Having had a chance to sleep on it and start reading/listening to some reviews, I have more thoughts. I enjoyed the movie. That has not changed, and I don't expect it to change.
I kind of hate how we've gone from analyzing the movie to analyzing the motivations of the entities - directors, studios, actors - behind the movie. It's a lot less fun and more cynical. But at some level, that seems to be how those entities want it. More on this later*.
I forgot that a lot of critics actually liked TLJ. A lot of the themes they like, I also am generally sympathetic to (for now I'm setting aside the plot being dumb and pointless).
The best example is that you don't need to be born important to do something important. I don't mind that at all, and I have no particular compulsion for everyone to be related to everyone else. What bothers me is that Rian Johnson broke the trilogy plot to make all these points.
That takes me back to the asterisk, which is that I feel like what RJ did was somehow selfish. Rather than riffing on the plot Abrams set up, he consciously chose to break off every plot thread. "Look at me, look how subversive I am and how controversial my movies are." This wasn't about you.
And that takes me back to the real reason for this post, which is critics panning TROS because it subverts everything from TLJ. Well, you can't have it both ways. If it's fun and cool that TLJ openly subverted everything from TFA, why is it bad and wrong that TROS openly subverted everything from TLJ?
IMO, TFA had a very specific goal, which was to be fun, safe, and Star Warsy. It did that too well. I expected TLJ to move into new ground plot-wise and even thematically, but not in such a silly and dysfunctional way.
So, that sort of put the onus back on TROS to re-do what had already been done in TFA, which is to get people back on board with Star Wars. Unfortunately, this is where the themes should have been getting more complex and the plot starting to simplify, but instead the plot got hideous and themes reverted back to the beginning.
It was almost like Abrams tried to make a whole trilogy in one movie. Set up themes, establish a mood, build up a supervillain, have some middle installment quests, bring everyone down to nothing and then build them back up, have a romance, make the protagonist go through a crisis of badness, make the antagonist go through a crisis of goodness, give every minor character an arc, have two huge simultaneous climactic battles, give Carrie a fitting send-off, and on and on and on.
So yeah, this movie was too busy. There was no exploration of a theme, it was thematic noise. You're not really following the plot, you're hanging on and trusting that when you diagram it on your wall later with lots of newspaper clippings and red string it will all make sense. The Force abilities are flying off the charts, pretty much anything can happen and there are no rules.
But back to what I like: Finn, Poe, and Rey pick back up where they left off as truly likable characters that I am emotionally invested in and want to see succeed. Kylo continues his tour de force as the most complex and interesting character in the each movie of the trilogy. There's a credible big bad guy again. There are kickass lightsaber battles. Several of the "emotional moments" are great. Leia killing herself to distract her son so that Palpatine's granddaughter can kill him and save the rebellion... there's a lot going on there, but it's a meaningful sacrifice. Kylo coming to the light was done with incredible conviction (there are a lot of parallels to Anakin's journey here... topic for another post). It's fun to watch.
More later, I'm listening to a podcast TCTTS posted and kind of live-blogging my response.
