@alyx it did feel like there was a huge lack of alien presence though, it seemed like mostly marketing/merch tie-ins and occasional shots of aliens in the rebellion as a "look at this ragtag group" thing

i would love to see a new alien side character a la chewbacca

@ebeth good points.

the empire parallels are many. i actually groaned at the opening crawl because, like, it was 90% describing ESB, and we just came off the previous film brazenly aping ANH.

but the film was decent. i enjoyed it more than TFA.

i think it's tragic to lose carrie fisher when we did; she played a major role in this story, and i just read she was originally intended to bottom-line IX. leia's become my favorite character. what a loss.

i also felt luke was shortchanged, not the major player i wanted him to be in this trilogy

@alyx RIP carrie fisher, drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra

there were absolutely parts of luke's characterization i was not a fan of on in this one but i'm also sort of glad they've kept this theme of the older characters passing the torch. i love them all so much but the last thing i want is to have them hanging around so much that it ends up feeling forced (no pun intended )

@ebeth maybe if he'd gone out in a more satisfying fashion than "all this Forcing made my body disappear" i'd feel better about his fate.

that said i really liked when [redacted] pointed out that luke was struggling with the same character flaws that plagued him as a youngin'. i was like, oh yeah, good point [redacted]. i thought that was solid characterization that tied this grizzled old guy to the kid from the original trilogy

@ebeth i also liked his humor; winking at 3PO, etc. every bit of personality they showed that wasn't "grouchy old man" was cool. i just wanted more.

@alyx i would be extremely surprised if he didn't come back in a fairly big way as a force ghost in the next one but yeah i can defs see your point here

i was honestly hoping [redacted] was going to be someone else who has a story with so many parallels to luke's! but i feel like that was probably impossible b/c of outside constraints. and the scene was definitely good either way. i LOVED the burning of the force tree, i felt like it had so much meta symbolism outside of the movie too. like "we're rebuilding all of this canon but don't worry, we care about all the worldbuilding that's happened over the years"

@alyx that last part might be overly optimistic? but between that scene and all the KOTOR nods i feel like that's the sense i've been getting with the whole legends/EU stuff

@Triplefox makes sense. if i had to guess i'd say it's about the same as TFA in that regard.

@alyx yeah, that puts it a bit too much in "music video" territory i think. Ever since I read that theory it's become my go-to criticism of most new movies. They can have all the details right but be let down by the editing.

Fury Road is a pretty good counterexample in that it was deliberately designed around being able to track the characters and their spatial location consistently. Part of why it was a huge production!