[Max Cow Disease]

I'm going to sleep on it and eventually see it a second time in the theaters, but I'm really not feeling it immediately after the first viewing. I was as pumped as anybody about this and had high hopes for what Rian Johnson was going to do, but I feel like the movie missed the mark in a lot of ways.

Some of the good:

The movie did have some notable highs. Pretty much all of the action sequences were pretty well done, and the movie had some pretty decent humour at times (the initial bit with Hux and Poe made me chuckle and was them obviously realizing that Hux is too ridiculous to be taken that seriously). Luke irreverently tossing his lightsabre off a cliff after 2 years of build-up was good stuff as well. There were more positives to draw on but I'll keep it at that for now.

Some of the bad:

The film didn't need to be steeped with fan service and lore, but I do think that Rey's parents being nobody and Snoke also being a nobody is detrimental (though I acknowledge that Kylo may have been lying about the parent bit). Snoke being killed off so quickly seems terrible to me, as he had the potential to be a fairly foreboding villain, but is now regulated to Darth Maul status as a cool bad guy that we now don't care a lick about, rather than Darth Sideous status. Who's the big scary bad guy now? A confused, still-somewhat-untrained Kylo Ren? I dunno. Meh.

I thought the movie jumped around quite a bit and could have spent more time on the meat and potato plots and less on the Finn/Rose stuff as mentioned. I thought the Rose character was rather atrocious, and her corny line whilst laying in the speeder was Attack of the Clones level bad. I like Finn's character, but I thought they somewhat wasted him in this movie by handcuffing him to Rose the whole time.

I'm not a fan of some of the new "force techniques" we're getting a whiff of either. This ability to seamlessly project one's image across the galaxy and carry on a conversation or kiss your sister on the forehead somewhat bothers me for some reason, and although this is a galaxy far, far away, I was blown away by the inclusion of a scene wherein Leia flat out floats around in empty space for several moments/minutes, and then comes to and force pulls herself back to the ship. Insanity. It took some of the universe's most capable Jedi masters years of training to learn how to appear as grainy, 480p force ghosts after death, and yet now the force is apparently busted wide open and it's no-holds-barred.

I was surprised that Luke was killed off (his physical form, anyway), and Leia survived the movie. It makes me question how they're going to write her out for Ep. IX. How did he even die there anyway? I'm assuming he drained all of his old man energy while force skyping, but I'm not certain.

Like I said, I'm going to sleep on it, watch it again, and mull this all over a bit more before I make up my mind or try and rank this amongst the others. But, I can say right now that not a whole lot about this movie has left me super excited about what could possibly end up happening in the next film, which must be somewhat of a bad sign. Force Awakens, I felt, left me pretty stoked right away about what was going to happen with these characters (particularly Snoke, Ren, and Luke), but quite a bit of that sensation has now faded.