RoS was so bad it makes any negatives of episode 8 pale in comparison.

Oh no, Chewy is dead! Wait he’s alive.

Can’t access the sith language [for some reason].

The dagger is a map! But only if you stand in this one exact spot and even then it just kinda points in a general direction to a place on a crashed ship.

Just nonsense.

They had an aimless film because Johnson ratfucked them and Fisher died. Like I say, they were in an impossible position.

It would have helped if they went into the thing with a unified vision 1-2-3, but they didn't even do that and they still would have been screwed by Fishers death unless they thought ahead and managed to film all her scenes at once.

I will die on the hill that while flawed in a lot of ways, TLJ was trying to do something interesting.

I saw the leaked plot of TRoS and refused to watch it.

Finn's arc for me is irredeemable. By killing Phasma in the middle part of the trilogy they were left with no place to go in the 3rd one for Finn.

I really wanted Phasma back with one burned eye to give Finns story a proper send off and we didn't even get that.

"Nope! Snoke's dead! Phasma's dead! Luke's dead! Resistance is mostly dead! Good luck with Episode 3 suckers!"

There was a way they COULD have fixed it in post because Fisher died before the film came out. If the whole idea was to kill one original cast member per film, and Fisher died IRL, here's what you do:

1. Kill off Leia in space. Don't give her the Jedi floating angel bit. Do her scenes in the cave at the end as a force ghost.

2. Play out the rest of the film as normal.

3. At the start of 3 (or post credit in 2), run Luke's death scene backwards. Force Ghost Yoda and Leia appear. "Your time, it is not." Then give the 3rd film over to Luke. There's your OG cast member for 3.

Even though I have always classified Star Wars firmly as fantasy and not sci-fi, I find the Holdo maneuver utterly unforgivable. TBH Starkiller Base was almost as bad, take the two of them together and intragalactic combat in the Star Wars universe should be instant and apocalyptic. Why even build spaceships when you can just point hyperdrives at your target from any distance, or just laser them from across the galaxy?

Of course I don't expect the movies to follow this train of thought, but that's frankly why it's a problem. The people writing this shlock don't think about the ramifications for two seconds, they just do what sounds cool and let the fans figure it out. But it really shatters any suspension of disbelief, and exposes how grossly uncurious the writing leads are about the universe they're crafting. All big movies are profit-driven, but it's nice to see at least some amount of effort to disguise that fact.

Hard disagree on the character arcs. Luke's arc was terrible. He is completely different than he was at the end of return, and thats ok if you can show how it happened. But it wasn't really shown just told. The flash back scene with kylo just shows the culmination of this supposed change. We take the guy who would not kill the most evil man when everyone is telling him to because he thinks he can be redeemed, and then go to yeah I had a bad vision I thought we should kill this kid. That's a jarring change.

If they wanted to set kylo up as the bad guy, the character arc needed more work.

I think red letter put it best on the character arcs poes arc was to learn to blindly obey authority. Finns arc was that nothing he did matters at all and that you should not sacrifice yourself in war.

And I think there is an argument to make that the rRse of Skywalker is in part bad because TLJ was badly written as a middle film. It took payoffs that arguably should be in the final film for itself in an attempt to be different and new. It does not really continue the plot for a third film. The whole movie seemed to jump from moment to moment Rian thought would be cool and did not consider really how to get there. That's why there are all these consistency issues in lore/suspension of disbelief, theme, tone. If we are building a staircase and in the middle we take the parts for the end of the staircase to try and now make it a spiral staircase I don't care how pretty it looks or impressive the craftsman ship it does not get me to where I need to go.

I think Rian swung for the fences and I appreciate the attempt but he struck out.

Yeah, because he killed Snoke. He could have expanded Snoke story in 2 leaving the 3rd movie to resolve it, instead he killed him for... reasons... leaving 3 to go "Well, fuck us, right?"

The only scenes I remember from the whole trilogy are from Last Jedi. Hyperspace blasting a starship into a star destroyer was a cool concept. And the whole final with Luke force projecting across galaxies was a good sendoff I thought.