I think he was too much inside the lines. He’s talking as if he made something completely different and… I don’t think he did. It’s a very good movie, one I enjoy quite a bit - some incredibly well directed sequences and my all time favorite moment in the franchise (Luke vs. FO), but… it’s still a very derivative movie. A lot of the time it felt to me as if I was watching TESB + RotJ + x = TLJ, x being the bit of originality the movie had. To me that was the dynamic between Rey, Kylo and Luke, which is exactly the sort of great expansion from something in the OT (the connection Luke, Vader and Ben had) I was hoping we’d get in the ST. It’s inspired by, but not so much of an almost-copy as some of TFA and some (albeit much less) of TLJ. It’s brilliant. A bit of Canto Bight and the Holdo-Poe dynamic are also original aspects of the movie in my view. So yeah, there is quite a bit of originality, but it’s not enough for him to proudly claim he “step[ped] outside of the bounds of what the original movies did”, or something. Again, it’s a nice movie, and I enjoy it enough, but I don’t think it’s this far out thing a lot of people, including the film’s director, say it is.

Maybe someone could enlighten me? From all of the discussion I’ve seen regarding TLJ, the fact that it’s a very different movie is usually a given, and… I don’t get it.