This movie was just a clunky, poorly conceived mess from start to finish. The opening scene in particular felt more like a ridiculous parody of Star Wars than the genuine article.
Poe: *Effortlessly whips his X-Wing around, singlehandedly crippling the big bad space ship* "Haha! Aren't I awesome! Aren't I cool, audience? Aren't I?"
Leia: *Exasperated reaction shot* "OMG! He's so reckless! Such a Rebel!" *winks at audience*
Hux: *Chews scenery and acts like an angry cartoon character (looks like one too)*
Rinse and repeat for like 25 minutes.
I literally felt like I was watching the made up SciFi satire film from the end of that Disney Chicken Little movie.
On top of that, I hate to break it to Disney, but just because it's "Science Fiction," doesn't mean that you get to throw the "Science" side of things completely out the window. This isn't a Marvel flick. This isn't Guardians of the Galaxy. Some degree of internal logic actually is needed here. Flashy colors alone don't cut it. The fact is those bombers were absurdly stupid by any objective measure. Big, painfully slow moving objects that literally have to hover over their target before dropping bombs like a freaking B-17? Umm... Wut?
Did the Star Wars universe just forget about missiles, all of the sudden? And how on Earth does that even work seeing as how
there's no freaking gravity in space??
Ditto for the stupid laser cannons fired by the Star Destroyers that seem to arc through space like mortar rounds. Just...
Why? Why screw with something so fundamental to the series' ascetic? It didn't need to be changed, and now it just looks goofy.
Which is before we even get into other silly features, like the "the cruisers can only get this far away from the Star Destroyers" plot device, or how using lightspeed for suicide attacks completely borks the universe. I won't get into those, however, in the interests of keeping post length manageable.
But I will say that the world building in this movie is just as half-assed and nonsensical as the science. The impression I got from the last film is that the Republic was the government in charge of everything, and had been for decades. The First Order were just some particularly well-funded lunatic fringe faction. How did that completely reverse itself all of the sudden?
Did the Republic not have any sort of military, or government, outside of its capital? That doesn't make any damn sense. It's just a transparently lazy way of preserving the "Rebels vs Empire" status quo of the first films, even though it's flatly ridiculous in this circumstance.
Now, I will say this much, most of the stuff with Kylo, Rey, and Luke actually was pretty decent. That did elevate the second half of the movie over the first. They even brought Rey's power level down to a more reasonable level (she was wildly overpowered in the first film), but that's ultimately not enough to save my overall impression of the film.
Seriously, get the guy who made Rogue One to just make ALL of the Star War movies from here on out. He actually seems to understand how to make a decent Star Wars flick. Rian Johnson and J.J. Abrams clearly
DON'T.
