Overall I fundamentally disagree with the ideas behind the movie, especially the cynical prequel apologist (“mind blowing fan theory”) approach to the Jedi and Luke. In general the movie seems determined to ruin any sense of heroism or audience satisfaction. Any time a male character attempts to do something they are denied and punished.
HOWEVER there are a lot of great things about it that I like, especially anything with Rey and/or Kylo Ren. Mark Hamill’s performance is really good. That throne room fight is one of the best fights in Star Wars, period. I love the porgs and some of the other humor, and I like the idea of Canto Bight if it had less Lucas in it.
For the Luke/Rey/Ren half:
*I like ImperialFighter’s ideas. Luke is not a murderer or a liar, and generally he would be THE character to be optimistic about someone struggling with the dark side. It does make more sense for Kylo Ren to result from a misunderstanding. Luke might not try to kill him, but he could hover uncomfortably close like a helicopter parent to try to keep him on the right path.
*Hopefully there are some deleted scenes. The lack of a third lesson drives me nuts.
*I don’t like Yoda’s appearance or presentation at all. At the very least it should be tweaked so that he’s not stuck in the early ESB cackling trickster persona.
*Fix Snoke’s dialogue as it’s comically on-the-nose. Some of it also plagiarizes directly from ROTJ (and the Bible!)
For the other half, I have ideas for tweaking it but they would be extremely difficult to execute. It would be easier to cut most of it.
I absolutely despise everything to do with Holdo. Ideally any function she serves would be replaced with Leia. Leia would tell Poe the plan and he would dislike it for some legitimate reason (“they’ll still detect the transports!”) and mutiny directly against her. Leia puts down the mutiny with her cool Force powers (no ridiculous space flight, the bridge never gets hit.) However Poe manages to let Finn and Rose get away to Canto Bight. Trim Lucas shenanigans, newsboys, and several pieces of Rose dialogue. DJ stays a relative good guy and doesn’t betray anyone, but he does ditch them after they finish the mission. I also dislike it when a villain has no reason to keep captured heroes alive other than “to make them suffer,” so I’d prefer Phasma’s introduction to be coming out of the smoke. Cut Finn’s faux-action movie one liners. Poe, Finn, and Rose’s plan works but is costly in some way or temporary, giving just enough time for the fleet to jump to Crait. In order to salvage the whole thing, Leia sacrifices herself with the hyperspace ram. Gives more guilt and pathos to Poe, wondering if he made the right decision.
The Luke/Leia scene is nice though, so again, probably just cut all of the stuff in the middle.
I would like Finn to succeed at his sacrifice as well, or at the very least leave out Rose’s idiotic actions and nonsensical platitude, but none of that is really doable. So maybe don’t have Finn or Rose in the ships in the first place, or have them break off when Poe tells them to.
Also cut the kids at the end. (LOOOOK SKYWALKUH, JEEDAI MASTUH)