I find it almost as impossible to believe that the man who both wrote and produced two such mature and original screenplays such as "Brick " and "Looper" came up with this script.
The most glaringly obvious explanation is he was instructed to pitched TLJ squarely at kids. Its simplistic and often incredulously weak storylines and character direction were almost unfailingly juvenile, as was much of the humour.Large parts of the movie came over more like a live action remake of a cartoon and I find myself wondering if the story group behind Rebels had an undue influence over it,despite what Rian says.
There were moments that almost managed to recaptured some of the old magic but they were mostly fleeting. Instead often all I could think watching this was that Rian had somehow confused the Battlestar Galactica universe with the Star Wars one, then panicked by crushing in the best bits of ROTJ and TESB, along with some of the worst excesses of the prequels.
On the plus side visually it was, for the most part, strong and sometimes stunning, but again instead of allowing you to be quietly impressed by those scenes they were constantly undermining them with dire story decisions, dialogue or comedy, often all three at once. I was deeply embarrassed for some of the actors, especially Hux and Finn ,who had some of the worst scenes I have ever witnessed in a SW movie, not to mention the others mentioned consistently in this thread.
And yet once again in a new SW movie the director decides to introduce universe breaking rules that fundamentally flaw the existing premises of the previous movie mythology so seriously its going to be difficult to rectify going forward.
Just as there is a balance (apparently) to the Force , so there is in writing and making a SW movie that appeals to the vast majority of its fans and the general public. This felt like it strayed way over the mark and many of the decisions made appear to have needlessly alienated a large portion of the traditional fanbase and ultimately this is going to effect the box office, both for this and the series going forward.
I'll be interested to see how this plays out in the long term. I went yesterday and there were exactly fifteen people watching it with me.
PS I expected to see that the reason the Rebels lured them to Crait was so that the ground attack by the huge AT ATs would be scuppered by destroying the mines and collapsing the ground benieth them but instead we got another grounded "Death Star " run, all be it with pretty colours.