[CaptainCrunch]

I will never begrudge or argue with a person who says hey, I liked TLJ, because movie opinions like art is in the eye of the beholder. I don't see a banana taped to the wall as art, but some people do, and I would never call them stupid.


For me, TLJ had way more flawed or badly written moments then it did oh my god moments.


Going back to the Original Trilogy, and especially ESB what they did really well is that they established a strong credible set of villains. Lets face it at the end of ANH everyone would have thought that the Empire having lost their ultimate weapon would be reeling, they lost a guy who was portrayed as an extremely ruthless and effective Commander in Grand Moff Tarkin. Yet right at the start of the next movie. We see that the Empire hasn't taken a step back, they're not shell shocked. We see a massive Star Fleet, we lose the incompetent commander in Ozzel right off of the start and his replacement Piett seems to be competent.

The enemy does smart things in this movie. They hire bounty hunters to track down the enemy. They send bombers in to flush out the Falcon, they get to cloud city ahead of Solo. They kick the crap out of the Rebellion right off of the start. Everything about the Empire in that movie is frightening and real and you get a sense that its only a matter of time. They have the resources, the soldiers, Vader in command and they don't do anything that you would judge as stupid.

Again everything about the First Order and even Ren in the TLJ just seems to be keystone cop levels of stupidity. Its funny because they tried to establish Hux as somewhat competent in the first movie, in the second one they basically made him into an idiot, a sucker for your momma jokes, who's dragged around the floor by Snoke because laughs I guess. His strategy of calling back fighters because they can't cover them even though the Rebel Fleet can't launch fighters. Followed by the really silly slow chase which I guess was supposed to replicate the asteroid field chase of ESB, was just awkward and silly. It was funny because even the commander of the dreadnought basically called Hux an idiot for not launching fighters.

To me and its my opinion, it just seems that without an over arching creative force controlling the storyline, the TLJ just felt like it wasn't even part of the trilogy. And it felt like Rian was just throwing things at the wall hoping to get a wooo from the audience.

Instead we get the red shirting of Snoke. We have the stupid slow bombers crawling their way towards the enemy fleet, which screams who thought of this strategy, and who designed these bombers, which I get is some kind of salute to WW2, but they were just a bad idea when in every other movie the Rebel's primary strike bombers. The Y-Wing, the B-Wing and even the ARC-170's were fairly quick and nimble.

They tried to advance Ren through the movie as a credible threat and then used him for the setup of a cringe worthy temper tantrum near the end when he had everyone fire on Luke, and clearly Hux worried about his laser bolt budget screams that basically Luke had enough.

We had the really bad Rose and Finn adventure with a betrayal that you could see right from the start.

To me, Rian either didn't watch the first movie and had no idea of the source material, or he just didn't care about the first movie or the concluding movie and made a stand alone really weird Star Wars movie.

In ESB at the end even though there is some reason for optimism and weirdness as Lando is wearing Hans clothes. The over all sense is that the Empire was truly ascendant and you wanted to see the next movie to see how Luke and the Rebels were dealing with such a pasting.

With the end of TLJ. I didn't feel that jeopardy. The big bad was dead. the FO fleet including the Supremecy which doubles as the FO's main base and manufacturing facility is destroyed. the FO is being ruled by a guy with serious maturity issues Rey's parents were drunks, Luke was dead but up until that point he wasn't part of the war.

On the rebel side, Rey had become really over powered. I still cringe at the Falcon returning to battle and basically destroying 10 tie fighters with one shot (it felt with that ) probably because Rian thought it would look cool, but once again it made the FO look like boobs.

I have this funny feeling that the reason that they bought Palpatine back and it was never in the original plan was because JJ looked at the mess that Rian had made of the main villain and decided that the only way to make the next movie interesting was to bring back Palpatine who's a very interesting character and establish a bigger bad then the FO as a threat, thus removing Hux who we haven't seen in any previews and the terrible FO as a threat. Now we get Palpatine and this massive fleet of Star Destroyers. Again in the previews we see very little of anything first order related

Look JJ is no dummy, I'm pretty sure that he looked at what TLJ had done to the story line and he figured the quickest fix is a new and more potent enemy that they don't need to spend a lot of time establishing, and a really credible Big Bad, because Ren just isn't that.

Just my 2 cents.