It has rules, it has structure, it has proposed reasons that things work the way they do.
People wouldn't be nearly as obsessed about Star Wars if it were all just handwavey reasoning.
One reason, for all it's flaws, Last Jedi is my favorite new film. It simultaneously admits (through character dialog) that "there are rules" and "there are egregiously no rules".
I hate the way it threw out the Star Wars universe's physics - because it took me right out of the universe. Yes, the Star Wars universe never had realistic physics, but it did have reasonably self-consistent physics and Last Jedi threw them away. It had bombs falling in space (as opposed to being projected as missiles), it had turbolasers arcing (not something it ever had before), it introduced hyperspace fuel in order to make the finale escape make sense (they could have just used an interdictor instead). It was maddening.
But they almost did something really cool with the force, throwing out the dark/light dichotomy and replacing it with balance. They could have had Rey and Ben actually see eye to eye and both become grey Jedi after dispatching Snoke and finally obtaining the prophesied balance in the force. That would have opened up all kinds of interesting new places to take Star Wars and new stories to explore. But they chickened out at the last second.
And then yeah, the whole last half of the movie with the slow space chase, escape plan, side quest... none of that made any sense in terms of its writing.
The best modern Star Wars movie by far was Rogue One. In some ways Rogue One had an easier job because it was explicitly an exercise in elaborating on the original movies, rather than trying to expand in a brand new direction. But it did its job tremendously well. (And the TV show Andor is taking things in cool new directions.)
If you do 1 really cool thing and 99 shitty things? Still into it! And TLJ does better than that.
There's far too much average pablum out there. Or almost worse, a movie that's entirely just slightly better than average... but never exceed slightly better.
When the hinted at a fleet of hidden star destroyers in Rise of Skywalker, I so hoped they would steal some elements of the Katana-fleet story arch. But nope. Funny how all the series set after Endor do their utmost to ignore the sequel movies, at least it feels like that to me.
Fo rTgrawn so, they could have skippes the zombie stormtrooper part. Star Wars zombies were a bad idea when introduced in that book about an infested star destroyer, written at the hight of the pop culture zombie craze, and are an element the new canon could have well lived without. After all, Thrawns thing in Timothy Zahns book triology was cloned soldiers. But we will see how that story goes, Thrawn is bavk, and I'm all for it!
As for the "why not just build a hyperdrive shell that you can use to javelin a planet into dust" this is a problem that is ignored in MUCH more serious science fiction than star wars. Because it's a pain I nthe ass to explain away.
But no, lasers.
Besides, we don't know that shields won't stop a ramming attack. The only time it was done it appears the shields weren't being used.
In ESB:
- An asteroid collides with a Star Destroyer. Communications with the Star Destroyer are lost, but nothing past the hit is shown on screen. (Presumably shields are active since they're putting these ships in the asteroid field.) [Just to speculate, the asteroid itself might have been pulverized and its materials interfering with communications, or some other shield/asteroid interaction causing loss of communications.]
In ROTJ:
- The Executor loses its shields and the A-wing crashes into the bridge. (No shields.)
- The Executor subsequently loses control and crashes into the Death Star. (No shields.)
And in Rogue One:
- The corvette pushes the two Star Destroyers together and they take major damage. (Unknown shield status.)
That being said Star Wars script-writing has been totally winging it on surprisingly big plot points from the start. It's frankly astonishing that it's even as consistent as it is.
-- Jon Souza
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/prelimnotes.php#jo...
But more to the point: we don't know if the Holdo Maneuver became more common in the SW universe because the only subsequent film decided to try and ignore everything that happened in the previous movie in favor of having space horses galloping on the exterior of a starship.
To each of their own, the meta in the Last Jedi is precisely why I hated that movie. Too many times it was the director speaking directly to the audience, in particular "the fans". This is simply not why I watch Star Wars. It also plagiarized a Battle Star Galactica episode a bit too much, and who the hell puts an epilogue in the middle of trilogy? Clearly Rian Johnson didn't care about what was going to be next.
I've heard he's making a third Knives Out sequel. To save time, here's the twist: whichever character(s) Johnson has picked to represent "Norman Rockwell America" did the crime, and they did it for a stupid reason they didn't think through. Whichever characters Johnson picked to represent the antithesis of tradition will come through and expose the villainy and stupidity of the old guard, while remaining morally pure of heart.
It’s bad writing. If they wanted to discard something sacred, they could have taken something which was actually in the series and discarded _that_. They sort of did this by ruining Luke’s character, only to reverse it at the end and have him save the day anyway. Really, Luke’s characterization really follows the same pattern. He was strongly characterized in all the other Star Wars films. Then Last Jedi throws this out the window for no reason whatsoever. Then by the time you’ve accepted that he’s a loser now, he steps up and saves the day. All more or less within the blink of an eye.
They’re just setting up a subverting expectations for the sake of doing so. It’s terrible writing, and terrible storytelling.
This complaint about TLJ resonates the least with me, as a (super, at one time) fan from well before the prequels. The seeds of this later Luke and of the situation of the Jedi are there in the OT, and I’m not sure what else you do with hermit-Luke in the setting established for the new trilogy. Sticking with “he’s still a gung-ho hero” doesn’t break “routine” (Johnstone’s terminology) and wouldn’t be good storytelling, and the way in which the routine will be broken has already been hemmed in by choices in VII (he’s withdrawn from taking an active role in galactic politics). At least with this direction, there’s somewhere to go with the character, and conflict for his scenes that’s not a straight repeat of him and Yoda in Empire.
Of course, all this was thrown away in the next installment, so it turns out I'm the fool!