JasonMa said:And now, as a solid Gen X'er, I'm going to disagree with you. Your take on Gen X doesn't match anything me or my similarly aged friends feel or grew up with.
I will agree that yes, the original trilogy didn't make you think about the ramifications of a galaxy with the Force or how the Rebellion got the weapons to fight the Empire. But then, neither do most legends/fairy tales. And that's what the original trilogy was, our modern day fairy tale.
Would you agree though that the last film was deliberately deconstructionist in a very Marxian sort of way? That it took what you said the original was, and went out of its way to tear that down - to essentially knock the original trilogy off their pedestal, so to speak; and thus to deconstruct our own past in a sense (given how much Star Wars was an icon in the 1970s and 1980s) - Heroes are never JUST heroes; Nuance abounds. More, the heroes you grew up rooting for are cowards and failures.
I just find it a very cynical film in that sense. In the larger sense one can defend it and say "But Luke has an arc", yeah, but it's an arc he already went through 30 years ago. Every character of the original trilogy is reset to the point they were at at the beginning of the series, with their arcs throughout the original trilogy disregarded or thrown out already or repeated. When we meet Han in the originals, he's a selfish smuggler. By the end of the series, he's reformed, he's a good guy and realizes certain things are bigger than his own needs. When we meet Han in the new film, he's a selfish smuggler. Luke is a headstrong, smug whiny kid in Empire who thinks he knows it all and in Star Wars, he has his uncle's force-fed belief that the problems of the universe are bigger than him and "so far away from here"; by Jedi he has overcome that and gained a certain calm that comes with maturity; In TLJ, he's a bitter, smug, arrogant old man who doesn't care about the wider universe anymore.
To me it's a very depressing, cynical film, with a maddening and prequel-esque middle act. The film for me is very much a mess. You have these Marxian and deconstructionist themes competing with a Casino scene straight out of Attack of the Clones. Very bizarre film and not in a good way. Weirdly constructed.