While I can understand some of the venom being spewed at this movie, I think it shows just how difficult it is to make a Star Wars movie that will please fans, critics, and the worldwide audience, not to mention get approved by executives, be produced on time and within budget, deliver a compelling and memorable story, and most of all earn more than $1.5 billion at the boxoffice. Sure it's easy for us to armchair speculate on how we would make a "Great Star Wars" movie, but would that vision be able to meet the above criteria? For example, after being very skeptical going in, I loved Blade Runner 2049. It got made, scored well with critics, was mostly enjoyed by BR fans, but it was a box office bomb. The stakes and expectations are 10X higher for a Star Wars movie.
That said, I'd probably give TLJ a 7/10. There were a lot of decisions I didn't agree with, and overall I felt the story went off the track that Abrams had set up with TFA. I find it strange that while each director should be given the latitude to bring their own signature to an episode, the broad beats of the story aren't spelled out for the overall trilogy. Instead if I understand it correctly, TFA ended where it ended and Rian had carte blanche to take the story where ever he decided. To me that doesn't seem smart 3-part storytelling, and a recipe for ticking off fans. You get a set up for Snoke that leads nowhere. A mystery about Rey's parentage that is resolved by a throwaway line (especially when compared to "No... I am your father"); a budding romance between Rey and Finn that may now be Rey and Kylo, Finn and Rose, Finn and Poe or Poe and Rey; a legendary, one-time wide-eyed jedi master and hero of the rebellion, who devolved into a cranky hermit content to sit on the sidelines and let the galaxy burn, including his sister; Knights of Ren who were nowhere to be found (unless they were Snoke's bodyguards). I wonder what JJ actually thinks of where Johnson took the story. For all the flack TFA gets about playing it safe and remaking ANH, it was much more of a crowd pleaser than TLJ. Maybe TLJ should have tried more to "ape" ESB. People might have complained about it being formulaic, but at least it's a winning formula. I didn't hate TLJ, but it threw in a lot of unexpected twists, had little to no payoff, and only nominally advanced the story IMO. But I for one am glad that Abrams is coming back to the director's chair for SW IX. I'd rather see the story get back on the track it was on, and give the trilogy an uplifting, positive and satisfying resolution.
