Episode 9 Spoilerrific review/discussion
Posted: Thu Dec 19, 2019 7:44 pm
So Ian and I went to a marathon showing of episodes 7,8,9 last night. Here are my thoughts and description. Bear in mind I'm not necessarily remembering everything, because a lot goes on in this movie!
So we open with a crawl which says that a mysterious broadcast has been sent to the galaxy - Emperor Palpatine is back! He's spent the last several decades building a massive fleet of Star Destroyers and is demanding that the entire galaxy submit to him or be destroyed. More, these Destroyers have "death star tech" - each has a big cannon on the bottom which can destroy an entire planet with one blast.
We see Kylo raiding some village somewhere and finding a "Sith Wayfinder", which is a small pyramid thing that's basically a GPS system. He plugs that into his fighter and flies to the Sith planet, which is not on any map of the galaxy and you have to fly through some weird nebula-thing to get to. Once there he finds Palpatine, who is kind of a zombified corpse that dangles off the end of a giant articulated arm. Palpy tells Kylo that he's been every voice he's ever heard in his head, every influence he's ever had, and that he created Snoke - Kylo literally walks past a big water tank with like three or four Snokes floating in it as he arrives. Palpy unveils his fleet, with the destroyers breaking out from under the ice and floating in the atmosphere. There's masses of them, many times more than the First Order has. Palpy says he wants Rey brought to him, and Kylo leaves.
Meanwhile we see Rey being trained to be a Jedi... by Leia. Yes, really. Rey meditates and whispering "Be with me", trying to get the spirits of the previous Jedi to talk to her, but nothing happens and she's disappointed.
The rebels/resistance/whatever also find out about the Sith planet, thanks to a First Order mole. The pyramid thing has an entry in the Jedi texts that Rey stole. Luke spent a long time looking for one but gave up, so they head off to the place he last looked to pick up the search. There's a big festival going on there, so they mingle and ask around. A woman at the festival puts a necklace on Rey and they talk a bit, then Rey has one of the Force-skype calls with Kylo. He tells her about Palpy and that he is going along but basically out for himself and that he's determined to turn Rey to the dark side. He grabs the necklace off her neck, and when the Force-skype ends he still has it in his hand. So Force teleport, basically.
His lackeys tell him where the necklace comes from and they order the local First Order guys to go after them. Lando turns up and picks up the heroes and they run for it. Lando says people didn't come to help at the end of Last Jedi because everyone is scared of the First Order. First Order troops turn up for a chase and the "They fly now!" scene, and they kill them and get away. They go to find some guy who was looking for the Wayfinder... I'm a little unclear on this point, but there's a guy they have to find, anyway.
They wind up falling into this black stuff in the desert and get sucked in. They think they're dying and Finn says "I need to tell you something... I never said it before" to Rey, but is sucked under before finishing. The stuff doesn't kill them though, they're deposited in some caves. Poe asks him what he was going to say to Rey and Finn refuses to tell him. This becomes something of a running joke, but it just kind of peters out. It seems like an "I love you" moment, but Finn never actually tells her he loves her, nothing romantic happens between them, so we literally just get Poe making jokes about Finn saying it a couple of times.
They find the guy's body in the caves, an old skeleton. He has an ancient Sith dagger with writing on it in the Sith language. C3PO says he has translated it but he won't tell them what it says because there's a law built into all protocol droids that they may not tell anybody the translation of anything in the Sith language.
Whilst there they come across a giant worm creature, which is injured. Rey heals it with a handwave, saying she used up some of her life energy to do so, and it breaks the cave open so they can get out. They find the dead guy's ship nearby and head for it. Rey gets distracted and walks into the desert, seeing Kylo's ship arrive. This is the trailer scene where she jumps over his ship, and cuts it in half. Meanwhile Chewie comes to find her, and is captured by the Knights of Ren and taken into a transport.
Rey uses the Force to grab the transport as it lifts off, dragging it down. Kylo, surviving his crash, uses his Force to fight her hold. She tries harder, and force lightning shoots out of her hands and blows the transport up, killing Chewie.
They leave in the ship, and Rey recognises it as the ship her parents left in when they abandoned her. She Force-Skypes Kylo and he says "your parents were nobody... because they chose to be. To keep you safe. And they abandoned you when they couldn't." Rey's father was Palpy's son, and she is his granddaughter. Dun-dun-dun!
They talk about 3PO, and decide they can get the translation if they go to some expert hacker. So they go to another planet and find the hacker, who says he can do it but only by wiping 3PO's memory completely. R2, it turns out, periodically backs up 3PO's memory but 3PO says his backups aren't very reliable. So they wipe 3PO and get the message which tells them where the second Wayfinder is - in the wreckage of the Death Star. Meanwhile, we see that the exploded transport was a different one, and Chewie is still alive and on a First Order ship.
Poe meets an old ladyfriend who says he used to smuggle spices, and Finn teases him about this in retaliation to his "what were you going to say" jokes. She plans to leave as the First Order are oppressing everyone, and has some sort of "Captain's pass" from the First Order which can get her past any security. They realise Chewie is alive and she gives it to Poe so they can go rescue him. They use the pass to get onto the ship and break Chewie out, but they all get caught. They're going to be executed but at the last second Hux says "give me the gun, I want to do this myself" to the troopers - and then guns the stormtroopers down because, of course, he's the mole. "I don't care if you win or the First Order wins," he says, "I just want Kylo Ren to lose." He asks them to wound him, so he can claim they forced him to let them escape, and they do. But when he reports this to his boss, his boss just kills him and says "Tell Kylo I found the mole."
They go to the planet where the death star wreckage is, and Rey uses the dagger to find the location of wayfinder and goes to the wreckage to locate it. She winds up in the ruin of the Emperor's throne room where Luke defeated Vader. Kylo turns up and gets it first, destroying it and saying Rey will only get to the Sith planet if she goes with him. They fight, and he's about to beat Rey but he's distracted by a force moment from Leia as she dies. Rey stabs him with his own lightsaber and he dies. Rey then heals him and leaves him behind, escaping in his fighter. Why kill him and then heal him again? What was the point? Who knows.
Kylo has a vision of Solo. It's not a force ghost, doesn't seem to be a real ghost either, more one of those cases where you just imagine somebody. Solo calls him Ben and Kylo says his son is dead. Solo tells him no, his son is very much alive and it's Kylo Ren that is dead. Kylo/Ben accepts this, and apparently is turned back to the good side. He throws his saber into the sea.
Rey goes to Luke's island and burns Kylo's fighter, determined to give up and stay there just as Luke did. She tossed Luke's saber into the burning wreckage, and Luke's Force ghost appears and intercepts it. She tells him he was right to abandon the fight and she's doing the same, and he tells her flat out that doing that was wrong. She finds Kylo's own Wayfinder in the burned wreckage of his fighter and Luke raises his X-Wing from the ocean. He also gives her a gift - Leia's lightsaber. We flash back to young Luke training young Leia... not sure if these are CGI creations of the actors, my impression was that they were actually played by different actors. Anyway, Rey heads to the Sith planet in his X-wing, using the Wayfinder. She transmits her location as she goes, so that the rebels can see where the place is and how to get there.
Palpy confronts her when she gets there and says that he wants her to kill him, because then his spirit will possess her body and he will become "Empress Rey".
Kylo arrives and Rey refuses to kill Palpy. He sucks some of her energy from her, which heals his hand. He's amazed by this, and says there's some special link with her and Ben that boosts both of their powers, which is why they are both so strong. This is a known thing, but only happens once every few hundred years or so. He sucks the energy from them and regenerates himself, and his body comes back to life. Now he doesn't need to die and possess Rey, he can rule in person.
Ben fights the Knights of Ren, but he doesn't have his saber and is getting his ass kicked. Rey pulls Leia's saber and does a Force-skype moment to teleport it to him, and he kills all the Knights of Ren. Honestly the Knights don't have that big of a role in the film. We see them a couple of times but they never do anything especially badass and Ben kills them all pretty easily once he has a saber.
So the Sith fleet is going to fly into space, but we're told that they need some sort of guidance tower to navigate their path. Without it they can only hover there, helpless. The Rebellion arrives to attack, and a big battle starts - but the Rebellion are outnumbered hundreds to one. Then Lando arrives in the Falcon. He's managed to convince the rest of the galaxy to come to the rescue, and is at the head of a vast fleet. So a huge battle begins. The Sith general decides not to use the tower, his command ship can guide the fleet out of the atmosphere. Finn guesses this (it seems to be a Force moment, where he 'feels' that the command ship is guiding them), so they attack the command ship. This is the horse scene, because they literally land on the command ship and attack on horses because "speeders can be jammed".
Palpatine goes on about how he has ultimate Force power because he's the culmination of all the Sith. We pan around and they're in this huge arena with thousands of hooded figures watching. Palpy shoots lightning up into the sky, shutting down the power systems on all the rebel ships. "You can't beat me!" He says "I am ALL the sith!"
Rey has a Force moment, and finally the Jedi spirits talk to her. We hear voices of past Jedi... not sure exactly, but Obi Wan is in there, and Yoda, I think Qui Gon and others, too. She stands up and says "And I... am all the Jedi." She takes on Palpatine, who tries to lightning-blast her and she uses her saber to reflect it back on him. Palpatine and all the watching Sith are obliterated, the fleet comes back to life, the Sith fleet is destroyed. But Rey exhausts herself in the effort, and dies.
Butttttt.... Ben comes to her aid, and uses the Force healing she showed him earlier to give her all his life energy. She comes back to life, and a moment later he dies. He fades away into the force, and back on the rebel base Leia's body does the same thing.
We see celebrations around the galaxy as we're told that everyone is rising up against the First Order - including, funnily enough, a bunch of Ewoks. We do not, however, see a bunch of Gungans shouting "We'sa Freeeee!"
In the aftermath Rey goes to Tattooine and finds Luke's old house. It's run down and there's a bunch of sand in it. She wraps Luke and Leia's sabers up in a cloth and buries them in the sand, then pulls her own one out. It looks like it's made from her staff, and has a yellow blade. A passing woman calls out, saying nobody has lived here in a long time and asking who she is. "Rey," she says. "Rey who?" asks the woman. Rey looks into the distance and sees Force ghosts of Luke and Leia watching and smiling. "Rey... Skywalker."
Rey and BB-8 turn to look into the twin suns as the Star Wars music plays, and that's the end.
So there's the basics. Like I say, I may be mixing up the order of stuff or missing bits, but that's the gist of it.
Things that jumped out at me...
You know, I know they didn't mean it that way, and it doesn't feel that way on screen, but that ending is kind of dark. This was advertised as "the culmination of the Skywalker Saga". Well, the culmination of the Skywalker saga is that every single Skywalker is now dead, and a Palpatine has stolen their land and their name. Um... okay. Yay, I guess?
For as much as JJ said he was fine with Rian doing what he wanted and dismissing most of JJ's setups from Force Awakens, he went out of his way in this film to do "take thats" to Force Awakens at every turn.
-Rey's parents were nobody? Nope! Kylo was just lying. They were Palpatine's son and his wife!
-Luke was a hermit who had given up on the fight? Nope! Luke admits that he was wrong to do that.
-Holdo's lightspeed-jump missile would revolutionise combat? Nope! Somebody suggests doing it to the Sith fleet, calling it the "Holdo maneuver" and Poe says something like "No, that was a million to one shot, it's not practical!"
-Kill the past? Nope! The past is super important. Kylo smashing his helmet represents that? Well guess what, he welds it back together and wears it again! Actually there's a funny scene where he meets with the officers on his ship and they're all like "Oh, the helmet is nice... looks good on you..." in a comically obvious bit of sucking up.
The galaxy has lost hope? Nope! The galaxy comes to the rescue!
Aww, Rose is in love with Finn! Nope! Rose is in this movie but she's a glorified extra who delivers some exposition and motivational speeches but otherwise does absolutely nothing, plays no real part in the film, and has no hint of romance whatsoever with Finn. I'm not even sure if the two ever talk to one another.
Marvel movies come across as one vision, one guy who is telling different stories in similar ways, with similar tones, as part of a greater whole. They come across that way because that's exactly what they are! This trilogy comes across like the movies are at war with one another. The Last Jedi came across as throwing a lot of shade on Force Awakens, and this movie comes across as a blatant attack on The Last Jedi. I can't tell how much of that is JJ being pissed at Rian for what he did, and how much is just Rian/Kathleen/Disney saying "Well Force Awakens pissed everyone off, so let's swing back the other way". But man, these movies are an absolute mess. A convoluted, contradictory, overly complicated mess.
That said, I found both the previous movies a mess but a fun mess. I'd read a lot of spoilers for this movie, so I knew the bulk of the plot going in. I expected it would be a terrible movie, and it kind of is. But I often find terrible movies entertaining, and I really did find this one entertaining. There's certainly a lot of spectacle, and to a degree I enjoyed just how blatant the shade JJ throws at Rian is. And there's some "so ridiculous it's funny" stuff in there, and some genuinely fun moments. So.. yeah. I kind of liked it. Certainly more than I thought I would.
So that's what I thought. What did you think?
So we open with a crawl which says that a mysterious broadcast has been sent to the galaxy - Emperor Palpatine is back! He's spent the last several decades building a massive fleet of Star Destroyers and is demanding that the entire galaxy submit to him or be destroyed. More, these Destroyers have "death star tech" - each has a big cannon on the bottom which can destroy an entire planet with one blast.
We see Kylo raiding some village somewhere and finding a "Sith Wayfinder", which is a small pyramid thing that's basically a GPS system. He plugs that into his fighter and flies to the Sith planet, which is not on any map of the galaxy and you have to fly through some weird nebula-thing to get to. Once there he finds Palpatine, who is kind of a zombified corpse that dangles off the end of a giant articulated arm. Palpy tells Kylo that he's been every voice he's ever heard in his head, every influence he's ever had, and that he created Snoke - Kylo literally walks past a big water tank with like three or four Snokes floating in it as he arrives. Palpy unveils his fleet, with the destroyers breaking out from under the ice and floating in the atmosphere. There's masses of them, many times more than the First Order has. Palpy says he wants Rey brought to him, and Kylo leaves.
Meanwhile we see Rey being trained to be a Jedi... by Leia. Yes, really. Rey meditates and whispering "Be with me", trying to get the spirits of the previous Jedi to talk to her, but nothing happens and she's disappointed.
The rebels/resistance/whatever also find out about the Sith planet, thanks to a First Order mole. The pyramid thing has an entry in the Jedi texts that Rey stole. Luke spent a long time looking for one but gave up, so they head off to the place he last looked to pick up the search. There's a big festival going on there, so they mingle and ask around. A woman at the festival puts a necklace on Rey and they talk a bit, then Rey has one of the Force-skype calls with Kylo. He tells her about Palpy and that he is going along but basically out for himself and that he's determined to turn Rey to the dark side. He grabs the necklace off her neck, and when the Force-skype ends he still has it in his hand. So Force teleport, basically.
His lackeys tell him where the necklace comes from and they order the local First Order guys to go after them. Lando turns up and picks up the heroes and they run for it. Lando says people didn't come to help at the end of Last Jedi because everyone is scared of the First Order. First Order troops turn up for a chase and the "They fly now!" scene, and they kill them and get away. They go to find some guy who was looking for the Wayfinder... I'm a little unclear on this point, but there's a guy they have to find, anyway.
They wind up falling into this black stuff in the desert and get sucked in. They think they're dying and Finn says "I need to tell you something... I never said it before" to Rey, but is sucked under before finishing. The stuff doesn't kill them though, they're deposited in some caves. Poe asks him what he was going to say to Rey and Finn refuses to tell him. This becomes something of a running joke, but it just kind of peters out. It seems like an "I love you" moment, but Finn never actually tells her he loves her, nothing romantic happens between them, so we literally just get Poe making jokes about Finn saying it a couple of times.
They find the guy's body in the caves, an old skeleton. He has an ancient Sith dagger with writing on it in the Sith language. C3PO says he has translated it but he won't tell them what it says because there's a law built into all protocol droids that they may not tell anybody the translation of anything in the Sith language.
Whilst there they come across a giant worm creature, which is injured. Rey heals it with a handwave, saying she used up some of her life energy to do so, and it breaks the cave open so they can get out. They find the dead guy's ship nearby and head for it. Rey gets distracted and walks into the desert, seeing Kylo's ship arrive. This is the trailer scene where she jumps over his ship, and cuts it in half. Meanwhile Chewie comes to find her, and is captured by the Knights of Ren and taken into a transport.
Rey uses the Force to grab the transport as it lifts off, dragging it down. Kylo, surviving his crash, uses his Force to fight her hold. She tries harder, and force lightning shoots out of her hands and blows the transport up, killing Chewie.
They leave in the ship, and Rey recognises it as the ship her parents left in when they abandoned her. She Force-Skypes Kylo and he says "your parents were nobody... because they chose to be. To keep you safe. And they abandoned you when they couldn't." Rey's father was Palpy's son, and she is his granddaughter. Dun-dun-dun!
They talk about 3PO, and decide they can get the translation if they go to some expert hacker. So they go to another planet and find the hacker, who says he can do it but only by wiping 3PO's memory completely. R2, it turns out, periodically backs up 3PO's memory but 3PO says his backups aren't very reliable. So they wipe 3PO and get the message which tells them where the second Wayfinder is - in the wreckage of the Death Star. Meanwhile, we see that the exploded transport was a different one, and Chewie is still alive and on a First Order ship.
Poe meets an old ladyfriend who says he used to smuggle spices, and Finn teases him about this in retaliation to his "what were you going to say" jokes. She plans to leave as the First Order are oppressing everyone, and has some sort of "Captain's pass" from the First Order which can get her past any security. They realise Chewie is alive and she gives it to Poe so they can go rescue him. They use the pass to get onto the ship and break Chewie out, but they all get caught. They're going to be executed but at the last second Hux says "give me the gun, I want to do this myself" to the troopers - and then guns the stormtroopers down because, of course, he's the mole. "I don't care if you win or the First Order wins," he says, "I just want Kylo Ren to lose." He asks them to wound him, so he can claim they forced him to let them escape, and they do. But when he reports this to his boss, his boss just kills him and says "Tell Kylo I found the mole."
They go to the planet where the death star wreckage is, and Rey uses the dagger to find the location of wayfinder and goes to the wreckage to locate it. She winds up in the ruin of the Emperor's throne room where Luke defeated Vader. Kylo turns up and gets it first, destroying it and saying Rey will only get to the Sith planet if she goes with him. They fight, and he's about to beat Rey but he's distracted by a force moment from Leia as she dies. Rey stabs him with his own lightsaber and he dies. Rey then heals him and leaves him behind, escaping in his fighter. Why kill him and then heal him again? What was the point? Who knows.
Kylo has a vision of Solo. It's not a force ghost, doesn't seem to be a real ghost either, more one of those cases where you just imagine somebody. Solo calls him Ben and Kylo says his son is dead. Solo tells him no, his son is very much alive and it's Kylo Ren that is dead. Kylo/Ben accepts this, and apparently is turned back to the good side. He throws his saber into the sea.
Rey goes to Luke's island and burns Kylo's fighter, determined to give up and stay there just as Luke did. She tossed Luke's saber into the burning wreckage, and Luke's Force ghost appears and intercepts it. She tells him he was right to abandon the fight and she's doing the same, and he tells her flat out that doing that was wrong. She finds Kylo's own Wayfinder in the burned wreckage of his fighter and Luke raises his X-Wing from the ocean. He also gives her a gift - Leia's lightsaber. We flash back to young Luke training young Leia... not sure if these are CGI creations of the actors, my impression was that they were actually played by different actors. Anyway, Rey heads to the Sith planet in his X-wing, using the Wayfinder. She transmits her location as she goes, so that the rebels can see where the place is and how to get there.
Palpy confronts her when she gets there and says that he wants her to kill him, because then his spirit will possess her body and he will become "Empress Rey".
Kylo arrives and Rey refuses to kill Palpy. He sucks some of her energy from her, which heals his hand. He's amazed by this, and says there's some special link with her and Ben that boosts both of their powers, which is why they are both so strong. This is a known thing, but only happens once every few hundred years or so. He sucks the energy from them and regenerates himself, and his body comes back to life. Now he doesn't need to die and possess Rey, he can rule in person.
Ben fights the Knights of Ren, but he doesn't have his saber and is getting his ass kicked. Rey pulls Leia's saber and does a Force-skype moment to teleport it to him, and he kills all the Knights of Ren. Honestly the Knights don't have that big of a role in the film. We see them a couple of times but they never do anything especially badass and Ben kills them all pretty easily once he has a saber.
So the Sith fleet is going to fly into space, but we're told that they need some sort of guidance tower to navigate their path. Without it they can only hover there, helpless. The Rebellion arrives to attack, and a big battle starts - but the Rebellion are outnumbered hundreds to one. Then Lando arrives in the Falcon. He's managed to convince the rest of the galaxy to come to the rescue, and is at the head of a vast fleet. So a huge battle begins. The Sith general decides not to use the tower, his command ship can guide the fleet out of the atmosphere. Finn guesses this (it seems to be a Force moment, where he 'feels' that the command ship is guiding them), so they attack the command ship. This is the horse scene, because they literally land on the command ship and attack on horses because "speeders can be jammed".
Palpatine goes on about how he has ultimate Force power because he's the culmination of all the Sith. We pan around and they're in this huge arena with thousands of hooded figures watching. Palpy shoots lightning up into the sky, shutting down the power systems on all the rebel ships. "You can't beat me!" He says "I am ALL the sith!"
Rey has a Force moment, and finally the Jedi spirits talk to her. We hear voices of past Jedi... not sure exactly, but Obi Wan is in there, and Yoda, I think Qui Gon and others, too. She stands up and says "And I... am all the Jedi." She takes on Palpatine, who tries to lightning-blast her and she uses her saber to reflect it back on him. Palpatine and all the watching Sith are obliterated, the fleet comes back to life, the Sith fleet is destroyed. But Rey exhausts herself in the effort, and dies.
Butttttt.... Ben comes to her aid, and uses the Force healing she showed him earlier to give her all his life energy. She comes back to life, and a moment later he dies. He fades away into the force, and back on the rebel base Leia's body does the same thing.
We see celebrations around the galaxy as we're told that everyone is rising up against the First Order - including, funnily enough, a bunch of Ewoks. We do not, however, see a bunch of Gungans shouting "We'sa Freeeee!"
In the aftermath Rey goes to Tattooine and finds Luke's old house. It's run down and there's a bunch of sand in it. She wraps Luke and Leia's sabers up in a cloth and buries them in the sand, then pulls her own one out. It looks like it's made from her staff, and has a yellow blade. A passing woman calls out, saying nobody has lived here in a long time and asking who she is. "Rey," she says. "Rey who?" asks the woman. Rey looks into the distance and sees Force ghosts of Luke and Leia watching and smiling. "Rey... Skywalker."
Rey and BB-8 turn to look into the twin suns as the Star Wars music plays, and that's the end.
So there's the basics. Like I say, I may be mixing up the order of stuff or missing bits, but that's the gist of it.
Things that jumped out at me...
You know, I know they didn't mean it that way, and it doesn't feel that way on screen, but that ending is kind of dark. This was advertised as "the culmination of the Skywalker Saga". Well, the culmination of the Skywalker saga is that every single Skywalker is now dead, and a Palpatine has stolen their land and their name. Um... okay. Yay, I guess?
For as much as JJ said he was fine with Rian doing what he wanted and dismissing most of JJ's setups from Force Awakens, he went out of his way in this film to do "take thats" to Force Awakens at every turn.
-Rey's parents were nobody? Nope! Kylo was just lying. They were Palpatine's son and his wife!
-Luke was a hermit who had given up on the fight? Nope! Luke admits that he was wrong to do that.
-Holdo's lightspeed-jump missile would revolutionise combat? Nope! Somebody suggests doing it to the Sith fleet, calling it the "Holdo maneuver" and Poe says something like "No, that was a million to one shot, it's not practical!"
-Kill the past? Nope! The past is super important. Kylo smashing his helmet represents that? Well guess what, he welds it back together and wears it again! Actually there's a funny scene where he meets with the officers on his ship and they're all like "Oh, the helmet is nice... looks good on you..." in a comically obvious bit of sucking up.
The galaxy has lost hope? Nope! The galaxy comes to the rescue!
Aww, Rose is in love with Finn! Nope! Rose is in this movie but she's a glorified extra who delivers some exposition and motivational speeches but otherwise does absolutely nothing, plays no real part in the film, and has no hint of romance whatsoever with Finn. I'm not even sure if the two ever talk to one another.
Marvel movies come across as one vision, one guy who is telling different stories in similar ways, with similar tones, as part of a greater whole. They come across that way because that's exactly what they are! This trilogy comes across like the movies are at war with one another. The Last Jedi came across as throwing a lot of shade on Force Awakens, and this movie comes across as a blatant attack on The Last Jedi. I can't tell how much of that is JJ being pissed at Rian for what he did, and how much is just Rian/Kathleen/Disney saying "Well Force Awakens pissed everyone off, so let's swing back the other way". But man, these movies are an absolute mess. A convoluted, contradictory, overly complicated mess.
That said, I found both the previous movies a mess but a fun mess. I'd read a lot of spoilers for this movie, so I knew the bulk of the plot going in. I expected it would be a terrible movie, and it kind of is. But I often find terrible movies entertaining, and I really did find this one entertaining. There's certainly a lot of spectacle, and to a degree I enjoyed just how blatant the shade JJ throws at Rian is. And there's some "so ridiculous it's funny" stuff in there, and some genuinely fun moments. So.. yeah. I kind of liked it. Certainly more than I thought I would.
So that's what I thought. What did you think?