This is such a difficult one. It breaks my heart that I didn't thoroughly enjoy this because I wanted to so desperately. 

This is just the epitome of "the middle movie." I feel like not enough progress was made for a two and a half hour film in such an important franchise. There are just quite a few things that felt really off about it, and I really don't want to spoil but so many things were distracting. The forced humour was so jarring in places it actually made me mad. The opening scene scared me so much because of how odd the tone was. And pretty much all of the new characters felt shoehorned in just to move the plot along or serve as someone else's means of development.  Also, so many wasted opportunities. I genuinely cannot believe some of the things that happened in this movie because it was just such a waste.

Equally though, there were things that I loved about this film. I love Poe's development as a character and I never expected to love Kylo Ren's story as much as I did. Luke, Kylo and Rey definitely had the standout scenes that made up for a lot of the mistakes in terms of enjoyment factor, but didn't totally outweigh them. I was completely engrossed the whole time and never felt like it was dragging on necessarily, though I do think that's just because I'm so invested in this world at this point that even the not-so-great instalments will have me in a trance.

I still enjoyed this. But I'm struggling to see where we go from here. So many odd choices and so many wasted opportunities. Bring it all back, J.J.