Rey turns out to not be some dumb fucking chosen one of prophecy repeat, but is just a person who has taken charge of their own fate.
But she is. She is magically good at everything she does, everyone likes her and whatnot. Being a chosen one doesn't require a prophercy, just requires a writer to make one character objectively "best" character. Whole "Wound in The Force" theory be damned, that is still her being exceptional due to, for now, no apparent reason.
Snoke is some shlub who got where he was by abusing the quick and easy of the dark side, and yet was raising Kylo Ren to be a synthesis of both light and darkness and also then gets fucking destroyed without so much as a fight.
Snoke is some complete noone. Nothing is really known about him, which was fine in the previous movie, as we all expected an explanation in this one. But then he just died. He is just random big evil with no connection to previous movies. It's as if there was suddenly new LoTR trilogy set after original one where there is crazy new powerful wizard named Snort and then he just dies.
Poe being a reckless absolute individual Hard Man Making Hard Choices is a bad thing, because when you are operating as a group rebellion disruptive heroes who think they're invincible get everyone killed.
It's a war, people die, and the problem is what Poe does works. It's the "Pink Hair Sue Commander" that
for no good reason didin't tell anyone her plan, which directly led to everything going badly. If you notice, when Poe is being told that they in fact have a plan, he thinks it will work. In his mind, all he did was trying to save everything because after Leia went down there was apparently no plan, and without one they would be dead.
The New Republic's "goodness" is functionally evil itself, because it plunges the galaxy straight back into a genocidal war after working so hard to get out of the last one.
You mean New Republic stupidity? This is something that hurts me the most probably, believing that New Republic, and Mon Mothma and basically everyone except Leia believed in this crazy stupid idea of "disband our entire military, when Imperial Remnants see we did that they will disband their entire military too". This shit is the satirical propaganda that people apply to real life anti-gun movement, except New Republic took it seriously. Even during the longest time Old Republic didin't have an army, they had Jedi, they had Juicidal Force, they had goddamn Navy. New doesn't have anything, and First Order be damned, there were dozens of other political entites that would attack them for profit, Hutt Cartels and various pirates from the top of the head.
And then there's Kylo Ren. Oh god, Kylo Ren. Back in TFA I thought his motive for killing Han was one of the best things about the film, because it was a villain motivation like that of Berserk's Griffith with weight and some scariness behind it. Kill the past is the theme of the whole film and what it intends to do for the franchise, and in this Kylo fucking embodies it. He gets it. He understands the endless cycle and wants now not just to sever his personal ties, but everyone's ties to the bloated past of the Star Wars galaxy. He transcended the inherent flaw in the philosophy of the Sith, the hypocrisy that embracing the dark side for your passion destroys that passion. Instead, he's embraced the dark side for...nothing. The void, the heady pure nihilism that can allow something new and unconnected to the bullshit of Empire and Republic to grow. And if the third movie in this trilogy in any way involves Kylo Ren using the First Order to crush the rest of the forces in the galaxy before turning it on itself and blowing up their dumb superweapon without a fight, I will endure any number of emo teen references in retaliation for my love of him as a villain.
He transcended the inherent flaw in the philosophy of the Sith, the hypocrisy that embracing the dark side for your passion destroys that passion. Instead, he's embraced the dark side for...nothing. The void, the heady pure nihilism that can allow something new and unconnected to the bullshit of Empire and Republic to grow.
That's a fascinating take on Kylo's motivation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he does still spout the whole "order and control" rhetoric that Vader used as a justification for his evil, but I'd love to see more of your idea implemented in the next movie. Embracing evil for evil's sake, as opposed to any sort of "greater good" or other excuses.
Also, the FTL suicide jump was way cooler than the low-power DS shots or the destruction of the Death Stars. I got chills seeing the mountainous story roadblock of Star Destroyers just...disintegrate under the power of it, black space turned white in total silence.
The FTL suicide jump indeed looked cool, but it has heavy implication as to why nobody goddamn did that before (setting aside that to this point there were explanations in lore that this wouldn't work, but obviously they aren't canon anymore), considering it's apparently the single best way of tacking space combat due to sheer power, not to mention range. Why does nobody use warp torpedoes? Just gut an X-Wing from everything except engines and warp drive, replace the cockpit with remote guidance and lug that shit at enemy ships.
I was fond of the "subtle" anticapitalism of rich people playing both the Republic and the First Order while living it up on a planet they stole.
Nothing subtle about it.
Within its own laws and physics and literary rules, the Star Wars universe is pretty much a blank slate. And man, why exactly do you think this opens up a whole new universe? There is nowhere to go from here! Whatever they do, it will be a serious disconnect from the both the trilogy and the series as a whole.
Precisely. EU is dead, and it was what had some of the best stories around, which is also my big issue with new movies. EU died for this, and the quality of non-existant EU movies aside, they would at least have much better source material that's consistent with Star Wars.
Perhaps even worse than that, whatever comes NEXT is certainly not going to be any good. Disney truly is Marvelizing Star Wars. And while this is going to step on a lot of people's toes, on the whole, Marvel movies... are bad. Disney doesn't care about good stories. They're not good at making stories.
I like Marvel movies. While they aren't the pinnacle of movie-making, some of them are visibly worse than other, but they are decently fun, most of them have some original ideas for themselves and most importantly, they are mostly consistent. I do not have to watch a movie and feel like it in some way contradicts everything that I have known about the MCU. Meanwhile in a way new Star Wars do exactly the opposite. They take the source material and balantly disregard it to fit in more "cool" factors, more forced ideas and more corporationalism. MCU might be a product, but it's decently machined and produced product that keeps in line with other products of it's brand, while new Star Wars is just sticking Star Wars brand onto something that clearly doesn't work as Star Wars.