I'm sorry but I don't know what I'm missing here. This movie was a huge mess stuffed with characters I'd be hard-pressed to describe beyond their name and job. Characters are rushed so haphazardly through the plot that I am not sure why I'm supposed to care about any of them. Major character details are introduced then swiftly forgotten. Rose enters the movie as a nervous, antisocial nerd, then that never comes up again, as if characters simply need to demonstrate a single trait before devolving into action figures. Snoke is a mysterious big bad guy who's just dead now before I could give a shit. Characters spend more time insisting that Poe Dameron is a cocky flyboy than Poe actually spends being a cocky flyboy. There's a lengthy sequence on a casino planet that felt tedious in the moment that also winds up being pointless because the plan fails.

And yes, this is a movie about failure and how people respond to it, but lots of stories involve setbacks and failures without making the entire plot feel pointless. This movie begins with the Resistance leadership chastising Poe for cavalierly risking people's lives. The movie ends with Poe being directly responsible for the deaths of nearly the entire Resistance, but Leia says it's OK because all the protagonists are still alive.

I didn't like the hamfisted "both sides are wrong" arms dealer morality. I didn't like the superficial abused-animals-and-orphans attempts at heartstring-pulling. I didn't like the weak humor that mostly just undermined whatever drama the movie was fumbling at. Luke Skywalker lives on a remote island as far removed from the rest of the galaxy as possible...except for the variety of adorable creatures featured in cutaway sight gags. That kind of stuff is the Star Wars equivalent of a record scratch and a dog covering its face.

Man, I walked out of this movie just feeling kind of ambivalent, but the more I think about this movie the more I dislike it. Oh well! It'll make a trillion dollars.