Finally catching up after avoiding this thread until last night.
First off, I may have fallen asleep for a few minutes about 1/3 of the way in, but if so that was due more to released tension after a stressful week at work.
Second, I liked the movie well enough until I got really pissed off by some of what I learned here. For the most part, I liked the overall direction while being somewhere between annoyed and bemused about the little dumb things people have pointed out like the whole Leia survival incident.
But my biggest beef with the last 2 sequels is how the whole backstory and politics doesn't cohere. This has nothing to do with analogies or parallels to real world politics. I just don't think it holds up on its own. The 6 Lucas films had flaws here. Lots of stuff didn't hold up to close scrutiny. But he at least showed he cared about it and had a consistent, if imperfect, take on things.
The 2 new films just throw random shit around with tons of gaps and inconsistencies and stuff that just doesn't make sense. We jump into Force Awakens and the empire is gone, the Senate is gone, and there's this First Order with the mysterious Snoke and he and Kylo are kind of a Sith pair though that's not clear. How do they govern the galaxy? It's not even hinted at. Is everyone who isn't in power basically a slave? Is it more like the Alliance in Firefly, where folks are "free" to engage in commerce and daily living but within limited bounds and subject to constant surveillance and quiet terror? Eh. Who knows. They have these giant Nazi like rallies but no civilians are there. Who is the front presented to the people? The emperor was, but he's gone. Snoke? Who the hell is he? And he's wicked ugly. It's really like the writers said "what is the barest minimum we can present to establish an evil totalitarian government", then cut it by 20%. You don't have to get into the weeds of mundane practicalities and stuff. Again, just as an example, Firefly never did, but the Alliance made sense. You could understand it, and if you wanted to explain how the Alliance worked and governed to someone you could make stuff up to fill in the gaps they left and be reasonably certain what you made up was consistent with the unstated parts of the backstory. But we had no clue about the backstory to the First Order.
Then there's the Resistance which seems to have a fair amount of logistical and materiel support from somewhere even though there is not even a remnant of the Senate left or any independent governments or civil structure that seems capable of providing it. And what do they stand for, except being anti-First Order? I mean, sure, that's a good start, but there is never any sense of what they want to create, support or reinstate. The Senate served that function in the original 6, even if the Senate was a pathetic organization.
But I could forgive all that in Force Awakens figuring we'd get it as we went along, and yet in this movie -- if anything -- they doubled down on "Backstory? You want a coherent universe? Fuck you!" Who is Snoke? Fuck you. What is the First Order and how do they govern or maintain order? Fuck you. Now they don't even have any planetary presence anywhere. Their entire governing leadership consists of Snoke, Hux and Kylo and now they live entirely in space. There is no capital city or planet. No bureaucracy. No Big Brother or Dear Leader. There is no government. There is only a space navy which they call an army because fuck you. They spend 100% of their time -- all of them -- chasing down a dwindling band of troublemakers. How do they pay for this? Fuck you. There's an entire planet of the wealthiest people in the galaxy who spend all their time gambling, and we're told they make all their money selling weapons to both sides because someone with a very special worldview wants to make one semi-salient point that war-profiteering is bad. Like that's a fresh take. But how does the First Order pay them? Fuck you. Even harder, how does the Resistance pay them? Fuck you more. If constant war is how they maintain their decadent lifestyle, why are they blithely letting the First Order move forward to utterly destroy the Resistance which would put a crimp in their entire business model? Fuck you.
Look. War destroys wealth. It does not create it. Individuals can profit from it but its overall net record on wealth is negative. Always and everywhere. The original six movies showed us a complete universe where wealth was created and commerce happened and you could imagine how the Senate and Empire taxed them and it could make sense. In contrast, here, we are told that literally every rich person made their wealth through arms dealing. That's fucking impossible. Someone has to create the wealth for the military to take and use to build its stuff and feed its troops.
But hey, I can ride along for a good story and I like Star Wars so I'm suspending disbelief and all that, until I come here and find out that the director hates backstories where characters are actually connected to stuff from the past so all this was a conscious choice.
Fuck you Rian Johnson. Snoke didn't have to be Palpatine, or Darth [take your pick] or anyone we knew. But he had to be somebody with a plausible path to controlling vast amounts of people and supplies. Instead we get Fuck you.