The more we discuss it, the more I feel like everyone’s poking holes in TLJ and revealing their problems with it. Maybe we were so protective of it and quick to praise it immediately after it came out because of the backlash, but now that some time has passed it turns out we aren’t as happy with the movie after all (Maybe just because of the third act, because people who root for Bendemption/Reylo don’t like Kylo’s breakdown and Rey’s woop-woop-shoot-planes attitude during Crait.)

emperorren:

One thing I’ve learned about serialized fiction (in general) is that you’ll never love a middle or final act the way you loved Act 1, because your brain went into Act 1 as a blank slate, completely devoid of expectations, knowing nothing about the characters, etc. Whereas the following installments, no matter how good, will never measure up to your idea of what the rest of the canon story is supposed to be.

That said, personally my issue with TLJ is that it simultaneously pushes the story too forward and not forward enough. The Reylo dynamic makes a sudden leap forward (so fast that it gives you whiplash and feels, at times, like an abridged version of what “really” happened) only to be pushed back, almost forcibly, to a “complicated enemies” stage which, let’s be real, is nothing new—that’s exactly how everyone with a modicum of sense and genre-savviness saw them at the end of TFA anyway. Snoke’s death is dealt with too quickly, squeezed in between the Reylo rollercoaster and the anticlimatic monstrosity (I mean that affectionately, lol) that Crait is, when it could easily have been the peak climax of the entire trilogy. Luke? Dies without ever actually leaving the island.

Of course, all this anticlimaticness is probably The Point, but it still makes JJ’s job really, really difficult. So many cards that he could have used for IX, Rian already took them off the table.

TLJ covers a lot of ground and uses a lot of interesting plot points only to dismantle everything and revert (albeit only superficially) to the status quo

in the end. Which is why I genuinely hope there is some sort of general plot planned ahead by Lucasfilm—that killing the *Emperor* and condensing both ESB and ROTJ’s plot twists in one movie is exactly where they wanted this trilogy to be as far as the middle act is concerned, and that JJ knows exactly what to do at this point.