[Chiefspants]

Yeah, R1 gave Star Wars a brutal, realistic, and real world insight into what real rebels have to go to when rebelling against the empire. In college (being a history nerd) that was my one qualm with rewatching the OT - and that was that all rebels were magically united in their world view and vision in dismantling the empire. This is never how it goes in real rebellions and with the inevitable power vacuums that follow. To see that discord and brutality in R1 really added something special to the universe, though I understand the critiques about how brutal some of that was to watch, (even Vader’s scene - which made me shriek like a straight up fan girl).

That was actually my hope going into the new trilogy. Dismantling empires is a very messy process - just look at the Soviet Union and what’s happened since. However, it got off to a bad start when the best JJ could muster was to make “A New Hope Awakens”. TLJ, at the very least, tried its best to rectify that - and weirdly, I love Rian’s OG script. In that script, Poe (not Rose) went with Finn to the Casino planet, there was no Holdo, and many more scenes with Luke and Rey. The core of that script was that the Jedi has stagnated and that their unrelenting hold on the galaxy is what paved the way for the Empire - a message that I frankly love. It got muddled somewhere from the higher ups... and it makes you wonder how/why that happened.