Well, unless the Filoni-verse can pull off a miracle and make me care about the ST setup, this movie will be a hard pass, possibly an unpleasant pass. Still trying to ignore and forget about TROS completely, but we’ll see.
I will say it is indeed painful to see Rey take on this mantle of “first of the new” that was fully meant for Luke - regardless of what is text or isn’t, Luke wins in ROTJ by defying his elders, and they all look proudly back to him at the end, which symbolizes how right he was to go against their wishes. It’s been the major understanding of the franchise for decades - that Luke would be the first of the new, his masters the last of the old. It makes sense, the Empire that they were unable to stop was defeated by Luke, the status quo completely changed, everything changed. Luke has a clear path and a blank page to make a better Jedi Order than ever before. Even Timothy Zahn saw this way when writing Thrawn, and I don’t think anybody objected, because I’m pretty sure that’s how everyone interpreted Return of the Jedi.
Sadly for some inexplicable reason the sequels took that away from him, and while seeing Rey at the end of TROS explicitly on this same exact path felt really bad, actually getting, to her, what we should’ve gotten for post-ROTJ Luke is… hard to stomach. Ugh.
You took the words right out of my mouth. That’s the part that stings the most.
You lost me here. Anyone who seriously says to ignore the opinions of professional critics and trust obviously review-bombed audience scores instead is not worth paying attention to.
As for film critics, I have no trust in their opinions anymore. Anyone can become a professional critic. Granted, the audience score often isn’t a good metric, either, but I only think it counts as “review bombing” if it’s being done for reasons unrelated to the quality of the film itself. Maybe a lot of those people hated TLJ for the wrong reasons, but those were still the genuine opinions of people.
Of course, why all that vitriol was directed toward TLJ specifically, while TFA mostly got off scot-free, I’ll never understand.