They fixed Star Wars the same way the vet fixed my dog. “The Last Jedi” was an atrocious film. “Solo” was excruciating fan service that ironically pleased none of the fans.
Disney has managed to kill all my enthusiasm I ever had for SW with a single movie. TLJ felt like an attempt to show how little they care about fans of the older movies imho.
Rogue one is my favorite thing so far out of Disney SW. It was so dark, and unexpected. Basically Hamlet in space. Would love for more of that, and i have high hopes for the mandalorian.
The fact that it was nothing like 1-3 is it's saving grace and no creature like jar-jar showed up. Though I was kind of hoping Snopes would end up being Jar-Jar because it could be the only explanation why Lucas would put that baffling idiot in there if he was really a brilliant Sith lord in disguise.
It's a fun watch, like Abrams' Star Trek reboot, but has the same problem of extremely lazy plotting. Not that the original trilogy never ever has something happen purely because it's convenient for the writer and they can't be bothered to think of something better, but that's the underlying motivation for a lot of the writing in TFA and Abrams' other films, while it's usually rare or absent in a well-plotted film, including the original trilogy.
He'll even, sometimes, write in nonsense because it's convenient, then have to come up with other nonsense to find an excuse to get rid of the first nonsense, without bothering to try to make any of that seem reasonable or natural. Example: Han and Chewie show up in a big ship just because we need them to be here now and can't be bothered to write them into the plot some more natural way that doesn't require introducing a new ship, but we don't need that big ship around past this scene because it only exists in the first place for the writer's convenience in the moment, so we'll just... make up some plot-irrelevant reason for them to abandon it suddenly, at exactly the time we need them to. Boom, problem—which we created due to laziness—solved, by applying more laziness! It's basically a whole movie of that, ground up, from a plot perspective, and it really grates once you notice it.
About the best thing I can say about Abrams is he runs one of the the best casting operations in the business and seems to be a good director of actors. I mean, damn. And he's about 100x better than, say, Michael Bay at creating good, popcorn-dumb but not dumb dumb or hard-to-follow-for-no-reason-but-laziness, action scenes. He's no master of action, but he does entirely serviceable work, which is more than a lot of directors manage. His plot writing is just god awful technically speaking. About as bad as it can be without suffering outright incoherence.
I agree, and I think time will eventually come to agree as well. TFA was visually interesting as all of the modern Star Wars films were, but plot-wise it was such an obvious fanservice-laden rehash of ANH that it left me unsatisfied. Yes, seeing Han Solo again engaging in space pirate shenanigans was fun, but another Death Star, just bigger this time, really?
TLJ actually tried to say something new and push the lore forward (in a direction a lot of fans didn't like, but still, no longer circling the drain of decades-year-old nostalgia.) I liked what it had to say about the nature of the Force and how the Jedi and Sith were both wrong, I like that Luke turned out to be a flawed character cynical about his mythical status as a hero, and that there is more than just the binary morality of "Jedi good, Sith bad, let's fight now" at play.
My biggest criticism of TLJ would be that, while I enjoyed it as a movie, I think it failed at its role as the second part of a trilogy, spending too much time undermining the previous movie. Although, as far as I know, that's because there never was an "arc" planned for this trilogy, so I don't even know how much blame TLJ can get for deviating from a plan which never existed.
I get a bad feeling that Rise of Skywalker is going to wind up being nothing but a fix-fic for the last two parts, though.
My biggest criticism of TLJ was that I think it did the intended arc justice, but I didn't enjoy it on its own as a single movie. (Some of that is because I accidentally sort of double featured it with Three Billboards and Three Billboards entirely broke Poe Dameron as a character for me.)
I don't have any expectations for Rise of Skywalker yet. Waiting for reviews.
* Has an 85/100 on Metacritic ("Universal Acclaim")
* Has a 91% score on Rotten Tomatoes
* Made $619M
So it was both a box office success and a critical success. Personally, I think it's far from an atrocious film. I think it's a flawed film, although my complaints have to do with structure and film mechanics, not story choices.
[1] While this is usually to drive down a score, you can find the reverse occasionally, such as the Atlas Shrugged movies. It's hard not to notice that the point the brigades are making usually revolves around "stick it to the Hollywood liberals," although I don't think that's true in TLJ's case.
The test will be this years film and how it does.
Having said all that, I don't think you're wrong -- I just think it's going to be the film after this year's that's going to be the real test!
I mean JAR JAR! for fuck sake.
Do you also deny that Rogue one is better at all than 1-3?
It would've redeemed his character if he was able to infiltrate the opposition by being an imbecile.
The problem is, no one would have shown up to the cinemas to find out. People hated Jar-Jar so much they wouldn't have wanted to see him redeemed.