this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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I'm an unapologetic The Last Jedi fan, so fair warning, but this is a huge part of the issue with The Rise of Skywalker. It was such a knee-jerk, panicky reaction to the mixed reception of TLJ that it materially made TROS worse than it needed to be. You can walk back some of the more divisive stuff in TLJ in a way that's much more graceful and isn't lampshading it with stupid shit like, "Come with us Rose! I can't because Leia gave me homework!" or having Force Ghost Luke literally catch and return the Youngling-Slayer lightsaber. Even if you want to go a different direction, it needed to be "Yes, and..." rather than simply undoing TLJ. It left no one satisfied and wasted run-time.
Beyond that, I agree, there was just too much, with the redemption of Kylo Ren (assuming you needed to go that direction... I don't agree) being enough to fill out an entire movie if done with care, and then the rebuilding the resistance and invading Exegol being plenty for another.
Oh my god I almost believed I was the only one on earth that thought this about the sequels and TLJ and TROS specifically. To the point I couldn't even mention it in any SW discussions because people would just dogpile on how much they hated people actually enjoying TLJ, or for just thinking TLJ is the best of the three movies.
It felt a lot like JJ Abrams gave Rian Johnson such a hard time by ending TFA on a cliffhanger (quite literally lol). Which basically gave Rian no wiggle room to do anything like a time jump or whatsoever at the start of the movie. It looks so much like Rian tried to salvage what JJ had started and then JJ came back to just backspace everything Rian had set up.
I had always kind of hoped that the Skywalker saga would be 9 movies of 3 trilogies and a 10th finale movie to wrap up the entire saga to an epic conclusion, probably would've been better, but I'm unsure if Disney would've been able to pull it off anyway.
The overall idea of the sequels seemed alright, despite characters being shoehorned in for the sake of fan-service unnecessarily. Like the force dyad, knights of Ren and Palpatine having a post-death scenario using the clones. But all of that felt like quite unsatisfactory executions and never really wrapped up, like "yeah Snoke was a clone experiment, we have many of them", as if that was sufficient information and then proceed to never ever mention it again lol
Over the years, I've come to understand a lot about what people didn't like about The Last Jedi. There are pacing issues and some of the setups strain credulity even within the gossamer veneer of Sci-Fi that's wrapped around Star Wars. A lot of it is sort of nitpicking that would be forgiven if Luke had stormed down a hallway slicing people up in Act 3, but I get it. Ultimately, they just couldn't buy what Rian was selling, but I did.
If you can roll with Luke being capable of backsliding just a bit and being flawed (and FFS, this is a fan base that rolled with letting him freakin' join the Empire multiple times in their precious EU), then I think TLJ was actually trying to do something thematically and narratively interesting with a franchise that was stuck in the past. I thought it set up a really solid final chapter, though I too thought that with the lack of a time jump, maybe we could do 9 movies plus a capper. Critical to all of it is accepting that Snoke was a red herring, and that poor Ben Solo, conflicted and prescient as he was, was a tragic figure too deeply broken to be saved.
Also, sort of tangential here but just because I want to talk about it, the "tone poem" of Rose's sister in the bomber is some straight up beautiful filmmaking that channeled George Lucas at his best, and while I didn't grok it all until a few minutes later, it's intentionally juxtaposed against Poe's your-mom joke before the battle and lame excuses after. Now, the joke was still a bit too broad and Marvel-y for my taste, but I think it was a smaller miss than the haters declare.