Finally got around to seeing TLJ on Monday after a busy weekend with no chance to go earlier. I walked in really excited - Rian Johnson has a good resume, the trailers looked great, and I thought it had a lot of potential. Walking out of the theater I was disappointed. Then I reflected on it, and I decided I thought it was a genuinely bad movie. Here's why.
Characters Actions
I'll accept the notion that you have to suspend some disbelief in a space opera movie. After all, there are space wizards. So I don't mind bombers that drop bombs in zero gravity without propulsion, faster than light travel, or the instantaneous communication. But, here's what I do expect. The characters need to act in ways that make sense, rather than in ways that advance the story toward a certain outcome.
None of the characters do anything sensible. General Hux is the least competent person to ever command. Custer, Chamberlain, and McClellan have nothing on this guy. From the outset, everything he does is idiotic. He has a massive fleet of star destroyers and doesn't use them at all, relying purely on the behemoth to destroy the planet and the resistance fleet. They just hang back. Then he lets a single fighter disable his capital ship and still the star destroyers do nothing. Then, once he loses another massive world destroyer (his second by the way) in spectacularly incompetent fashion, he brushes it off because they're tracking the resistance. Which by the way, they were before the resistance.
By the way, the resistance's whole plan was terribad. Step 1 - send a single fighter to disable the anti-bomber guns on the giant ship. Step 2 - bomb the ship. That's.... not brilliant.
Look, I could pick apart every tactical decision in this movie. Not that they were simply somewhat ill-advised. Hux and Snoke are so dumb the only explanation for their actions is simply that they needed to do them to get the plot where it wanted to be.
And the resistance was no better. Holdo keeping mum about her plan made no sense whatsoever. Her justification, that hope needs to be something freely given, makes no sense. And her keeping mum led to a mutiny, a secondary plan that failed, and leaking of her plan causing it to fail too. And again, it's not like these are world beater strategies. We're going to drive till we are close to an old bunker and abandon ship.... No reason not to just tell everyone.
Bait and Switch Tactics
Then I felt like they deliberating played games to manipulate your emotions without any real ultimate effect or payout. Leia flying back.... added nothing. There were 4-5 scenes like that were they deliberately lead you to think one thing, do something else, and then reveal, aha, nope it was the first thing after all. And that doesn't lead to revelations. It's just kinda resetting status quo. Leia using the force to get back on the bridge changed nothing. So why go through that? Just seemed like cheesy are these person going to die, are they not? Oh fooled you.
Motivations
I thought Luke's character arc didn't make a lot of sense either. His involvement with Rey, sorta training her to show her why things are better off without the Jedi, some of that makes sense but it didn't feel earned. That said, I'll accept he is so scarred from his own revelation that the dark side is still close to him (almost killing Kylo) and then Kylo ****ing up his academy that he has to leave and separate from the universe. Seems extreme, but whatever. Trauma. Okay. But him coming back? What drove that: a 20 second conversation with Yoda who basically said "eh, Rey doesn't need to be trained by you to be a jedi so your whole book burning episode ain't worth *****.." Yup, that seems like a powerful enough message to end a 30 year exile.
Consequence
At the end of the Force Awakens, the first order takes a pretty big blow. Their planet killer / actual planet gets blown up and most of their army gets incinerated. The Republic still exists, and what you're led to believe is that the First Order is a growing threat. I think it'd take more than a few days for them to overcome a setback like losing a planet killing planet. And at the beginning of TLJ, the crawl basically tells you nope, that didn't mean ****, they're still totally badass. And then they lose another planet killer in the first 20 minutes of the movie. Why do these guys keep building giant ships / planets? They're terrible at keeping them up and running. But saul good, because Snoke shows up with his bigger yet flagship of the armada. That... doesn't last either. Neither does Snoke. Both get cut in half. At what point do we acknowledge that the first order isn't really a credible threat because all their spacecraft keep getting wrecked, usually by 10-20 small fighters?
Look, I'm a supply chain guy in my professional life, so maybe I'm reading into this space wizard story a little to deeply, but I don't see how you can keep building and maintaining an armada of death if it gets pasted every time some purple haired tart points her ship at it and hits the warp speed button.
In all seriousness, from a story telling perspective, it's hard to view this story as a great underdog story in which the rag tag band of misfits overcomes impossible odds when every time they fight, the misfits totally **** up the bad guys.
Rogue One did this so much better. They used guerilla tactics. In and out faster than the empire could react. When they finally commit forces, they get their asses crushed completely. You walk out of Rogue One impressed with the empire and realizing the crazy odds stacked against the rebels in episode 4. I walk out of TLJ and expect General Hux to step on his dick, fall over, and impale himself on Kylo's lightsaber guards.
I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with this word vomit, but these reasons for me are why I thought the movie just wasn't good. And it's a shame, because they were easily, easily correctable without even changing the story much.