I remember when my girfriend and I went to see TLJ for the first time. We both came out of the theater with an overall good impression.
Then we went and saw it again, and the flaws started to appear.
In other words, the movie passed the Refrigerator Test (unlike TFA or TROS), but didn’t bear repeat viewings as well as, say, the OT.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s nowhere near terrible, it’s just that it is very messy in many ways.
I think “messy” is really the core problem with all the post-Disney Star Wars stuff. Everything just feels very all over the place.
For sure. I think the issue with TLJ over the others, however, is that the messiness gets in the way of the message, whereas with the JJ entries the messiness works to conceal the void where a message should reside.