You still haven’t seen the film, right? So I can keep ignoring you? This film was absolutely nothing like TPM. Many, MANY of us were critical walking out of TPM. The people you see gushing in the videos after the premiere were selected because of their reactions. And I’ll bet many of them (the adults at least, such as Kevin Smith) still love the prequels today.
Understand, I am not criticizing the acting, the direction, the cinematography, the special effects, the editing, the audio mix, or the score.
I’m criticizing the story. One does not need to see a movie to know and comprehend its story.
All of these things together make the film what it is. The presentation of the story was nothing like ANH. Many of us wish something besides Starkiller was done. But I had other, more important, plot points in my mind while all that was going down in the film.
Your criticism popped up very early on when you read a bullet point list of steps that are similar to ANH. Yes, when it’s stated like that it sounds awful. But, aside from Starkiller, they felt like polite nods to 1977 while a new story was being told.
I suspect you may be looking back and judging TPM with a set of “after-the-fact” eyeglasses.
Of course? This is the case for every movie I’ve ever seen, though. TPM was disappointing at the time, but there were definitely things I enjoyed about it. If I were a bit younger, perhaps it would have been a ‘classic’ to me and my opinion would degenerate much more over time. In the years to come, I would say I became more critical of everything about the PT. At this point, I can watch them and see the few things that they did really well, and shake my head that it doesn’t matter when the end result is so bad.
Whereas TPM felt like a let down that ‘oh well, at least it has a few key moments that worked’. This felt like one of the first action adventure films in recent years with actual heart to it, with some definite flaws that could be tightened up. It will probably adjust in people’s rankings (most likely, from ranking right above Jedi to right under), but I suspect that its legacy will not be that it was a major misstep, but rather a return to glory that was just a bit too safe. The long term opinion is going to depend somewhat on what the next two films do, though.