I'm not going to use spoiler tags in a dedicated thread. For "Just Watched," it's fair enough, but everyone clicking on this one ought to know what they're getting into. I hereby issue an official
I loved the part of this movie that focused on Rey, Luke, and Kylo. It's familiar because of the original trilogy, but twists things around enough to feel fresh by the end. I'm glad they killed off Snoke, and I find the outrage on reddit over him being "wasted" both baffling and amusing. Snoke was only ever a plot device to begin with, a necessary villain who had to exist simply because the First Order existed. Having Kylo now be in charge makes the most sense narratively, and it'll no doubt make for a great dynamic with Rey in the next movie.
You know what didn't make sense narratively? Wasting a huge amount of screen time in the second act on a wild goose chase that not only proved to be a resounding failure, but ended up delivering the intel to the First Order that led to the Resistance being all but wiped out. What the fuck? Why would you write this into a movie? All Finn, Poe, and Rose had to do was nothing, fucking nothing, and the Resistance would have escaped with their new base intact and a few hundred members left, rather than literally just a few. And why didn't Leia, or Holdo later, tell them that, rather than just keeping silent and letting them believe that there was literally no hope? I've seen some people argue that it was entirely intentional and tied into the movie's themes of failure and desperation, but the thing is, it's never even acknowledged that everything bad that happens in the final act is literally all the heroes' fault. Why couldn't the First Order have found out what the Resistance was up to by other means? It's such a tiny thing, but it would have made the rest of the movie so much easier to accept.
Or maybe the First Order shouldn't have found out about the Resistance's plans at all. The throne room scene, coupled with Finn and Rose's escape from the Star Destroyer, really ought to have been the climax of the movie. I didn't like that it felt the need to follow that up with a retread of the Battle of Hoth.