1. I like how an hour and a half of the movie is spent traveling from planet to planet trying to find a clue to a dagger that has the coordinates to a mysterious triangle that will lead the heroes to Sheev… and they find the triangle in Sheev’s office.
That would the the first place that anyone with a working brain would think to look, making everyone in the film look absolutely idiotic for not thinking of it. This can help us understand how important it is to not waste the audience’s time when you’re telling a story.
2. I like how the heroes spend most of the movie together, as a team, on a grand team-building adventure… for the first time in the entire trilogy. It really highlights how little focus the entire trilogy has on actually developing these characters and getting the audience to care about their bond
I gotta wonder if that part of the movie was originally in Lucas & Arndt’s story treatment for TFA that was recycled for TROS…
The kind of quest that Rey, Finn, and Poe go on together, you mean? That that would have been part of Lucas’ early ideas for TFA?
3. I like how the movies reveal how much imagination and creativity there was in Lucas’ saga by taking us back to Mustafar and showing us how Abrams and co. envisioned this iconic world. That they did this right at the start of the movie is just the icing on the cake.
4. Iain McCaig, a concept artist for the prequels, once said that Lucas told him, “I don't want something to be special because of how it's filmed, but because of what it is. Just put the camera on it and let it play out in front of the audience. If it's amazing, they'll know.”
I like how moments like this reveal how self-conscious Abrams is as a director in comparison to Lucas, since that principle of “If it’s amazing, they’ll know” clearly isn’t at play in Abrams’ style. It really shows how little faith he has in his audience.
5. And lastly, I like how the films showed that you can plagiarize the iconography of Lucas’ films all you want, but if you can’t match the quality of his scriptwriting and directing, some people in the audience will walk out with a sick, empty feeling inside.
These have been five incredibly important things I learned from my least favorite Star War, and I find them to be very positive takeaways.
6. One more thing I love about TROS is how Rey basically goes through the same arc Jake takes the entirety of TLJ to go through, but in a single scene. Further calling attention to how much of TLJ was pointless filler.
And she doesn’t just renounce the Jedi out of misplaced fear of her own proximity to the dark side, as Jake did (if you steelman RJ’s film). She was brought to that place by actually doing what Jake only imagined himself doing: murdering Kyle.
AND she actually started her own fire, while Jake needed a shitty refabrication of the Yoda puppet to do it for him!
