Saw this movie a second time. I was definitely able to digest a lot of what was going on much better. I was hoping that it would make the movie better, but it might have had the opposite affect. There's just something fundamentally off about the tone of these new movies.
Something about these movies just reeks of being written by corporate committee. Something about them reminds me more of Pirates of the Carribean than Star Wars. The characters just don't seem very real. They also seem written by someone who's knowledge of Star Wars just isn't very deep.
It's little things like when they all go to that festival, and they have to constantly tell the audience what a free and joyous festival it is. They can't just enjoy the festival themselves. Then they are on speeders and the jokes are just bad....like saying "they can fly now" three times is funny? In the original series Han and the droids were responsible for much of the humour, but it all seemed a little more natural. The movie is just one zany adventure into another. All the "boring" stuff, from the original series has been stripped out. The problem is that a lot of the boring stuff builds characters, sets mood, etc..
The constant one-uppiong of the force powers was also just too much. In the original series Luke, after a significant degree of training, had to really focus to move a lightsabre. Now Rey and Kylo are throwing moving ships back and forth. Force ghosts, which used to just portray feelings, are not physically interacting with the environment....not even going to bother getting into Palpatine.
Disney can create great SW content, as demonstrated by the Mandalorian and Rogue One. Those movies feel a lot less "Disney"ish though. Basically, the studio needs to keep their nose out of the movies to make them any good. They also need to ensure that the people making the movies have a large degree of familiarity with the material.
Anyways, still think this was better than TLJ by a mile, but there was a lot of room for improvement.
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