Silly and mostly bad

Rating: 2/10 (17 March 2020)

I always kind of wondered if JJ Abrams was a hack. I enjoyed his film Cloverfield and a few others, but ever since Star Trek Into Darkness, where he retconned the Star Trek 2 plot and basically just redid it with different actors, I began to wonder, "Is this guy a "good" director, as I originally thought, or a talentless hack?" After Star Wars 9, I'm thinking more the latter.
For all the praise he gets, many of his films now consist of taking the storyline of other, better films, and jury rigging them into slightly different plot lines. Look no further than his much more lauded feature in the Star Wars myth, episode 7. It's Star Wars, A New Hope, with different people and a different setting. It even has a new Death Star, just planet-based.
Ultimately though, my biggest issue isn't the sameness of the story, compared to other outings, it's the absurd length JJ goes to erase episode 8, and the culmination of the film. I won't go into too much detail, as others have done well with that. I'll just point out that when we first see the stupidly sized "dark Star Destroyer" fleet (how did more ships than existed in the entire Empire get built secretly without anyone noticing?), the equally-stupidly sized Rebel fleet, and the Emperor "force-lightning's" the entire rebel armada, I was noticeably rolling my eyes in the theater, was I watching a Monty Python sketch?
Bottom line, it's just a dumb movie with a terrible plot that feels like it was written by an army of 13 year olds who saw the original trilogy exactly one time. Maybe that sums up JJ's level of writing.