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Lord Boron, I'd argue there's been more bad than good since RotJ (counting the Holiday Special), and definitely since TPM.
Been my stance as a fan for a looooong time that there are good moments and clinker moments in all the Star Wars films. I can't flat-out label any one single offering as "bad", top to bottom, but neither can I give any one a full 100% score, either, even if it's little things like poor conveyance of the passage of time in Empire.
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kristen jones, I think I'd forgotten that the MCU failed to engage you. Frankly, I love the universe-building and longform storytelling happening there. What is it about it that leaves you cold?
...Because regarding universe-building and longform storytelling and creative oversight and such... Well, going from TLJ to Solo, seeing what everyone has said about it all, positive or negative... I see what LFL is trying to do in this new era, and also why it's having so much trouble getting traction. I applaud taking one's time and building the universe brick by brick. I like how the MCU started with, essentially, character delves and then started upping the stakes toward bringing the Phase 1 group together, and then continuing to evolve and ramp things up further. But it was all forward.
With Star Wars, we had Episodes IV, V, and VI. Then we went back and got I, II, and III. Then we got Clone Wars. Then we got VII. Then we got Rebels. Then we got Rogue One. Then we got VIII. Then we got Solo. We have been so all over the place on the timeline it's silly. If we still had three years between films, maybe the marketing could acclimate people to the setting of each, but with them coming out so close, it needs to be linear and it's not. One of the big responses I saw to Rogue One was confusion over where Rey and Poe and the other folks they'd seen in TFA were. After all, wasn't this the next movie?
The criticism I've been seeing of Solo not being a movie anyone asked for... Well, yes and no. If things had come out in actual chronological order, it'd be a great character intro, and a nice change of pace after the grimness ending RotS. Whether it then led into Rebels or a Kenobi or Fett movie (or both), we'd have that, then Rebels would segue into Rogue One, and that into ANH. I think a less scattershot approach to telling the story would be the best move. But we can't go back to 1975 and convince George that starting in the middle might not be the best approach.
And the same criticism of TFA and TLJ I and others have made still applies: More transition from RotJ to TFA is necessary. Not just something we would have liked to see, but
necessary. We could probably much better accept Luke as a bitter old man had we seen him get gradually more and more frustrated/disillusioned with how the galaxy saw him and kept expecting him to swoop in to save the day rather than step up to solve things themselves. We could probably much better accept Han and Leia if we'd seen him spending time away from the tedious politics that were her life, while still being in love and in communication, only having their crisis happen when Ben turned.
And yes, someone needed to have given Rian's first draft a polish. Much of it I like, but much of it needs work. Please don't now agree with that by repeating all the things you hated that I think actually worked just fine, like Poe's winding up of Hux, "Leia Poppins", Rose, or Luke becoming one with the Force.
For all Star Wars is a cyclical retelling of the Hero's Journey, many seem to forget the last stage of the journey. After the establishment of the new normal, at the end of the quest, there is often a "happily ever after" cut. But classical myth also gives us the last arc: Dissatisfaction with the tedium of the new normal, a New Call to Adventure they welcome, the Final Trial, and Apotheosis. Back then, it was often transubstantiation into the heavens, and Obi-Wan, Yoda, Anakin, and Luke doing what they did is a pretty good sci-fi analogue.
My biggest beef is that there's a lot that's good, all the way back... But it's so disjointed and inconsistent and compressed. There are so many instances of things happening on screen that should happen off, and vice versa... So many instances of things that need more time to elaborate and evolve, while so many others get way too much and drag on... I think one of the reasons I have less of a problem with TLJ than some on here is that for the last thirty-five years or so, I've looked at everything that's come out as a useful bin of characters, events, and data points to use in a theoretical linear, consistent, deliberately-structured episodic sequence of films and animated series that start at zero and go ever forward. None of it has felt like something I just have to accept in its entirety as-is. As with Transformers, holding out hope that it will someday become the epic I know it to be is the only way I can stay sane and not scream into the void.