Here’s some of what I see as the biggest problems.
- By ignoring TFA and making large changes to various characters, this “trilogy” has lost any sense of cohesion. TLJ feels like neither a continuation of TFA nor a stepping off point to another movie and definitely doesn’t feel like the middle part of a story. I think there are ways to fix this in the third movie so that, as a whole (trying to think holistically here) it feels like a trilogy again. To do this, they probably would have to contradict some parts of TLJ, but that shouldn’t be a problem. The people that liked TLJ apparently had no problem that it contradicted TFA and the original trilogy and the only way to get a decent part of the audience back is to contradict TLJ and say ‘no, actually we need to hold onto parts of the past, some of it does matter.’ I can’t think of a good way to do this, but there is a way that it can be done and at least have this thing make sense as a trilogy instead of being a tale told in three parts.
- You’d have to have seen Mark Hamill’s comment for this to make sense, but Luke Skywalker hasn’t even been in this series yet. All we’ve seen so far is Jake Skywalker. Again, there is a way to fix this. It’s not a good one, but it would be better, in my opinion, than what we’ve got.
- They keep calling these episodes 7, 8, and 9 as though they’ve are a continuation of the Skywalker episodes 1-6. To me, these are the Rey and Finn saga, completely unrelated to the Skywalker saga, and the numbering suggests Rey and Finn episodes 1-6 in the future. With TFA, I was fine with it being episode 7 of a Skywalker saga. But with TLJ, that has changed. Again, I think this can be fixed. I can’t think of a great fix, but I can think of one that, if done, would at least have me giving Disney/Mucasfilm another chance.
So what is it that I’ve come up with to fix all these problems? Well, I don’t have time to type it out right now. Haha. But maybe I’ll post it when I get a chance, just for fun.