New thinking, but still true to the old stories.

Rating: 9/10 (28 December 2019)

I've seen a lot of bad comments about this movie, and... I just don't get them.
People complain about things not being true to Star Wars when a LOT of things in this movies were obvious nudges, hints, and even direct links to Legends (formerly known as Expanded Universe, which I will write as EU from now on in this review).
Yes, Palpatine is back. Ooooh so weird, such a stuoid Disney movie, that came from no where, so desperate...
But is it really?
No.. In the old books of EU, that is exactly what happened.
Palpatine foresaw Vader's betrayal and started working on clones and an old sith technique from way before the old republic era called Transfer Essence where your soul upon death is transferred into a target body. Your old body is destroyed, and if the mind of the new body is stronger than so is your soul, in which case it's sent to Chaos... Therefor those using this alternative path of immortality used clone bodies, because it was a blank slate to plant their essence/soul into.
In the EU Darth Sidious was one of the practitioners of this technique.
The emperor who died at the Death Star was one of those clones, and his first official death.
His second death was by his own hands after conjuring an enormous force storm, which is an alternative much stronger variant of force lighting, which exists in two forms. A much bigger and stronger one that Sidious mastered, where you raise your hands up in the air and the lighing embraces a WIDE LARGE area hitting MANY... just like in the movie. The other version is even stronger, and more or a rare occasion, and has the potential of causing wormholes and decimating entire planets.
In the Dark Empire books from 1991-1992 this happened, and he lost control upon which the storm engulfed his ship and destroyed him.
All in all Sidious died 4 times before he was ultimately destroyed for last.
So having him return with clone bodies in the movies... not weird at all. it's a DIRECT nudge to the old books.
Now, in addition to that there were a lot of hints to the old EU, and probably a lot that even I didn't catch.
Abrams does read up a lot on the EU. Rian however, not so much.
Rian messed up big time with the Last Jedi... I am not a fan of that movie, and Abrams was given that train wreck to try to save, and he did as best as he could by trying to recover the plotlines that Rian discarded in the former movie.
Also, Abrams was given a very short time to make the movie, so that's sad, and I'm sure it would have been better if he was allowed more time.
That IS a problem, and does explain the rushed scenes now and then. But I still think Abrams did a great job with what he was handed.
Having Rey cast away her birth surname (Palpatine) and taking a new one (Skywalker) was also a great take to show that if your blood family is truly bad, you can cast that away and stick to your chosen family. I mean, it's the future, and we can change names and surnames in real life as well.
I also love all the cameos, Wedge for instance, but many many others.
And... something that made me real happy.
You know that ceremony in A New Hope where Luke and Han gets medals, but Chewbacca did not get one for some unknown reason.
Yeah.. that is the medal Chewie got after Leia died. Check the pictures, it's that one. I think that was a nice way of rectifying old mistakes.
And yes, the movie is not perfect, it does have flaws. But so foes every movie ever.
Where are the wartorn, sad and mourning and wounded people in the ending party scene? However, that was the case in episode 6 as well.
Problem? Yes, but not just this movie, also the old movies.
And to the people saying that this movie is not Star Wars because it just crams a lot of new stuff in it.... well... episode 5 and 6 did a LOT of new stuff as well.. and episode 4 was also very new in general and they thought it would flop at first.
Star Wars IS about new mystical space stuff. Both new and old, and this movie added a lot of old stuff from the old EU, but also added new stuff, and some thing might even be new but inspired from the EU.
I personally think (not confirmed by authors but just my guess) that the complicated navigation to Exagol, and the super weapon producing Exagol,,, well...... the Maw Installation was a research station that worked on super weapons, and was located in the Maw Cluster which was an extremely difficult cluster of black holes to navigate through.
I do see a very clear hint there that it might very well have been inspired by it. At least that's my guess.
They also made the Sun Crusher... so... if you think it's unreasonable that they made tons of planet killing star destroyers at Exagol......
Well... the Sun Crusher was a superweapon that literally made suns go super nova, obliterating entire solar systems... So yeah.
I did want to see more about Jennah and the other ex-stormtroopers, Zorii, and other stuff. I also wanted Finn to dig more into the "I was redeemed, and so were they, so what if we try to talk more troopers out of it"... i did want more of that.
I also think the kiss was slighty out of tune with the movie in the end. but at the same time, it does kinda embrace the whole "we're kinda toxic for eachothers but we still do this" which does actually happen in real life very often, so it worked, even if I would prefer it without the kiss.
I did like that they downplayed the very forced romances from Last Jedi, like Finn and Rose, with just the shoulder pat, that was good, because the Last Jedi romance was.... very shoehorned and came from nowhere with no build up (Rian!!!).
There are some more problems, but also a lot more positives, and I'm already writing a convoluted novella here, but yes... the movie had a few problem, but it did as best as it could to save the trilogy from the trainwreck that Rian did with 8th, and I am VERY happy about the movie, and loved that they added so much from the EU and actually did their research.