I hated the prequel duels. These fights were more like the OT, where the point is to inform the character's mindset and where they are in their life, compare to Luke when he's wildly swinging his saber cause he's enraged and at risk of turning to the dark side.
Meanwhile when Obi Wan is enraged at Darth Maul it looks exactly like the rest of the fight, highly choreographed glowstick ballet.
When Palps became not a skeleton I was hoping beyond hope that we'd see him pull out a saber or two and have an epic 1v2 duel. And then nope. That was dull as heck.
I can't imagine anything worse than this, but then again it would've made the movie schlockier so I wish they did it. The movie was bad. Not as bad as I thought it would be, but bad. The first half kind of felt like I was inside a running clothesdryer, and the second half gave me a headache. They undid everything from TLJ so they had to stuff two movies worth of plot into one. It's also full of seams and obvious patches where they had to go back through in editing and try to hot-glue the movie together.
The movie's held together with duct tape and moves so fast it hopes you won't notice. I liked the characters, especially Kylo/Rey and Finn/Poe, but they're in service of this incomprehensible nightmare, and that makes it frustrating. Finn and Poe and basically everyone else, especially the OT characters, have nothing to do. There's a trilogy worth of C3PO jokes in this movie, and none of them are funny, characters' entire arcs are resolved in like thirty seconds, there's a bunch of weird shit that makes no sense and I assume they just hit pencils down and couldn't edit around them, since the movie was still in editing up to like a week ago. It's still unbelievable to me that Disney spent 4 billion dollars on this franchise to just immediately slam on the gas with no plan whatsoever. Considering how carefully they built up the Marvel universe, I can't believe they flubbed Star Wars this badly. Force Awakens was okay but they left no guidance on where the story was going, gave it to a different director and he fucked it up, then gave it back to JJ Abrams to try to course correct, and he drove it right off a cliff.
I'm serious about the two movies in one. The first half and the second half are clearly two poorly-developed movies compressed into one. The fight on the death star wreckage and Rey subsequently fleeing back to the island planet because she's given up is obviously a second-movie third-act "heroes are at their lowest point" moment, equivalent to Luke on Bespin, but the movie's so rushed and maniacal that it all blends together.
What was Finn gonna say to Rey? I have heard JJ Abrams said he was gonna say he was force sensitive, and he obviously is in this movie, but I don't buy that cause why would he be cagey about that? I think they were leaning towards a romance subplot but abandoned it because there wasn't enough time, and just left the scraps behind and hoped you didn't notice. He obviously doesn't love Rose anymore, she shows up at the beginning like "hey are you going on another adventure?" and he just says "Sorry Rose, you're not in this movie"
Likewise, what's with Lando and the girl from Endor at the end? I heard someone suggest he might be her dad, but to me that scene felt more like he was trying to pick her up.
Why don't stormtroopers protect their shit? Remember in A New Hope when they broke onto the death star and it was tense and dangerous and they had to use disguises and shit? In these movies they just fly in and land and it's like whatever, don't bother with alarms, we'll send two guys.
Zorry Bliss or whatever, who's in the movie for five minutes and her entire point is to give them a magic medallion that they'll use in the very next scene and then never again, in a scene obviously put together after the fact to explain how they got onto the ship.
Merry from lord of the rings suggests they use the Holdo ram move in an obvious pickup shot, and they just ADR the back of Finn's head saying they can't, so shut up.
The "Dyad in the Force," which incidentally explains their force conversations but was obviously put in the movie to explain why Palpatine can't just drain Kylo at the beginning to rejuvenate himself.
Not even gonna touch the army of star destroyers because that's self-evidently dumb. The two lightsabers thing is stupid and it's clear they just didn't have any ideas left for how to fight him. In any case, bringing palpatine back negates Darth Vader's entire character arc.
This one's just me being dumb, but at the end Rey just decides she's a skywalker because we need an ending to the movie. But isn't Luke a palpatine? Aren't they all? Palpatine made Anakin with the force, Anakin was a virgin birth, so where did his Y chromosome come from? Does he have Palpatine's DNA?