It’s excellent, easily the best Star Wars movie since Empire Strikes Back (though not as good as that).

I’ve got five good things and three bad things that I want to say about it. Let’s start with the good things.

  1. The systematic disarming of Abrams’ puzzleboxes. What is Rey’s ancestry? Who is Snoke? Why is Luke hiding? What happened with Kylo Ren? To some extent, Johnson gives answers, but to a very large extent, it’s clear he doesn’t think these puzzles are that interesting, and he certainly doesn’t set up any new puzzlebox mysteries to be resolved in the third movie. It’s a recognition that movies don’t need puzzles to be good, and that puzzles aren’t the point of Star Wars.

  2. The undermining of Star Wars tropes. Like, we all know that the hotshot flyboy with a complicated plan relying on subterfuge and lowering the shield is going to win the day, right? Nope. We all know that Kylo Ren’s conflicted angstiness and his redemption will be the focus of getting him to turn on Snoke, right? Nope. We all know that Rey’s ancestry must be important because you need fancy parents to be a big deal, right? Nope. It’s like someone who hated every theme in the original Star Wars movies set out to undermine them from within and did so while making it still feel like Star Wars.

  3. Making Poe, the world’s worst character, into a total shit. I hated this guy in the first movie, and didn’t understand the love for him, and this movie turned him into an ultra-shit. He continually belittled and disrespected his more-experienced female bosses, and then COMMITTED MUTINY AGAINST ONE, and because he’s a charismatic dude, there was a sense that maybe he was right, but the movie had the sense to make him completely wrong, and to make those women the real goddamn heroes who saved the day, while his bullshit plan almost got everyone killed. Fuck you, Poe. (And yeah, I know he’ll get a redemption arc in the third movie, but at least he got his deserved narrative slapdown in this one.)

  4. The new characters. Rose was great, A++, she’d better not be fucking dead. Benicio del Toro’s character was disappointingly mercenary in the end, but also good for undermining tropery around like your Billies Dee William and Hans Solo as charming rogues. Sometimes rogues are just dicks who are in it for themselves!

  5. The visual imagination. The white and red planet was great, Luke Island was great, the casino planet was great. All top-notch Star Warsy settings.

And then the bad:

  1. Weird world-building. Like, how does the First Order have these enormous resources to have a gigantic fleet, and the Resistance has so little? Wasn’t the whole thing the Republic until just very recently? Shouldn’t there be tons of Republic starships around still, even if the Republic itself is no more? Also, the Republic fell very comprehensively and quickly. I guess maybe the argument is that the Republic had only ever taken shallow root after the fall of the Empire, and most of the people in power were still pro-Empire, but…

  2. Snoke not being explained. Yeah, I hated JJ’s puzzleboxes, but “wtf is up with this snoke guy” really did need some kind of an answer. He’s the only Sith we’ve seen who didn’t have a Palpatine pedigree in all the movies, so it seems like he needs to have come from somewhere? Or maybe not, maybe “hey, rando evil guy arose, it happens” is not so weird?

  3. It was kinda long. I really really liked it, but there was a LOT of “we need to escape before this happens” over and over and over, and I feel like they could have cut fifteen minutes out of it somehow, even as I’m not sure what they should have lost specifically.