Yes 54 58.70%

No 38 41.30%

I loved that entire astral projection scene.
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I don't think any plot threads were ignored.

Rian explored everything - Rey's lineage, Kylo's power dynamic, Luke's character arc, Resistance vs First Order.

In an unpredictable way. And I applaud him for that.

If you're left wanting more with Snoke that's too bad - I'm not sure he was ever going to be an interesting character. He only ever existed to feed Kylo's character.

He has as much backstory - more in fact - than the Emperor had going into Return of the Jedi. That's plenty, since Kylo is who we're really interested in.

I liked it, a lot. And it was better than rehashing old shit in a new wrapper. Period.
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If you're going to be as blatantly lazy about it as JJ has been I agree
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Granted it's early, but the audience rating on RT is actually pretty good for IX. Way better than VIII FWIW.
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Part of the problem is the only ones seeing it are the fan boys who thought the second part was any good.
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What I’m upset at the most in is how Finn was a complete useless POS. I liked him in the first film and thought he would take off but his arc was so disappointing. If Rey has more acting chops she would’ve been more believable
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Also, was talking more about how Rian ignored the intentions JJ had for the plot of Episode 8 in favor of his own ideas. Not just tweaking, outright ignored. It makes it pretty hard for Episode 9. Granted, that's at the feet of Kennedy and Iger for not organizing this trilogy at all and letting it mutate into this garbled disaster.
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JJ wanted to make Empire Strikes Back. I do not blame Rian for not wanting to make a diet Empire.
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I can't speak to that as I have no idea what JJ was intending to do.

But if JJ didn't want Rian fucking with his ideas, the Lucasfilm story group should have exercised a lot more control.

All I know is I watched TLJ, and found that it moved the plot forward in an intriguing and fresh way. I was eager to see what was next.

As soon as they brought JJ back in I feared for the worst. And he didn't disappoint.

I actually think there was a good story inside all of these three films trying hard to get out. Kylo Ren is interesting. The other characters work as a foil for him, even if they aren't particularly interesting. The original characters satisfied me, for the most part. They weren't going to carry a movie all by themselves anymore so I don't have an issue taking a back seat.

But a lot of hamfisted execution and the inclusion of Palpatine ruined everything. Absolutely everything.

JJ Abrams should be writing comic books or something. He's that bad. His ideas fucking suck.

Rian Johnson actually tried to make this trilogy interesting, and then Abrams came along and and hit CTRL-V and ruined any chance of it being memorable.

Lazy fuck.
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How can you fail to make Poe Dameron an interesting character?

Oscar Isaac was great casting and he's a friggen hotshot X-Wing pilot! How do you manage to make him dull?

Oh that's right, make him a semi-antogonist to a dumb and pointless 'Girl PWR!' quasi-protagonist because...reasons.
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Again - I digress, but still.

In the original script for TLJ, we were going to go into Poe's rather shady past in Canto Blight as he wheeled and dealed his way to find DJ.

This plot point got destroyed when Rose (for some reason) got added to the mix (which left Poe with nothing to do and no natural way to develop his backstory).

Not only that, KK did intervene at the entire design of Canto Bight saying it "didn't feel Star Wars" and instead had them re-design it off of early models of Jabba's palace. Whatever.
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It looks like it took in about $175 million domestically and $375 globally the first weekend. Lower than expected but they are saying due to the holiday that will probably be a little deceiving as people might be planning on seeing when they have time off.
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Yeah admittedly scores from opening night can be skewed as mainly the biggest fans are fighting the crowds on opening night. As more of the general audience sees it there will probably be some changes.

I don't buy the Christmas excuse regarding the numbers (I heard they were expecting $450 million opening weekend) TFA came out Dec 18th Christmas didn't hurt it's opening weekend. There is going to be blowback from the reception of TLJ. The fact that this thread even exists shows that a certain percentage of people that saw VIII weren't going to see IX, especially opening weekend.
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The opens in the trilogy are

$248m
$220m
$175m

and the reviews aren't going to help drive fence sitters to the theaters. So they'd better hope that the timing was the only reason for all that decline, or this is going to be a (relatively speaking) bomb.
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