Star Wars: The Last Jedi spoilers and questions

In no particular order…

• Luke Skywalker is one hell of a remote employee.
• Imagine being Rey, and having to field sad Ben Solo FaceTime calls at any time of night. I hope she has a DND mode for that mind-meld comms feature.
• I think I liked it. It’s hard to tell to be honest, and I’m seeing friends and coworkers reckon with that too. It was fun to watch, and a lot of stuff happens but it’s hard to say if I loved it.
• Is Benicio del Toro’s thief character supposed to take his ill-begotten money and turn into The Collector from the Guardians universe eventually? It may seem like reading too much into something but every scene and character has a purpose in a star wars film so maybe?
• Johnson & Johnson are going to sell SO MANY fucking carbon-fiber pattern band-aids in the next few years.
• Every early review of this was highly positive, so it’s tough to walk into something with extremely high expectations because of course your mind is going to look for ways to break it down if it doesn’t immediately blow you away. I honestly think people getting a chance to see it a week or two early is going to color your experience and make it feel special. I have a private spoiler channel at work and even among the star wars superfans, about half of them didn’t seem to enjoy it.
• Holy shit Laura Dern fucking ROCKED IT from beginning to end. I never expected to see her in a star wars film but she was a great temporary addition.
• I think the problem is the film very much feels like a sequel in a line of sequels. At some point during a battle I looked at my watch and thought oh shit, there’s only 45min left and we’ve barely moved the plot forward, I really hope they win this one space battle so they can win the next one they talked about before setting up something for the end.
• Think about being a writer for the star wars franchise, amid all the different people that wrote and directed before you. It’s almost like a giant game of telephone, where one writer leaves a cliffhanger the next one has to tackle.
• How are they going to kill off Leia before the next one?
• Given the internet’s love of Porgs from the trailer, I was expecting them to play a bigger role in the film and coming away from it they seemed to have less screen time and depth than even ewoks? They were just a cute sidekick/reaction joke vehicle after all?
• I kind of loved the Kylo/Ben bit about “what if we killed all the Olds in this fucking place” moment. I immediately thought, yeah, what if all the Baby Boomers were out of power and Gen X could take their place?
• Hux sure looked like Eric Trump to me.
• The cast was a bit more diverse, I liked it!
• I’m kind of glad Poe’s screwball plan didn’t work out, Rogue One was entirely about a super crazy plan that had almost zero chance of working out and then of course finally does and I think I was getting tired of using a snowball’s chance in hell that this works as a constant plot device.
• Oh crap, I just saw the first comparison of this movie to the dreaded prequels. Seems way harsh, but it seems the backlash has begun.
• So when is episode 9 coming out so we can get some closure?