Not just upset fanboys - fundamentally terrible story telling

Rating: 1/10 (27 December 2017)

When the trailer for TLJ came out I couldn't believe how unexciting the movie looked. There's plenty of bad movies out there that even manage to make a two minute trailer look good. So when all the positive critic reviews came out I was glad to be proven wrong...or so I thought.
I came out of the theatre after watching it totally disappointed. What was I not seeing in this movie that the critics were? After more and more user reviews came out I was glad to see I wasn't the only one. And it's not because they upset expectations of the Star Wars fanboys, its because it is a fundamentally terrible film.This movie will be regarding as the least necessary of all the Star Wars films. I guarantee you will be able to skip from TFA to Episode IX and the overall story will still make sense. No character arcs were progressed and all the up in the air subplots from TFA were either not addressed or dropped entirely. Even within the film there were entire subplots that could be removed from the film and the story would not change (casino subplot I'm looking at you). In fact Luke Skywalker's entire role in the movie was inconsequential. He literally stays on the island the entire movie, doesn't train Rey and then dies. Sure he delayed Kylo Ren for a couple of minutes with a "hologram" but surely the remaining resistance fighters would have made their way out of the cave regardless. I won't get into the myriad of other problems with the plot but I will say this: TLJ makes the Star Wars galaxy feel smaller than ever before with a story that takes place over 24 hours across on one planet (well three if you include Luke brooding on an island and the pointless Casino subplot). The whole thing is just generally boring and will be the first time I don't give a Star Wars film a second viewing.
Generally the second movie in a franchise leaves some questions unanswered and subplots which all converge in a climax in the third film. Think of Empire where Han is frozen in carbonite or The Matrix where the bad guy wakes up in the very last scene. Unfortunately TLJ wraps up almost every subplot and answers every question. At this stage why would we want to go and watch Episode IX? I guarantee that in Episode IX they will try to undo the corner that they have painted themselves into by bringing back Snoke, bringing back Luke as a force ghost and saying that the reveal about Rey's heritage was just Kylo lying but it's going to make the whole trilogy look very sloppy.