I’ve largely been trying to abstain from posting in this thread lately, but I seriously don’t understand how Canto Bight remains so controversial. It seems crystal clear to me that the “pointlessness” of the sequence is the point. Finn and Rose go to Canto Bight so that they can pick up DJ…
I don’t think so. They go to Canto Bight to find “The” Master Codebreaker, the one guy that can help them according to Maz Kanata, but end up in jail for a parking violation (how exciting!), and by a spectacular coincidence run into another Codebreaker, who just then happens to decide to break out of jail.
…and have the plan that they made with Poe backfire spectacularly, providing the climax of the film (in classical “rising action-falling action” terms) and underlining the “failure is the best teacher” theme that’s central to the movie. It’s not that nothing of consequence happens, it’s two steps forward and three steps back, which is not at all the same thing.
Meh, that theme doesn’t really apply other than “do not trust some random shady guy you meet in jail to do the job of some other guy you were supposed to find”. The entire sequence leads into a fight between Finn and Phasma, that has not been set up at all, as Phasma hadn’t been part of the film up to that point, and the final scene with Rose and Finn on Crait isn’t very strong either IMO, as Rose stops Finn from sacrificing himself, which if Luke had not shown up (which Rose didn’t know about), would have certainly doomed the rebellion. In other words it requires Rose to know how the rest of the story will unfold to make any sense. So, in my view the Canto Bight sequence doesn’t really advance the plot, whilst also suffering from weak writing.