Finally saw it this weekend with my wife, in a decently populated theater (our local Studio Movie Grill, which I love) on the 23rd.
I'll add my non-spoilery thoughts for now, and write a separate more spoilery post later.
Fair warning: I have a LOT of thoughts about this movie, and there's a LOT to unpack (for me), so this will be a long couple of posts. Even for me. You've been warned.
One other point: I haven't read every post in this thread, so I'm not really coming in with any particular response to anyone. These are just my general thoughts, not a rebuttal to anyone specific.
Overall, I loved this film. I think it was fantastically done, and I say that as someone who grew up on Star Wars back when my copy was a VHS recording off of the old PRISM network, which I watched literally every Sunday morning from the time I was about 5 or so until the time I was maybe 12. I was bitterly disappointed by the prequels, although that bitterness has faded and now I just find them weak film entries. I loved the period from about '92-'99, when (for me) the Star Wars universe exploded into a much broader set of stories, thanks to the works of Timothy Zahn and reprints of the old Williamson/Goodwin newspaper strips from Dark Horse, alongside the plethora of classic computer games coming out of LucasArts. I still dislike the "special editions" for a variety of reasons. I've come to really enjoy the Clone Wars cartoon, and Rebels. I liked TFA, but saw it as "good, but flawed and a little too similar to what came before."
I say all of this for the benefit of anyone who wants to trot out a "no true Star Wars fan..." line of argument. You can stuff that line of thinking right up your thermal exhaust port. I am a fan, I have always been a fan, and I am not an indiscriminate fan by any means. Simply slapping the "Star Wars" logo on a product ain't enough for me. I demand a LOT more. Sorry if that comes across as harsh, but I've seen it bandied about elsewhere and just have zero patience for it at this point.
I think this film, in many ways, was necessary. TFA was necessary, too, although in different ways. TFA, in my opinion, revitalized Star Wars. It brought back much of the OT feel, but nudged it a little in some other directions. It had some real problems with weak direction and plotting, and JJ's lazy reliance on "mystery boxes," particularly where there is no mystery at all. And I thought it played things a little too safe, although I understood why it did. TFA had a two-part strategic mission, from a marketing perspective: (1) it had to bring on enough of the old school fans (a whoooole bunch of whom now have kids) who had been disenchanted by the prequels, and (2) it had to feel new and interesting enough to grab modern audiences who might be kinda "blah" about Star Wars. I think it succeeded mightily in that respect, even though there were old school fans who were disappointed by it.
TLJ had to do something different, but I think that necessity is not always recognized by a lot of fans. I understand that response. I also understand the "don't tell me I didn't understand it!" response when you're told "You just don't get it. Here, let me explain it to you..." That said, "you just don't get it." Not the film itself, mind you. I think someone can completely "get" what the film is doing and trying to do, and still dislike it. I don't feel that way, but I get why some people do. I think what people don't understand is something more complicated:
The danger of comfort.
Many movie franchises are entirely happy to provide long-time viewers with a comfortable, familiar, ultimately unchallenging rehash of their favorite bits of the franchise. You may see evolution within such a franchise, but usually it's a kind of dead-end evolution. It takes the wrong bits and amps them up, or takes the laziest, easiest to reproduce stuff and amps it up. I think one of the better examples of this is the Star Trek franchise, especially before the "reset button" that JJ mashed in 2009. Trek, in my opinion, was dead well before JJ turned in his "Not-Quite-Star-Wars" version. You can probably debate exactly the time of death, but I'd say it was at least when Insurrection came out. Trek had lost itself. It had become lazy, in a way. It retained much that was familiar, but it felt like it had lost a real sense of creative spark and vibrancy, basically like it was just going through the motions. It was all, of course, very "familiar" to fans, and in some ways "safe," but I expect that lots and lots of fans had already grown dissatisfied with each subsequent film and show. People kept hoping for some return to the "glory days" of the franchise, but no one could figure out how to do that, and a big part of that (in my opinion) was because no one was really willing to take risks where it counted. It all felt the same and very familiar -- and in that sense, it was "comfortable" -- but it was more like "comfortably numb." And it was ultimately dissatisfying. It was either close but not close enough, or retaining only the veneer of the best of things while otherwise feeling totally generic. And it ended up with the new JJ-Trek we have now which is, I would say, pretty much soulless. It is not, in my opinion, Trek at all, even though it mostly looks like it. It's become generic space action with only primary-colored uniforms and saucer-and-nacelle ships to distinguish it.
You could arguably say the same about Star Wars in its novels from the period of about, oh, 1995 right up until R.A. Salvatore dropped a moon on Chewbacca, by which point I'd already given up and after which I knew I'd never go back. There were a whole series of novels that felt...comfortable, familiar, and ultimately stagnant and dead. Characters just sort of went through the motions, but didn't feel like they were evolving. Stories seemed to revolve around yet another superweapon, yet another Imperial commander who had risen to challenge the New Republic (Thrawn was great, but let's move on), yet another dark Jedi/would-be Sith lord, and so on and so forth. Hell, just look at the covers. Nobody changed their hairstyle for 20 years, and the characters barely seemed to age! Star Wars, in those books, was evolving, but towards a dead end. R.A. Salvatore tried to shake that up, as did the folks who invented the Yuzhaan-Vong, but I think it was too late by then.
Star Wars, as a franchise, is at an inflection point. Particularly after TFA, and to a lesser extent Rogue One, it could allow itself to slip into comfortably familiar territory, rehashing much of what came before in an attempt to appeal to its fans and "give them what they want," but I think that in so doing it would consign itself to dead-end evolution like we've seen before, and would eventually die out or be "rebooted" into something else in a Star Wars mask. I actually lean towards it dying out, if that were to happen. This film, even moreso than Rogue One, dramatically shakes things up, but does so in a way in which I believe it still retains much of the soul of Star Wars. I recognize that not everyone will agree with that point, but I think there's a difference between the soul of something, and the past of something. Star Wars needs to grow beyond its past, or it will simply repeat it ad mortem. It will stagnate and die if all it does is pay homage to what came before, and never try to grow into something more. And I think that, without consciously and explicitly rejecting much of what came before, that's what's likely to happen. I think that's what this film did, and the core of the film is a question about shaping the future, how that should happen, and what it should look like. More on that later.
Related to all of this, I have a serious hunch that Rian Johnson is a Dune fan. This is just a theory of mine. I've read 5 of Frank Herbert's original 6 Dune books. The first book is its own thing -- a grand space adventure, with some underlying political commentary. The second two are better thought of as a duology about the nature of messiahs. The fourth one is a work of philosophy masquerading as science fiction, and is probably my favorite.
Basically, there is a point in the 3rd book where a character looks into the future and sees the ultimate death of humanity if it continues on its current path. To avoid that, the character makes a series of decisions that will fundamentally change the direction of humanity, by basically destroying what it has come to hold dear, and which prevents it from achieving its full potential (which is necessary to survive the future). Within the books, one of the central things that must ultimately be rejected is the "great man" or "messiah" figure, so this character takes steps to ultimately end that concept forever. Instead of having humanity turn with arms outstretched to some messiah or savior or "great man" to solve its problems...people would reject that notion and seek to change things for themselves. There would still be leaders, but the leaders would not be "gods," and the impulse within humanity would become "I'll fix it" instead of "Fix it for me."
That's all in very, very, very, very broad strokes, of course, but I see a lot of this in TLJ. And the thing is, the only way to do that is to upend the notions of the past. And TLJ definitely does that.
I get why all of that makes people uncomfortable. I think that's ultimately the point: you're supposed to be uncomfortable. The film wants to challenge you and is actively trying to upend your notion of what Star Wars "means," while still very consciously engaging with that notion. The film is asking -- and positing its own answer to the question of -- "What is Star Wars ultimately about?"
Anyway, like I said, more spoilery stuff later. I still have a lot more to write, but I need to organize my thoughts. There's a ton of stuff going on in and with this movie that I think should be addressed more particularly.
