Tried to get the series back on track in predictable ways

Rating: 7/10 (19 December 2019)

I'm going to start by saying that the best of the recent starwars movies were the "anthology" ones. I think that Solo and especially Rogue One were better than episodes 7, 8 and 9. Ep7 was too much rehashing of the original trilogy and Ep8 - well allowing a director to completely disregard story elements that the previous director was clearly building up to was a huge mistake.
Now episode 9 is here. After watching all 3 movies it felt like we've been watching an argument between J J Abrams and Rian Johnson.
"This is important"
"No it's not"
"YES IT IS!"
Such a massive mistake not having someone directing the story across episodes. So what we got in Episode 9 was largely Abrams trying to yank the story back on to the track he originally intended. It had its good moments (threepio got all the best lines). But it was for the most part pretty predictable other than a couple of cameos I didn't expect (I cheered to see Dennis Lawson, however briefly).
Including Leia was always going to be difficult with the passing of Carrie Fisher. Her scenes were cobbled together using unused footage from Episode 7. I suppose it was done about as well as they could have done but much of her dialogue seemed general and vague in the context of the scenes she was in. Clearly the other dialogue was built around using as much as they could. It came off as being a lot like one of the Weird Al Yankovic mock interviews where he takes a celebrity's answers to interview questions and then changes the questions to alter the context.
When I first watched the Last Jedi I really enjoyed it and for the most part defended it against its critics. Over time I began to agree more and more with those critics. At the moment I'm a bit torn over whether I liked this one or not. Time will tell what my final verdict will be.