I personally enjoyed both movies, but aside from the Canto Bight sequence (which was well-intended but poorly executed imo), I thought many of the critiques of Last Jedi were the result of poor setup by Force Awakens.
Didn’t like what they did with Luke? Well, he got sidelined to an island for a whole movie, so he either has to have been locked away against his will or he has to have some reason to have withdrawn from the Galaxy for almost twenty years. Snoke’s backstory? Why didn’t we get it in his introduction? Same with the Knights of Ren, and the New Republic, and so on.
Force Awakens is a lot of fun, but, like A New Hope, it doesn’t really set up a follow-up movie very well. Empire gets around it by having a time jump, but with everyone’s priority #1 being to find Luke ASAP, that wasn’t really a possibility here.
Totally agree. The Force Awakens began the march towards this discontent. Think about the characters from the original trilogy. Everyone of them has regressed and was doing exactly what they had been doing before. Han Solo was diminished to goofy comedic relief. The plot was really dumb. Imagine flying to an enemy installation, and never asking your insider for specific details. Wouldn’t Han have ever asked, “okay we’re going to be at the Starkiller Base soon, hmm, we should probably review the plan?” Instead they were already on the planet before Han furiously asks “you don’t have a plan?” Also why would a group of only 3 make the infiltration, wouldn’t it make far more sense to send a group of people?
To fully understand the plot you have to buy a companion book. How many people know the New Republic capital is Hosnian Prime and that’s why the First Order targeted it? Or that, for some reason, the New Republic likes to park its entire fleet next to the capital to hang out (hmm, maybe not parking everything in one place would be a good idea)? Or that Leah had been rejected from society because she was freaked out by the First Order and tried to warn people? Do people know the Resistance was actually a private organization designed to stop the rise of the First Order as the New Republic ignored the threat? Do you think most audience members caught the idea that the New Republic had made arms treaties shrinking the size of their military, while the First Order went back on their word and kept secretly building?
All of this was in Episode VII, but was cut because it’s clunky as all get up. But because audience members don’t understand the background, the story sometimes doesn’t make sense and audience members are left scratching their heads by the circumstances that the protagonists find themselves in. Why is Leah walking out of a sketchy ship to find BB-8? What is the Resistance? What is the New Republic? What is the First Order? Why are they blowing up planets? Who’s the guy with the secret map of Luke Skywalker at the beginning? Who’s Snoke? What are the Knights of Ren? Why was Kylo Ren seduced to the dark side? Why are Han and Leah separated? What happened to Luke? Who are Rey’s parents? Who is Finn? Who is Phasma? Why does Phasma matter?
Many of these questions can only be answered through comic books and tv shows. It’s ridiculous to expect audience members to be well versed in all the Star Wars canon. It’s like asking someone to read their scriptures daily, but instead of a holy text, we have the work of Lucasfilm Story Group. By raising so many questions, Johnson had the chance to answer many of them in a crappy way.
JJ was obsessed with creating an A New Hope clone. So he used the story beats of the original, and then built the story around it. He knew he wanted to have a new Rebel Alliance, so he created lengthy backstory for why the Resistance made sense. He knew he wanted to have a new Death Star, so he came up with a lengthy backstory for that. What emerged was a messy story that was too complex for the film, and ended up on the editing room floor.
But Force Awakens was a cultural event, and was FUN. But fun does not necessarily lend itself to a great foundation to build out future installments. We were supposed to be getting episode twelve in a few years, but Force Awaken’s inability to launch the franchise has hampered those plans leading to their termination.
