So I finally saw Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and found it to be neither as revolutionary nor as offensive as fans and critics suggest. I enjoyed it overall, but if you must know, I felt that some of the plot points stood on wobbly legs.

Spoilers incoming.

Still incoming.

Last chance.

• Snoke was a flimsy, thin character, wasn’t he? A villain so powerful that he can do things no Jedi or Sith ever has, and yet the filmmakers didn’t feel the need to share how he became this near-omnipotent figure. Then they offed him in an anticlimactic scene. What a waste.
• Luke. The single most defining, iconic character of my childhood. He didn’t go out with a bang or a whimper. Either would’ve been more memorable.
• Some of the comedy felt tonally wrong.

A clear message delivered throughout the movie is that we need to release our grip on the old and welcome the new. I’m cool with that. I also believe that the director embarked on a quest to create a movie that defied expectations, oftentimes at the expense of what might’ve worked better.

And yet, for all of these thoughts, I still liked it. So go figure.

Besides, as legendary author Kurt Vonnegut notes, there’s no sense in getting all worked up over this stuff. If you enjoyed something someone made, wonderful. If not, okay. But if you’re creating petitions for or against, you’ve probably missed the point.

“As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.”

Thanks, Kurt. Oh, and full credit goes to the great Peter Clines for bringing this comment to my attention.