comment is just a pile of unproven conjecture and generalizations. (By the way, I’m a journalist myself, for what it’s worth.)

Sure, that’s fair.

There’s nothing wrong with identifying a cluster of professional critics who you know have opinions you respect or at least tastes you agree with to broadly filter the wheat from the chaff.

You really need to read the audience reactions on Rotten Tomatoes to get a real feeling of how the movie is.

Lol so it’s a mess “from all indications from the people who have actually seen TLJ” ... except for basically every critic on the planet, including the writers for this website that you’re commenting on, I guess?

... wanting to commiserate with fellow disappointed fans occupying a similar space of disappointment?

The act of initiating a thread on a film review premised on the fact that you won’t be seeing the film is pretty squarely within any definition of trolling that I’ve ever encountered. (As does presuming that creative decisions with which you disagree were made for marketing purposes — though I’m sure those involved…

I read your other comments, each trollier than the next, none of them disproving any of what I said.