ST TLJ will make TFA be looked at much differently.

I say that the TFA still played it safe in imagery and the trappings of nostalgia. It wasn't bold back then, and it isn't bold now. Rey should have been on a water or jungle planet instead. Rey should have believed that she is related to someone special to make dramatic irony of her being a Nobody work (not just finding her parents). Rey should have been more defined than someone who looks and acts like a Skywalker.

 

One of TFA biggest "plot hole" was fixed in TLJ : "Why Rey is so powerful?" Many called Rey a Mary-Sue and speculated that it was a clue to her parentage (Skywalker, Kenobi, Palpatine or even Reincarnation). This is not the case at all. TLJ gives us a solid explanation. "Darkness rises and light to meet it". This is Snoke's words. Rey is so powerful "because" of Kylo Ren/ Ben Solo. The Force needed balance. To counterbalance Kylo's darkness, the Force gave to Rey the same length of power. The Darkness is so strong in Kylo that the Force needed an equivalent in the Light. It's Rey. That's why they both have similar "raw, untamed, power". She's Kylo's opposite. Snoke believed it was Luke but it's revealed that this balance was Rey.

 

I disliked the force awakens
and hoped the last Jedi would answer all the questions I hate
It did not


it feels like everything the fa set up was tossed aside in tlj

 

That’s interesting in terms or them having equal raw power, but she has control and skill, like a master. Is that explained?

 

No, it's not but Rey doesn't really have control in this movie. The first time, she tried to reach the force, she failed then when she managed to do so, she was immediately attracted by the darkside. To be honest, she doesn't show any exceptional skills in TLJ. In contrary, I found her pretty useless in the movie.

 

.... TLJ is a reboot of TFA

 

One thing that sticks out to me is that Ben didn’t own up to making a mistake by killing Han. He actually doubled down on that mood. He didn’t kill Snoke because he was doing a good deed. He was killing everything from his past.

 

Well now TFA - and the ST as a whole - look worse.

Primarily because it appears, as we suspected, that the vaunted "Mystery Box" was a monumental fraud. There was never any plan. Rey's parentage was such an anti-climax that it beggars belief that this is the work of professional storytellers.

 

I doubt that they will have the lesson learned to have a trilogy main plot before starting it

 

The sets for Jakku, including the Falcon, were already built by the time that JJ and Kasdan replaced Arndt. I'm glad they decided to make the best story possible, rather than draft a story to fit Jakku.

 

They could still change Rey. They could still modify Jakku. There is no need to be cheap on budget to make the desert look less like Tatooine.

 

Haven't seen TLJ yet (3 more hours to go), but I just finished re-watching TFA with the knowledge of what happens and what is revealed in TLJ. And...

It actually still works better than I thought it would. I was expecting that a lot of parts would feel empty and pointless (to me anyway) knowing what is (and isn't) revealed and the bulk of the film still holds up. I say this as someone who very much enjoyed TFA; I'd probably rank it somewhere around the middle, after ANH, ESB, and ROTS at least. I felt that if she's not Rey Skywalker, then TFA would take a huge hit in my eyes, with significant portions of the film being "ruined" for me. I'm happy to say that's not the case.

The part with the Skywalker lightsaber and Force vision in Maz's castle is probably the part that sticks out the most to me as "what's the point of that?". It's still hard for me not to read it as passing on from father to son to granddaughter. Luke's ROTJ saber could have served the same purpose in the story without any unnecessary suggestion of lineage. The visual suggestions that Rey could be a Skywalker don't really leap out at me when I'm watching. Plenty of stuff comes to mind when I'm thinking about everything that I saw TFA hinting at that isn't resolved -- but most of that didn't really intrude on my thoughts while watching.

My favorite moment in the film has always been when Rey finally accepts her destiny and pulls the lightsaber from the snow. It's still a great moment, but it feels a bit less meaningful to me now. I guess we could read this as it rejecting the Skywalker bloodline entirely (as opposed to simply "choosing" her over Kylo), but ... meh.

Other favorite moment is the very end and reveal of Luke (Still love that music). I still see Luke as looking more conflicted than I know he is in TLJ. Just from his expression, I get the "he doesn't need to ask who she is or why she's here" stated in the novel. This is a powerful moment, and imagining it immediately followed by him taking the lightsaber and throwing it off the cliff... well, that's a pretty jarring shift in tone. But even if the films are viewed back-to-back, we've got closing credits, the opening crawl, and the Resistance stuff separating the two.

I don't think that we were ever going to get an explanation as to where Maz obtained the lightsaber in one of the films anyway. If she was going to explain on-screen, it would have been in TFA. The explanation is not really important to the story and is better suited to being told in a comic book or something. It's kind of like "who placed the order for the clone army" -- we can infer that it was either Palpatine or Dooku, posing as Syfo-Dyas. It's not important to telling the story, and I'm sure it was probably answered definitively for those who really needed an official answer in the EU anyway.