If there's a thing that I don't want in Star Wars anymore it's Lucas in the editing room.
Marcia Lucas, on the other hand...
That narrative does explain a lot of things. This movie was sorely missing some proper time. I placed about 80% of the blame for most things wrong in this film on TLJ not setting anything up for the closure but the more I think about it that number keeps going down. Scenes like the they fly now, the whole hyperspace skipping, the quicksand and the whole dragging 3PO from world to world was just fake drama where the runtime could have been used for better purposes.
I mean what would have been lost if they just WALKED down to that cave in 20 seconds instead of being trapped in the quicksand, create some fake drama then get there anyway? Or if 3PO could have straight away just translated the Mordor language? He got his memories back so that went nowhere eventually apart from some droid antics.
Yeah, that stuff didn't really bother me in the moment, but it does sort of highlight the meaningless nature of a lot of the drama in these films. That's JJ, though. You can see that same sort of thing in a lot of his other films including outside of Star Wars. It's just part of the roller coaster ride.
You raise a point I've brought up about TLJ, though. The end of TLJ practically
begs for the franchise to
not end with Ep. IX. The way I saw it, TLJ set up an Ep. IX that would end with the Resistance
beginning to reconstitute itself, and start to present a real challenge to the First Order, with tension within the First Order beginning to wear on it. You could then have another three films to handle the eventual total defeat of the First Order, as well as Ben's redemption arc, Rey rebuilding the Jedi, etc.
Instead, for whatever reason, we get an end to the saga that ties it all up with a bow (kinda sorta mostly). The First Order is defeated utterly. The Emperor is destroyed. The Sith are defeated again, etc., etc.
My hope is that we do get a few new films with the ST cast because I actually really like the cast and these characters, but I'd like to see them more fleshed out and given more room to develop. I'd also like it if they either had a single creative team running the story aspects of the next series of films, or even a single director/writer. The approach taken with the ST was, in my opinion, a mistake. The ultimate films it produced are entertaining, but it could've been handled a lot better.