ineptelephant said:
Its like watching Archer all over again.
"Do you want Sith? Because this is how you get Sith!"
It seems to me that the new trilogy fittingly has nothing new to offer. Frankly, the original films weren't the kind of in-depth intellectual powerhouses that warranted a trilogy of introspection, which is a polite way of putting it considering the blatent copy-paste. Battle of Hoth pt.2, new deathstar with a dumb weakness, leading jedi master sacrifices himself to distract the sith villain whom he formally taught and etc. The high camp archetypical moralising space western was never a particularly sophisticated story to begin with and the subversion card has already been played for Rogue One.
Fair enough to everyone that enjoyed it, I found both movies incredibly dull and somewhat insulting to my memory (the Luke fakeout especially, jesus. Should've gone all the way and had Kylo say "But now, I am the master!") but that's the infinite multiplicity of subjective opinion for you.
For the most part I'm fine with the shared beats. Lucas made it clear before the prequels even came out that the saga doesn't repeat, but it sure does rhyme. And by the time we get the crossed sabers before Senator Palpatine's face in a totally-not-foreshadowing moment, he'd really beaten that point to death.
It largely comes down to perspective, but I at least found the sequel trilogy to be fun so far. I could live without the dumb phone jokes, could really live without a casino planet side excursion, and think much of of the conflict in TLJ was driven by sheer stupidity, but at least I wasn't bored like I was during the prequels. Well, I mean, TLJ was too long for the content and desperately needed an edit and I checked my phone several times to see what time it was, and that still managed to be better than my response to AOC.
I don't know. I think part of it is just that I never had the same reverence for Star Wars a lot of fans seem to have. I grew up on them, but they were dumb fun space cowboys and samurai movies. I remember when I was five or six and saw the movies in revival and was blown away by the visual spectacle, the silly fun, and the visual spectacle.
But that's also kind of the thing: if I'm entertained, I'm far less likely to care about the dumb moments or the plot holes or just the cludgier moments of a movie. So when I'm paying attention to the cracks, it probably means I'm not entertained. And while I've watched TFA more times than I've watched the prequels combined, one viewing of TLJ gave me enough down time to really go "this is dumb," "this doesn't make sense," and "I want a porg." Okay, that lat one isn't really a bad thing.
And while none of that automatically equals plot holes, I do think it enters into the territory of "why people had problems with the movie."