But what if you think Rey was already a good character? I certainly did, at least until the whole “you are a Palpatine” fiasco. But I feel like a major goal of this movie is to rationalize and streamline some of the messiness of TROS, bringing the sequels’ reception back to the mostly-positive outlook pre-2019.
Remember, both TFA and TLJ had a more than 90% positive critical reception, and I feel like the audience score would look the same way if sequel hate wasn’t weaponized during the Trump-era culture wars. People liked the sequels before TROS, Disney just needs to figure out how to make people like them again.
For one I wouldn’t take payed critics opinions seriously
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.
and second - this “Trump-era” culture war you speak of, I don’t think has anything to do with it. What happened is TLJ came out an completely destroyed Luke Skywalker. And people were pissed. You can try to blame outrage culture channels on Youtube for this. But the whole reason they ever rose to stardom in the first place is BECAUSE people were going to these sites to see if people felt the same way they did after leaving the theater from TLJ.
I know some people were genuinely upset by what happened to Luke (although I personally like it, YMMV), but the culture war grifters were the ones who turned it from individual dissatisfaction into a mass movement of right-wing nerd outrage. And it rubbed off on people of other political persuasions too: if everyone around you is saying “Rian Johnson ruined Star Wars”, you’re inevitably going to start believing it.
The only reason TFA was so positive is because it was a new mainline Star Wars movie after 15 years of none. And once that high wore off and TLJ came out, people looked at it far more critically. And it especially didn’t help that the movie itself was horrible.
One, as I already told you, a lot of people like TLJ. Stop acting like your opinions are objective.
And two, it being a “new mainline Star Wars movie after 15 years of none” didn’t stop people from hating TPM. You can have issues with how weak TFA was as a setup to the sequel trilogy (God knows I do), but the vast majority of people genuinely loved that movie. And it also helps that the “culture war” thing wasn’t anywhere near as big in 2015: I remember grifters trying to make people hate TFA because “How dare they have a female protagonist” or “How dare they have a black stormtrooper”, but no one listened to that stuff back then.
But anyways, I’ve said my piece. If you seriously don’t believe there was at least some political element to TLJ hate, you clearly weren’t paying enough attention back in 2017. Does that 40% Rotten Tomatoes audience score really look genuine to you?
There is a culture war aspect to whether or not people like TLJ but that doesn’t matter. The quality and intent of the story still remains. If the people on one side of the culture war are right about it, then they’re right. There are explanations for certain decisions that Kathleen Kennedy or Disney or Rian Johnson or whoever made about the movies that are absolutely related to culture war stuff, but the fact remains that those decisions exist in the movies on their own, and are still bad decisions either way.
The sequels made lots of money because they were big flashy movies. TFA was good and had a lot of promise. TLJ made money off the back of that, but tanked all the goodwill that the fans had for it, which resulted in Solo bombing or getting boycotted. TROS made the least money of the three.
The average non-Star Wars fan might have liked them in a vague sort of way because they like big budget movies in general. An apt JJ Abrams comparison would be something like Star Trek: Into Darkness. It has 84% on Rotten Tomatoes. It made plenty of money. But most Trek fans could probably tell you why it’s derivative and repetitive, why it really doesn’t understand the point of Star Trek or the characters it’s depicting, or why it doesn’t make any sense, which makes it bad.
For people that actually care about Star Wars, the reception of the sequels is generally negative, for political reasons or not. If anything, this site is an echo chamber for people that don’t hate the sequels, because some of the only people left here are people trying to do fanedits of post-2015 Disney stuff.