Dantooine Free Press

Let's get this out of the way.  Yes, the final Star Wars trilogy was pretty bad.  It started off promisingly enough.  I liked "The Force Awakens."  No, it wasn't the most original or creative of the saga's movies.  But it was entertaining, and coherent enough to allow Lucasfilm to build an extended story line from it.  Things went bad with "The Last Jedi." What became clear with "The Last Jedi" was that there was no unified vision of the last film trilogy.  While people like to complain about J.J. Abrams, he set up a number of interesting questions for subsequent films to explore.  They included Rey's parentage, the origin of Snoke and the First Order and could Kylo Ren be redeemed.  Rian Johnson decided to throw all of that away, and gave us a cynical story where the Resistance survived in spite of the saga's overarching hero, Luke Skywalker.  "The Rise of Skywalker" suffered, in large part, because Abrams had to undo muc...

It is seems to be fashionable among current Star Wars fans to trash the final three installments of the Star Wars saga.  Some critics even take joy in proclaiming Disney's efforts to continue the narrative initially created by George Lucas to be a miserable failure.  It may go against what's trending, but I liked the first of Disney's instalments in the final Star Wars trilogy.  I found Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens an entertaining extension to the original storyline, one full of potential for what the tale could be.  Sure, looking back, the last two films failed to live up to that potential.  Moreover, the first of the Disney films had it's flaws and it's plot holes.  It certainly was not the best of the Star Wars movies.  But looking back on them all now, including the two movies dubbed "Star Wars Stories" by Disney, which address tangential plots, I can easily say that The Force Awakens is within the top five of the entir...