No boss battles this time around.
Overall I was very happy with the movie and the incredible effort made to make sense out of the cluster that was the PT + OT + unexplained 32 year gap + TFA + RJ, lol.
And I'll say right up once again that my #1 fan-fiction wish for the finale ever since watching TFA was to have Rey put on the Vader mask, distract Kylo, then run him through. I never actually thought I'd get that of course but then Leia kind of did that by seemingly appearing in Kylo's mind with a Palpatine-esque hood...which distracted him so that Rey could run him through. Well **** close enough I say.
The Rey/Kylo/Palpatine scenes were fantastic IMO almost straight across the board (though I didn't love showing a massive Sith legion only to have them just stand there and die.) The thing that kind of blows my mind though, and the one thing I thought was an absolutely sure thing, was that they did indeed show the mother of all space battles...and it was kind of unexciting. Um, what??
That's a head scratcher for sure. All right then, expectations subverted I guess, lol.
However I loved almost everything else.
So Ben Solo (not Rey, Luke or Anakin) becomes "the most powerful Jedi" ever by keeping the person he cared about from dying. The Sith legend fulfilled, after the ultimate destruction of the Sith, a Sith legend that could only be fulfilled by a Jedi since it requires the person doing the saving to die. That I wasn't expecting. That was excellent. It really casts those ROTS scenes with Palpatine telling Anakin that together one day they'll achieve that power in a different light since together they *did* achieve that power through their combined grandchildren.
I liked that the mystery of Rey's power was that she was merely a Force conductor and not the most powerful Force user. That's how I saw it anyway. The entirety of the Sith vs. the entirety of the Jedi doing battle through their respective proxies (Palps clone and Rey) one last time.
I liked that Rey wielded the combined sabers of Luke and Leia at the end, a nice remnant of George's original ST where Luke and his twin sister defeated Palps together.
Jannah was silly but thankfully inoffensive due to the briefness of her role. The whole battle on the outside of the Star Destroyer with Finn, Hannah, and everyone just did nothing for me though. Again I'm shocked because I thoroughly enjoyed the first 2/3 of the film and normally the big battle at the end is where all the good stuff happens, hell even AOTC delivered in that regard.
But I can't say enough about the Rey/Palps/Ben Solo stuff. In fact Ben is by far my favorite character of this trilogy now. And I'm very glad that Palps went out on a high note (IMO) after all the goofy faces and flying around he did in ROTS.
Lando was a lot of fun, not the biggest role obviously but you could tell Billy Dee was having a ball.
I liked the surprises this time around, they didn't feel done just to trick the audience or piss us off, I thought they actually made the story more interesting.
The different clones and Snokes in tubes felt very "Dark Empire-ish" to me, which I also really liked.
A nice return to the film's roots there at the very end too.
Overall it's surreal to be here at the end now of all three trilogies and thankfully I think their little hail mary delivered in the end. I see that for several people here it was just the final nail in the tragedy of Disney's ST or what have you but fortunately the stuff that this film got right was for the most part the stuff I was deep down hoping they'd get right regardless of the surprisingly ho hum space battle.
