I don't really know how I felt about it. It was good, certainly not THE END OF STAR WARS like the weird backlash is saying, but I'm not sure if it was as good as the reviews were saying either. It looked beautiful. It had some of the best cinematography of any Star Wars movie. That spaceship explosion at the end was really arty. The "it's salt!" planet looked really cool. I liked that the action setpiecess went on a bit longer than TFA's. It certainly wasn't easy to predict how the plot would go, but I don't know if that was always good?
I get that the message, which they had stated by Yoda just so you got it (I liked that he did his crazy ESB laugh), was that you learn from failure and that's why Poe and Finn and Rose and Rey all failed in whatever they were doing...but I don't know if the characters actually learned that lesson? Poe maybe did but it was weird how Poe was resposible for getting so many people killed and yet Leia and Laura Dern were just like "oh that Poe, he sure is a hothead!" like it was no big deal then kind of put him in chrage at the end.
Mark Hamill is great. Daisy Ridley is very good and charming as Rey.
Leia flying didn't look as bad as people are saying. I got emotional at the "for our princess" thing in the credits.
Droid report: BB-8 had some good stuff. I hate that R2's whole role in the last two movies has been sleeping all the time and only waking up when the plot needs him.
I think I liked Finn more in TFA than here? Please keep Phasma dead she sucks.
The casino planet was a letdown for me because when I heard there was going to be an alien casino planet in this I thought "great, that'll look cool and hopefully have lots of crazy stuff in it!" And it didn't! At all! It was just an Earth casino with a couple of aliens in it...wearing human clothes. But I did like the ending with the stable boy so I guess that plot was necessary for that.
Hacker guy was annoying.
Kylo Ren still has the best character arc of any of the characters in these new movies, but he still felt a bit pathetic by the end. I wonder if there will be a big time jump between this and Episode 9 and he'll be all dark and badass in that.
I get what they were trying to do with Snoke...he's not that important and we don't need to know his whole backstory...but I feel like we needed to know a bit more? People are saying "WELL YOU DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT THE EMPEROR IN ROTJ" and that's true, but we know he's the emperor of the galaxy and that's enough really. And we're nine movies in now so the context is different so I think we need to know something about the history of the First Order and how they got so powerful because we get really nothing here or in TFA. That's my biggest problem with these two movies: the universe still feels too small. The Republic was apparently just four planets (as opposed to thousands in the prequels) that got blown up and didn't notice the First Order rising and now the First Order apparently controls most of the galaxy (I guess?) but we don't SEE the First Order doing anything other than trying to kill rebels. Are they oppressing people? Maybe show it in the movies sometime? Imagine if you'd never seen the originals and didn't just think "oh they're just like the Empire" when you saw this because you don't know what the Empire was...I don't know. I just feel the world building's been really poor in both movies.
Plus Snoke just isn't scary or memorable, really. Ian McDiarmid had a far better evil old man voice than Andy Serkis, but I guess Serkis doesn't want to make him sound too much like Paplatine. And I don't get why he had to be mo-capped when he spends the whole movie sitting down (I know the reason is because he was mo-capped in TFA and they didn't actually plan ahead.) The fight with his guards was cool.
Oh, I am beyond pissed that they killed off Laura Dern.
She was manufactured for a purpose.