I think SOMETHING happened either during production, post-production, or even both, because this movie just doesn’t make sense a lot of the time. It’s not just retconning things and moving too fast for its own good (there are not a lot of “moments” in this movie, and it hurts a lot of the emotional punches it’s consistently failing to land), it’s referencing plot points that didn’t happen prior to their referencing, and half the time it’s not finishing off things that they ARE setting up. (What was Finn going to tell Rey? Why was Lando talking to Jannah at the end like we were supposed to insinuate… something? Why is Rey kissing Kylo at all?)
I’m also convinced Palpatine is lit and shot the way he is to cover up his mouth, because more than half of his dialog is completely obscured as he’s speaking it. I don’t think he was supposed to be there as much as he was, and I think he was deployed as a narrative patch job above and beyond “we needed to wrap up the whole saga.” I wouldn’t be surprised at all if something went really sideways on this movie and this was the best effort at making whatever it was they had left work.
Also I understand the refusal to not write Leia out between movies but that would have been preferable to what they did here. By far. She became a literal PROP by the end. And her presence in the scenes she was “active” in was utterly false, no matter how good the CGI lighting and costuming was. There was no feeling that she was acting with anyone, or that anyone was acting with her. There’s good reason for that, of course, and I feel like trying to glide over that unavoidable reason through movie trickery just called more attention to it. The only Leia scene that carried any of the weight it was intended to was Chewie reacting to her death, and even THAT had nothing to do with anything happening in THIS movie, but relied on literal decades of familiarity from previous, much better movies.
This is the worst film Abrams has directed, and I have a hard time believing it’s turned out this way solely because of bad vision and worse execution. Something about this movie just seems straight up broken in multiple ways, and not in the “What else could I do look what I was left with” sort of way, but in the “I have a release date I have to hit no matter what and this movie doesn’t work the way it is but I’m literally out of time so hopefully we can cobble SOMETHING together.”
For the first 45-50 minutes, it’s a sort of bland, speedy, superficial bit of fluff & fun in Star Wars packaging. And then it just keeps skipping and stuttering through whatever its story is trying to be for the five seconds it can maintain focus. I know he’s a flashy, superficial director but this is bad even for him, and it really does seem like there are some extenuating circumstances we might not know about.
It might also be why Abrams decided to work with WB for the foreseeable future and to leave Disney/Lucasfilm behind.