*human character

I am extremely conflicted. Its best parts were better than TFA's, but its worst was much worse than TFA. Part of me wants to chalk it up to TFA being really safe and sticking to a tepid plot and sequencing while TLJ tried something new and got mixed results; part of me wants to blame it on middle-itis, where it has to service as the middleman between the first movie and last (exasperated by this shift from the first movie relying on the older cast while the next one doesn't use them nearly at all) before it can be its own film; part of me wants to blame Disney for drawing out the funny bits (the Hux and Poe bit at the start should have ended after the first Poe retort if it was there at all) and making the movie too quippy in general; part of me wants to blame spotty direction and a subpar script that gave us the illusion of twists, but moved really only moved the story a few yards a head in a bee-line; and part of me wants to understand why some of the bizarre choices, like Super Leia, were made. And honestly, it feels like a mix of everything above.

But, in the end, I am two hours out from watching the movie and the good parts are sticking a lot more than the bad. TFA goes through the motions, being a stock Star Wars film that gets a bit boring to watch on the 10th viewing; TLJ has some outstanding parts intercut with sequences I'd probably prefer to fast forward over.

And legacy be damned, they should have killed Leia off then and there. She did absolutely nothing the rest of the film (literally asking why people expect her to do something at the end), and given Carrie Fisher's deadness, we know she can't do anything radically important in Episode 9. It was a super lame scene that only served to blue ball the audience instead of capitalizing the statement that the movie is making: this is the new generation of Star Wars, and it's not going to use the OT or PT as a crutch. Instead, it was the first of many unfulfilling plot twists.