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
As someone that hates TLJ, I agree it is very odd to not logically follow on from TLJ at this point with TROS to try and salvage a narrative that could span at least 2 consecutive movies instead of this weird convoluted patchwork / director tug of war you get going on that ultimately makes the entire Disney Trilogy a pointless mess. Obviously they heard many of the criticisms aimed at TLJ but failed to understand the impact and lasting fallout from them which was that many fans have become outright apathetic to Star Wars altogether or entirely dismissive of the Disney Trilogy and you were never going to get them back into cinema seats anyway so why pander to their TLJ criticism to the point that you make the movie irrelevant to it’s own trilogy?
I like your line about watching the film eat itself alive and for me, I’d apply that to TLJ as well due to how meta it is. The whole trilogy is so self aware that it literally comes off at this stage as a spoof than any kind of respectful continuation to Lucas’s legacy.
Edit: I meant “consecutive movies” when I accidentally wrote “concurrent movies”.