Well, I loved TLJ. I have no complaints with it. I thought the stories were woven together nicely. I thought they went in the right direction and I can see where the next episode can wrap things up for the entire saga.
A lot of people complain that Rey just seems to magically pick up things. She doesn’t. She copies someone else every time. Every power she uses was first used on her. Mostly by Kylo. Who cares who her parents were. As far as I know, the Skywalkers are the only family where the force runs strong (in 3 generations). Otherwise the Jedi were monks and didn’t have children to pass on their genes. Johnson gave us the answer in what Snoke said. He knew that when he found Kylo and he was so easy to turn that the force would bring his opposite. That is Rey - someone who won’t turn. They are being setup as the yin and yang of the force. I think for the force to be in balance, the dark and light sides need to be in balance. Lucas already went this way in the prequels by laying out the total destruction of the Jedi and Sith.
And yes, TLJ is very much part of the PT canon. I expected that. I’m glad of that. I recognize that Lucas didn’t do his best work in those films, but I love the story he was trying to tell. It changes the nature of the good vs. evil in the OT to one of dark and light, but no necessarily good and evil. And even in ROTJ you get a hint of that when Luke draws on his anger to defeat Vader. But Luke did not turn as Vader and Palpatine hoped. Now you have Rey and Kylo, neither one of them seeming to be turnable to the other side. Each tapping in to half the force. I think the ST is going to be about merging the two to create something that keeps the balance and teaches students of the new way to avoid tipping one way or the other. It is a very Buddhist message of the middle way. I love it. I hope that is where Abrams goes with it. I think it could be a very powerful ending. I just don’t trust what he is going to do.
With the news that Luke’s self-imposed exile was Lucas’s idea (concept art from before the sale to Disney) I have hope that the story they are telling is Lucas’s core story for the ST. He has good ideas. The PT, when you dump all his silliness, is a good story. I’m hoping they kept Lucas’s core idea (the force side of things and the balance) and just changed the characters and their journeys.
And I find the complaints about what Leia did with the force to be very silly. What is the first force ability we saw both Luke and Rey use? Pulling a lightsaber to them. What did Leia do? she reached out and pulled the ship to her (and in terms of physics, it was she who moved instead of the ship). She reached out for the door and went toward it. Yeah, it looks like she is flying, but if you look at the pose and gesture, she is just doing exactly what Luke and Rey did.
I am as pleased with TLJ and I was disappointed in TFA. I need to watch it a lot more to properly rate it, but I consider it the best Star Wars movie since the OT. On par with Rogue One, but better. It gave me the Star Wars I was after. I loved where the characters went, what they did, how the story flowed. If they can follow it will a good Ep IX, I’ll forgive Abrams for his flawed first outing. Oh, and remember what Abrams said about Rey’s parents, they weren’t in TFA. She was never going to be a Skywalker of any sort. We saw all the living Skywalkers in that film.