Good Movie, but not My Star Wars

Rating: 6/10 (29 December 2019)

JJ did a great job with this movie. It's as delightfully campy as the original trilogy, and I adore that they finally touch on sith artifacts and culture. JJ brought a lot of the magic from the games and old movies into this film, and the lightsaber fights were splendid. If you have trouble following the plot... I'm sorry. It's pretty easy to follow, and it's decently straightforward. Some characters' motivations are unexplained or underexplained, but otherwise it is a great movie with tons of throwbacks to the eighties.
However, this movie was not made for me. As someone who grew up on the original trilogy and prequel trilogy but now is a lot older and more mature than I was then, this movie was not made for me. The plot is back to being mostly male led, any major Asian characters from previous films are sidelined, and the world is relegated back to the oversimplified black-and-white morality of Lucas' six films. Every interesting and unique addition from TLJ is retconned in a way that makes it feel like infighting between episodes 7 and 8.
The movie is genuinely good. It's enjoyable, and it works very well to close out the rest of the saga. Apart from a couple parts, the film directors and writers made good choices and a solid film. However, it's a movie by a specific demographic for that demographic, with some pandering here and there to make it feel "woke" without eating to actually be woke.