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Originally Posted by #-3

I still gotta butt in and say your all wrong about TLJ, narratively it was a very strong movie, with pretty much the best villain seen to date in Star Wars.

Spoiler, big long non-sensical rant, by a poor writer about why TLJ was made sense until TRoSw destroyed it all. (and I truly believe they destroyed it all trying to appease all of you people who complained about TLJ too much for reasons I can't really fully understand).

Spoiler!

It had problems, The opening scene needed to be darker and more serious to fit the theme of the movie, the Kanto Bite diversion didn't fit within the flow of the story and ended up almost completely derailing the core narrative, except to build towards Poe's little mutiny, and the Leia not death scene was an emotional moment everyone knew was coming that turned into an eye roll. But problems of this scale are almost universal through the series.

From a plot prospective, they were left to make a sequel to the most predictable movie ever. One that stole every single plot beat down to the most minute aspect from its forebearer, and I'm going to choose not to be critical of TFA for this because we all understand that was an apology for harms inflicted 15 years earlier. So they start with the exact same opening as the original sequel, our heros have been discovered and they are making an emergency evacuation of their base, it makes sense, they have told us they will continue to occupy the role of paying homage to the originals. But it would be boring if twice in a row they give us the exact same movie, because there would be no anticipation to build towards for the third, its a new trilogy we are in the middle act and it is time for the story to step out on it's (otherwise what was the point of telling this story at all, just remaster and release the old ones again). I think the framing of the movie is very smart for the circumstances in which it starts.

Then we go to the main characters, first Start with our main villain. We already know Kylo is number 2, we already know he lacks control, we have already seen the weakness of will in his quest to dominate the galaxy at all cost. So with all of this knowledge the choice is to play into that, allow him to feel connected to the main protagonist, let the audience inside the villains personal space, bring the moment to a head and create the ultimate heel turn. We just came close to trusting Klyo he protected our hero against the big bad, he was tempted to redeem himself but he didn't instead betraying us and taking the mantel of #1 bad himself. It was the great villain arc we needed out of TRoS but didn't get.

The main protagonist, had shown over the top natural abilities and only seemed to suffer from one weakness, a lack of knowledge. The first episode in the arc revealed only a passing knowledge of history behind the powers she possessed. So her quest surround the search for knowledge. It was defined by her willingness to seek out the dark side was not driven by the close familial attachment like Luke before, but by the quest to understand what it all meant, what was light? what was dark? choosing the right path in this quest would come from knowledge not temptation, The quest ended in the destruction of the old ways (the literal burning of the tree) but was redeemed by saving the texts. After finding the knowledge she was seeking she found light in running to save what was really important (her friends), like Luke had done before her but unlike Luke she succeeded. I also thought it was quite clever to have the expectation of relation to broader story teased and pulled away, the old movies were defined by a father-son relationship, in the second chapter we were given the big reveal, this movie that was created to mirror the earlier versions but define itself in opposition again, and again the big reveal was given to us by what should have been an unreliable character, an important piece of information that should have been true. This the same place but wasn't the same story, these were independent actors forging a new path,

This was also the story of letting old wars wither and die. There was seemingly little point to the long car chaise or the Kanto Bite narratives, but if you look deeper a lot of it was around questioning if there was any point in continuing this generations long fight and seeing that many in the galaxy had turned their back on fight, with few left who had living memories of a time before the fight, fatigue had set in. And then Luke, we saw the war weary great generation of heros resist the fight before taking up the mantel one last time and fading away, (also symbolized in Leias appointed replacement scaraficing herself), leaving only this new generation who has known nothing else to find a new way. The Galaxy failing to answer the resistances call, the kamikaze attack destroying the first orders main fleet, the final showdown being between a small force that would fit entirely on the millennium falcon and 6 AT-ATs, we were left with a feeling that there was really nobody left to fight this fight, whoever won the next round would really be the victor.

It was narratively a very strong movie, that worked well with the story that it had. And they pissed it all away in the next chapter, probably because they spent too much time listening to people who wanted a rerun of Empire Strikes back and not enough time trying to extend the narrative that was built for them.

The big reveal from the unreliable narrator that should have been true was turned into a lie, it builds towards suspense if you are unsure exactly how trustworthy the bad guys are.

The main villains ascension to big bad was reversed by a cheap plot tool. His move to being beyond redemption was ignored to re-hash the same story over again.

Somehow these depleted forces instantly rebuild themselves into the grandest fleets seen yet, without regard for the war weariness of the galaxy.

The final battle brought no closure, it was just another instance of the same story we have already seen twice over, basically rendering the entire trilogy meaningless. If there is an unlimited ability for the bad guys to rebuild on a moments notice, what's the point of this all?

TRoSw should have been the new big bad cornered, more volatile, more dangerous, but alone, we could have opened with true villainy, havoc, and destruction from Kylo. It should have been our heros defeating him not to change the nature of the galaxy, but to defend the small make shift family they had built, because only by fighting for the right reasons could we finally put an end to all of this destruction, It should have left more certainty that after his defeat there wouldn't be fleets of rouge bad guys patrolling the galaxy to restart the same fight all over again. That was the entire point over this trilogy to tie up the loose ends left by the middle stanza. If we had seen that ending, I think we could have comfortably walked away from the Imperial Period of the galaxy and allowed then next saga to tell the story of a different time.

The main problem with your analysis is even if you liked the narrative, very little time was actually devoted to the main narrative. The vast majority was spent on totally useless side adventures:

1. The casino scene.
2. The chase scene. This literally took up about 1/3 of the screen time, and the whole point seemed to be that guys like Poe should just blindly trust authority.
3. Weird Luke doing things like milking aliens.
4. The opening Poe/Hux exchanges and the horrendous battle scene.
5. Rose / Fin love story.

The execution was just horrendous all the way through. Every exchange between Kylo and Ray was weird. Every action or battle scene was way too choreographed, to the point of looking like a ballet. They made the New Order into a Monty Python-esque parody.

On top of that they relied heavily on nostalgia, by doing things like offing General Akbar or having Leia fly through space. So it's very hard to state they took a fresh new approach.

I guess, if you can manage to scrape away all that, which is more or less the entirety of the movie, then you could pull out a good plot point or two. The same logic applies to the Phantom Menace though.