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[Reelya]

I was less bored than TLJ. In TLJ, with all the back and forth cutting it felt like every 5 minutes they cut back to the people on the Rebel ship just standing around talking interminably about how they were in the Big Space Chase, and this went on for two hours. I really started to hate Poe in that movie because of how often he was in those scenes just standing around talking about being chased and nothing actually happening.

If the JJ Abrams movies all suffer from any specific problem too much, it's that there's way to much "we gotta go to place X to find the MacGuffin Z" plots. In RPG terms, consider if you crossed out all the JJ Abrams "side quests" where the only reward was some MacGuffin, or finding some person who could unlock the locked MacGuffin, as optional and boiled it down to the main story, how much would be left?

Consider that there were plenty of side stories and set pieces in the original movies and even the prequels, but they weren't quite as stuffed to the gills with MacGuffin Plots. By that I mean, in the Lucas films, they're going to places because of other reasons, and plot happens along the way, setting up the set pieces, whereas in these films there's way too much of "only on Planet X is there a person who has thing Y / can fix thing Z" etc, and the plot consists of stringing these units together.

(Minorly spoilerly from here on) Consider that "C3PO brain fart" plot-point. It only exists so they can string another "MacGuffin Quest" onto the string, and have yet another set-piece location. If they were running too long, the entire "plot unit" could be excised without any real change to the rest of the movie. The problem here is that the resultant movie can be filled to the gills with action, yet you're still bored, because there's no real reason that the action is happening in that place vs any other place. Like when the heroes all went to that planet where they're having a festival. They're only there to find a MacGuffin, so the entire backdrop is meaningless in the big picture. It also leads to plot holes, since the supposedly genocidal First Order couldn't shoot up the civilians in that scene, because the heroes were only there because of the MacGuffin, so if the civilians all got killed it would be the heroes fault for hanging around. So, because of the constraints of the narrative, nothing of actual substance can happen to anyone else when the heroes just turn up looking for the MacGuffins. In The Force Awakens, it was almost all about a Big MacGuffin: finding the lost bit that has the coordinates of Luke's planet. I thought it was just that Movie, except in the latest movie it's also almost all about finding a Big MacGuffin about finding the lost bit that has the coordinates of someone else's planet.

[IcyTea31]

What you're describing is called modular scenes. That is, scenes and plot points that can be added or removed freely to pad or shorten the runtime, as they are not essential to the main plot.
If we compare screenwriting to cooking, modular scenes are salt. Too little and the meat will be bland (a "talking heads" movie) to many tastes, too many or unevenly loaded, it becomes unenjoyable.
And yes, for this one they frontloaded several modular scenes in a row and glued them together in a contrived manner, creating a clumsy first act.

[hector13]

I saw it, and it at least cheered me up from my astonishly bad mood for a while.

Finn remains as pointless as ever; he should’ve been a side character in the first movie and then killed off. I was sad to see no Poe-Finn gayness despite this.

It was very clunky at the start, and I probably agree with Reelya about some of the things that happened merely to be reasons for the characters to go places and do things.

Spoiler: mostly minor but one huge spoiler (click to show/hide)

Chewie getting captured being the most glaring for me. The First Order dudes are told to look for Rey, then they find the ship she came in on and one of her companions, and... then leave without her, even though she is literally standing in the middle of the desert and said companion was lumbering toward her when they got caught.

Despite the quest-chain feel, the 3PO thing I thought was reasonable enough. It actually fleshed out the world a bit; the Sith were so bad that droid assistance was forbidden for translating their stuff.

I’m also not entirely sure what the Knights of Ren were around for. They show up, look imposing and then don’t do anything until the heroes go elsewhere and they show up again to look imposing.

Rey going a bit bananas over being Palpatine’s granddaughter was also a bit silly, considering she was trained by Vader’s children. There was no reason, really, for her to fear that falling to the dark-side was a certainty, despite visions to the contrary.

I enjoyed the half-second Denis Lawson appeared far too much, though. Much internal squee-ing was had.

[Rolan7]

Finn remains as pointless as ever; he should’ve been a side character in the first movie and then killed off. I was sad to see no Poe-Finn gayness despite this.

Legit aww

[Reelya]

I thought that about both Finn and Poe. They're not each there for any specific reason. Might have been better to amalgamate them. That also might have made the second movie much more watchable. The worst offense of that movie was trying to jarringly weave three characters separate adventures into one. If it had just been an A-group and a B-group as in Empire it could have been better.

[LoSboccacc]

disclaimer: I enjoyed episode nine, it was a good start wars flick, but it has its share of silliness

Spoiler: just the eye rolling parts, massive spoilers (click to show/hide)

Rey can fly and literally control large spaceships, still sails into hurricane level sea

Palpatine spoiler in the Rolling intro

Palpatine handling the logistic of building a massive fleet on a planet whose only access is a literal gauntlet, in secrecy and with full crew.

massive fleet only navigate off one beacon with a single backup

they destroy the backup beacon, everyone forgot the primary that was just turned off

big dicks start destroyers

the bad guy ships pollute, because of course

the care in making diverse death sounds for storm troopers

the ass pull to rejuvenate Palpatine, introduced on the spot just because

Palpatine being beaten for the third time in the same way, Jesus dude enough with the bolts

I know they needed to kill a lot red shirts to make the situation dire for when the reinforcement arrive, but the ratio of reds to heroes death was ridiculous

general Poe commanding from a fighter, very sensible

the amount of fan services, almost every female scene was taken from ass level

anyway if I had to pick one thing to criticize it lacked a larger finale a la episode three, with the impact on the galaxy as whole more evident

[ChairmanPoo]

Just like Snoke shows up from nowhere, Palps shows up from nowhere. Riight

[Urist McScoopbeard]

What you're describing is called modular scenes. That is, scenes and plot points that can be added or removed freely to pad or shorten the runtime, as they are not essential to the main plot.
If we compare screenwriting to cooking, modular scenes are salt. Too little and the meat will be bland (a "talking heads" movie) to many tastes, too many or unevenly loaded, it becomes unenjoyable.
And yes, for this one they frontloaded several modular scenes in a row and glued them together in a contrived manner, creating a clumsy first act.

That just sounds like bad writing. Scenes should always be necessary, and if theyre not, actually provided interesting additional details about the world, the characters, and insights on the plot of the movie.

EDIT: I haven't even seen this movie and the rhetoric and explanations popping up around it are already making me hate it.

[itisnotlogical]

To play devil's advocate, I didn't find it any dumber than say, your most hated prequel film. This trilogy's just bad for different reasons.

About IX specifically, Rey being Palpatine's granddaughter is a bigger ass pull than even Palpy himself. It's "btw Dumbledore's gay" but for Star Wars.

However dumb the prequels were, they had an internal logic where you could draw lines from a character's prequel appearance to where they are when A New Hope starts. Prequel-exclusive characters either die off or are unimportant to the OT story, and the majority of OT characters have plausible reasons for their role in the prequels.

How is it even remotely possible to guess that Palps started a family? We see him in the prequels as a politician who never leaves Coruscant, doing evil Sith things in various spinoffs, or as the Emperor. Somewhere in the middle of all that, he found a nice non-evil wife to start a family with? Then his son fucks off and starts his own family outside of Palps' purview??

For what it's worth, I fucking loved Rogue One and Solo. So just like it was with the prequels and the years following ROTS, all the good shit's gonna be in spinoffs and other low-profile stuff.

Don't ask questions. Just consume product and then get excited for next product.

Oh give me a break. Star Wars has always been a money-grubbing merch-driven commercial juggernaut. The only difference is that Marvel's made film-a-year cinematic universes not only a thing, but an expectation for anything even remotely popular.

[LoSboccacc]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 more likely a force baby than a grandkid

[DemonOfWrath]

The prequels at least have the redeeming feature of fantastic lightsaber duels to go back and re-watch. The sequel trilogy doesn't have a single good lightsaber fight (the throne room battle in 8 falls to pieces once you see a few hideous flaws, and the duel in 9 was just dull).

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Rey was just swinging her saber like a club while Kylo just blocked and waited for her to drop from exhaustion.

[NRDL]

In regards to lightsaber fight's, I feel like that's more a matter of taste. I've always been a bigger fan of the slower, kendo style fighting of the original trilogy, and all the Sequel fights are that but even meatier. The prequel fights, while fantastic in terms of choreography, were too dance-like for me.

[hector13]

The prequel trilogy did have the closeup of Anakin and Dooku during their duel, which was mightily boring, and a bizarre design choice.

[LoSboccacc]

and the terrible, schizophrenic CGI Yoda fight

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I went on opening weekend (to see Cats, not Star Wars, I don't hate myself that much) and the theater was just fucking dead. They had their whole ticket gate set up and everything, and nobody was there. It was some real creepypasta shit, good job JJ ily