Bret Devereaux

TLJ had some interesting concepts (far more so than either of the Abrams turds before or after it) but the execution was so thoroughly botched on so many levels that it's almost as if the entire film was a deliberate strawman to make the interesting germs look as bad as possible

Whenever I press people who say this, the only thing they can come up with is the casino sequence, which literally ties all the concepts together. So I really don't understand this critique. What's your beef

I don’t really find this convincing. Especially the “it broke the rules of fantasy space war” part. It’s a beautifully-shot film that artfully dissects the hero’s journey narrative of the rest of the franchise. And it’s the funniest, save since the originals.

I think this divide in reception cuts to genre expectations. If you are assessing TLJ as a surrealist visual spectacle, it does quite well. If you are assessing it as a work of speculative fiction, with the worldbuilding demands that implies, it fails miserably.

My own view is that, given that literally the entire rest of the Star Wars franchise is built as the latter, it was stunning malpractice to give Rian Johnson the greenlight to do the former within the core Star Wars canon.

Rise of Skywalker is worse, mind you. At least TLJ had ambitions and in its odd way achieved them. I think I would have loved TLJ if it had been its own film, without the Star Wars logo, with its own distinct universe, an independent deconstruction of the genre.

But it was a mainline canon Star Wars movie, a fact which imposed greater demands on it in terms of cohesiveness and worldbuilding - demands which it failed at in the rare moments where any attempt was made to speak to them at all.