Hey, this is really good! An intriguing introduction to what should be a big, ambitious project. I have friends who I have major disagreements with on The Last Jedi in particular, and I sometimes enjoy debating them about it - this should give me more ammunition to work with 😉 I’m looking forward to reading your defence.

Regarding constructive criticism - I would not add any more elaboration, as I think you may have elaborated slightly too much. Instead of cutting things, I’d say some topics could be grouped together so your reader doesn’t think “huh, this feels repetitive, when will the real thing start?” You don’t want to feel like you’re just trying to meet a longer word count. For example, the disclaimers about information from other films and information from external sources could go together:

Regarding the sequel trilogy, the responses to criticisms for each film relies on information from its prior installments and itself, it does not use information from its follow-ups, I am trying to frame it as if the film was recently released which was when the criticism would have to first… pop up; for example, when I am discussing The Last Jedi in this essay I am only going to be using information from itself as well as its prior installments, I am not going to be using information from its follow-up, The Rise of Skywalker. Likewise, I will not use information from ancillary material such as the movie novelizations, as I agree with the notion that one should not have to go outside of a movie and rely on ancillary material in order to fix major story flaws so the movie would make logical sense and be enjoyable by itself.

This is maybe just my personal writing style kicking in, but I never like to use too many commas in extended sentences - I believe the intro could be even easier to read if you used a varity of dashes, semicolons, and shorter sentences. For example, the same paragraph could be:

Regarding the sequel trilogy, the responses to criticisms for each film relies solely on information from its prior installments and itself. It does not use information from its follow-ups; I am trying to frame it as if the film was recently released which was when the criticism would have to first… pop up. For example, when I am discussing The Last Jedi in this essay I will only use information from itself and its prior installments; I am not going to be using information from its follow-up, The Rise of Skywalker. Likewise, I will not use information from ancillary material such as the movie novelizations, as I agree with the notion that one should not have to go outside of a movie and rely on ancillary material in order to fix major story flaws, so the movie would be logical and enjoyable by itself.

You may also notice I’ve substituted some groups of words when one word could communicate the same thing. I’d say it’s best to make it as snappy as possible. Anyway, that’s my two cents. Good luck with writing this!