re: Watched The Last Jedi. I don't get the vitriol.

Political stuff aside - since mentioning it instantly polarizes people - TLJ was still terrible, for reasons I have elaborated before, but shall do again since it is therapeutic for me:

-The First Order was played completely for laughs, thus removing any sense of threat when we see them on screen. Hux is a buffoon. Kylo Ren has already been beaten by Rey. Why is anyone afraid of them? Imagine if, in the climactic scene of Empire Strikes Back, Luke, having not completed his Jedi training with Yoda, nonetheless beat the crap out of Darth Vader. How excited would anyone have been for RotJ then? What would have been the point? The entire purpose of the second act of a story is to make it seem like the antagonist is too much for the protagonist to overcome and set up the final showdown. “Subverting expectations” by not doing that does leave your audience thinking, “Wow, I didn’t see that coming,” but not in a good way.

-The original trilogy had the benefit of no pre-existing backstory, so it was possible for them to be very vague with the setup. There is an Empire. They are bad and control the galaxy. At some point in the past there was a Republic that was good and which was defended by the Jedi, who were super good. Now there are Rebels fighting to restore the Republic, and the Jedi are (almost completely) gone. That’s all we needed. No specifics. Broad strokes got us where we needed to be to enjoy the story. The sequel trilogy, however, most assuredly does not have that luxury. We already know and love these characters. We know what they were fighting for and that they ultimately achieved their goals. These are not things that can be ignored, except that the sequel trilogy almost completely attempts to do that, and in the rare instances that it doesn’t, it shits all over what the original trilogy set up. Han Solo’s character arc from ANH to RotJ is that he learns to trust others and believe in something more than just himself. Except that apparently he didn’t, because he went right back to being a smuggler again when the final battle was done. Luke’s battle to restore the Jedi to the galaxy is the entire fricking point of the original trilogy. They didn’t call the third act “End of the Empire” or “Emperor’s Fall” or anything like that, they fricking named it Return of the Motherfricking Jedi. So it pisses off fans not a little when the sequel trilogy reveals that that victory was actually a failure, and Luke himself is not the awesome Jedi we saw him as at the end of RotMJ, but is instead a bitter old man who has decided that Jedi are stupid and the whole thing was a bad idea. And then Force Ghost Yoda shows up andinexplicably fricking agrees with him. If Yoda believed that the Jedi needed to die out, why go to all the trouble to train Luke as one in the original trilogy? Why not just show him the right way to hold a lightsaber and leave it at that?

-Now, TFA could afford to play a little coy with the events preceding it because it was the first act of a new story, and therefore its purpose was to set up some intriguing storylines that would be addressed in the second and third movies. We don’t know who Rey’s parents are because she herself doesn’t know. We don’t know who Snoke is or what he wants because (apparently) the Resistance doesn’t know either. We don’t know why the victory of the Rebellion turned out to be so incomplete and apparently inconsequential or why the restored Republic relies on a small band of freedom fighters rather than an actual fricking military because... well, look, just go with it, ok? But then TLJ comes along and completely shits all over those questions too. Want to know who Rey’s parents were? Well too bad, because you were apparently an idiot for even being curious in the first place. Want to know who Snoke is and what his goals are (i.e., THE ENTIRE frickING REASON ANY OF THIS IS HAPPENING IN THE FIRST PLACE)? The joke’s on you, motherfricker! TLJ makes such an obvious attempt to avoid normal, eons-old storytelling tropes that it basically laps itself and only succeeds in taking you out of what little story remains.

-And that isn’t even counting all the stupid little things in the movie, like the fact that in a galaxy with presumed trillions upon trillions of inhabitants, the fate of them all is being decided by two groups with about five ships and a few hundred people each. Seriously, if the First Order’s rule is so lax that only a few hundred people out of trillions can be bothered to stand up to it, can it really be that bad? And then there is the stupid “speed limit in space” ridiculousness, the fact that the Resistance “wins” at the end by running away so effectively that the First Order basically gives up, Finn’s big heroic moment being him hitting a woman in the back, the entire Finn-Rose-Poe subplot that ends up having no point and going nowhere... I could go on.

TLJ is a bad movie by any standard. One need not inject politics into things to make that point.