Lightspeed skipping is like the Bayhem or action scenes from Roland Emmerich disaster movies, like driving a plane through a collapsing skyscraper as the world blows up around it. At a certain point the tension caused by the bending of known rules and physical laws is released and you simply have to sit back and watch the madness wash over you. And that’s not terrible. I enjoyed TROS mostly because of how willfully it destroyed tension in service of action schlock. There’s nothing wrong with that, and Star Wars has dabbled in that realm many times before.

But compare any of those Bayhem scenes to, say, the Langley heist from the first Mission Impossible movie. That is a scene which takes place in almost complete silence with a single guy on a wire. It takes a good ten or fifteen minutes and it’s one of the most creative, tense, rewarding ‘action’ sequences I’ve ever experienced. The reason it’s so good is that the movie establishes clear rules and is careful never to exceed them.

Again, Star Wars isn’t MI nor should it be. But the point is that rules breed creativity and tension within a movie and breaking them releases this creativity in favor of imagination and breaks tension in favor of spectacle.

I hate the lack of creativity and tension in TROS.
I love the imagination and spectacle of TROS.

That is all.