I really hated The Last Jedi and hope there is a film in there that could be salvaged.

A lot of it is the jokey nature of it, and by that the Marvel-esque meta humour. And make the heroes a little less Millenial if that makes sense.

I’d even change the opening crawl to suggest something like the First Order are capitalising on the chaos inflicted by Starkiller Base on the New Republic to drive out the Resistance from their territory and annex New Republic systems.

Make this the START of their campaign, don’t say that they’ve already overrun the Republic and essentially undone Return of the Jedi and reverted to Empire versus Rebels.

Indeed cut out all references to the Rebels or Rebellion. That belongs in the OT, the Resistance are supposed to be the undercover forces of the real government!