Proof again no 1 man should have so much of the SW storytelling weight - not even Lucas

Rating: 2/10 (15 December 2017)

Fan since '77, and I really wanted E8 to be great, maybe the best one yet, but I had to fight my fan bias and see it honestly, which was a pain. Unlike E7, it felt more akin to the prequels than to the original trilogy.
Without spoiling it, great effects, action, music, set pieces, creatures, but I'm looking more at storytelling credibility, arc, beats, and escapism vs. sociopolitical commentary. There were a lot of things in there that just took me out of the moment and demanded too much to be believable.
Many of the twists and surprises didn't feel like credible fantasy but just flying by the seat of his pants and half baked. Rey's origin? Snoke's backstory? The tipped hat to the older generation felt obligatory and somewhat forced, and was not as moving nor affecting, because it wasn't believable. And Canto Bight kinda bites - detour into a different cinematic universe; that and other moments did not really feel like SWU. With spoilers, a lot more could be said, e.g. inserting "pageturners" into the lexicon - like that character was about to whip out a cup of Starbucks and copy of the NYTimes.
If I turn off my brain and just go for an action ride, 9 stars. But there were just too many conveniences, too much luck shoved at us, too much fuzzy logic, too many pauses to have a deep moment while the world's burning down around them, and to me the social commentary was too thinly veiled - again, felt more like a prequel than OT. A key ethos of the SWU is classical escapism with the commentary more buried. This bordered on partisan political puff. Rian please.
Great production values, but please bring back someone like Larry for the script. Rian pretty much tied off or trashed the threads he and JJ opened in E7, which IMHO, even if it was highly derivative of E4's story beats, was still a comparatively better told story overall.
I'm surprised Kathy's giving Rian a whole other trilogy. Looper was a better film. If so, I vote to make it 'anthology' rather than 'canon.' E8 was a wasted opportunity on multiple levels.