Over the years, I’ve come to understand a lot about what people didn’t like about The Last Jedi. There are pacing issues and some of the setups strain credulity even within the gossamer veneer of Sci-Fi that’s wrapped around Star Wars. A lot of it is sort of nitpicking that would be forgiven if Luke had stormed down a hallway slicing people up in Act 3, but I get it. Ultimately, they just couldn’t buy what Rian was selling, but I did.

If you can roll with Luke being capable of backsliding just a bit and being flawed (and FFS, this is a fan base that rolled with letting him freakin’ join the Empire multiple times in their precious EU), then I think TLJ was actually trying to do something thematically and narratively interesting with a franchise that was stuck in the past. I thought it set up a really solid final chapter, though I too thought that with the lack of a time jump, maybe we could do 9 movies plus a capper. Critical to all of it is accepting that Snoke was a red herring, and that poor Ben Solo, conflicted and prescient as he was, was a tragic figure too deeply broken to be saved.

Also, sort of tangential here but just because I want to talk about it, the “tone poem” of Rose’s sister in the bomber is some straight up beautiful filmmaking that channeled George Lucas at his best, and while I didn’t grok it all until a few minutes later, it’s intentionally juxtaposed against Poe’s your-mom joke before the battle and lame excuses after. Now, the joke was still a bit too broad and Marvel-y for my taste, but I think it was a smaller miss than the haters declare.