I just don’t get it? Like, even if you didn’t like TLJ, it’d be better to at least try to follow up on that. What we got was transparently bad improv. Surely there was a better way to address the criticisms of the prior movie, while also doing something else that could feel like a continuation of it. Anything else!
As someone who loves TLJ, it’s honestly baffling. I mean, I had fun, but for all the wrong reasons. TROS was just ridiculous to me. I think I honestly would have hated it, if it wasn’t so cavalier in its capitalistic cynicism, honestly to the point of unintentional humor.
From Palpatine’s reappearance in the crawl, to when Rey was about to say “Rey Skywalker” I was laughing at how soulless and corrupt it dared to be. It was so shameless about everything it did. It reveled in it. I had fun watching the film eat itself alive. You could just see the puppeteers of every faux-emotional moment straining themselves, as well as you could their strings tied hastily to Carrie’s rotting corpse as a marionette. They couldn’t justify the existence of these movies at all.
Everything truly interesting and meaningful about the sequel trilogy was discarded in favor of what? Nothing here was genuine or good*. I’m only holding onto the idea that they made it as comically hollow as they did out of spite.
*well, save for babu frik. and genuinely threepio’s best movie imo