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?)
TL;DR: it’s not a saga film, it sets up everything in the First Act and doesn’t rely on the previous two films stories.
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.
I was really worried about that after what they did to Tarkin in RO. 😦 That’s heartbreaking. They were saying very early on after TLJ that she had a very significant part in the story in the ninth film. They actually never had to write her out at all, there was plenty of opportunity to have her die at the end of The Last Jedi with some really simple re-writes and re-shoots after Carrie’s death. But JJ and whoever else was in charge instructed Rian Johnson to leave her alive for the ninth film.
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.”
JJ came in late after they fired Colin Trevorrow. While we don’t really know why he was fired, Palpatine wasn’t a part of his original script and Ian McDiarmid confirmed he was hired by JJ only a year ago.
It’s never a great idea to make such radical changes mid-production, especially with such a tight deadline.