Render said:
Good.
I'm sure 9 will be fine. Enjoyable, yet bland.
But the big thing I'll take away from this whole sequel trilogy fiasco is a feeling of wasted potential.
You started with the OT cast and a good director who loves SW - and the best you could come up with was 3 ultimately mediocre films? Sad.
I think that the ST could still be salvaged if IX knocks of out of the park, which I don't really think is going to happen but since possible and probable is the theme of the day why not.
TFA laid really good ground work with characters and the state of the galaxy. There's some stuff that is head scratcher worthy in it, like how she suddenly could use the Jedi mind trick, use Luke/Anakin's lightsaber, etc but by in large the universe post OT is well defined.
Everything kind of fell apart in TLJ. Rey faces not much adversity to learn the ways of the Force, and can seemingly do whatever she wants. Finn seems to have regressed from TFA that instead of facing adversity, he's back to running from everything which is a stark contrast to where he was by the end of TFA. Then we have Poe who is supposed to be a great pilot and in TFA was shown to be more competent than he was depicted in TLJ.
That's just a few things. Considering that JJ had provided an outline for VIII and IX but that Johnson decided to not use those either in part or whole, Episode IX is going to face a significant uphill battle to win back the fans trust and to close off the Skywalker Saga in a manner that does the characters and franchise justice. JJ coming back I think gives people hope, but I don't know if he can stick the landing. But this is a consequence of letting the directors being given a pretty broad amount of authority for direction (like Snyder's vision and subsequent DCEU films) versus the here's the broad plan of what we want and you have to play within these bounds (MCU).
