Might want to put a spoiler alert in the title of this thread.
Snoke: I was meh on him at first, I think the motion capture performance in this is one of Andy Serkis's weakest. IDK, it just seemed obviously CG. So I liked that kinda just as he was building to be an overarching bad guy of the trilogy, it was "Nope!, F That guy.)
Bombing in space. Sigh, that really pulled me out of the first couple minutes of the movie. Sure maybe they are magnetic, or the gravity well is just right, but geez. I like how they set Poe up to grow past being a cocky, brash rush in and blow something up, but it was just really bad.
I enjoyed that after 2 years of youtube videos and fan theories on Rey's parents they were like: "*expletive deleted*ck those guys, they were no one." There's a lot of people in the galaxy, we can meet new ones.
I loved Yoda's scene. Loved that they used a puppet.
Overall I really liked the movie. It made me care about what Rey and Ren are going to do to each other in the next one, and how they'll grow. Depending on how JJ Abrams handles 9 I could see the the 7-8-9 trilogy being better than the 4-5-6 set.
Some fans are going to be disappointing because they wanted a life changing experience, and they got a pretty good movie.
Not to pick on anyone, yours was just a convenient list to build from. To start with - my opinion is that this is tied for second, with Rogue One and behind Empire. Not FAR behind Empire, and not far at all ahead of ANH.
Re: Snoke not having a backstory - people today are spoiled by the prequel trilogy. Yes, the PREQUEL trilogy. Think about the Emperor's role in ESB and ROTJ. He was on screen for, what, 20 minutes total? No backstory at all, we didn't know where he came from or how he got his Force powers, or even how he became Emperor. We knew he controlled Vader pretty thoroughly, and that was enough - he kept the scourge of the Jedi, the Dark Lord of the Sith, on a leash. Sent him around the galaxy as his enforcer. When we saw him in ROTJ, he didn't even need a lightsaber, he beat Luke in a heartbeat with Force Lightning, and ended up killing Vader with it. That's how powerful the Emperor was in the Force, and we STILL don't know anything about his actual training or background prior to appearing as the Senator from Naboo in Ep1.
Similarly, Snoke being misdirected by his reading of Kylo's intent was, IMO, beautifully done. Snoke's overconfidence led to him believing that he was in control, and knew what his apprentice meant to do, and he DID it - just not aimed at the target Snoke thought. That betrayal to take over as the primary power in the First Order seemed very fitting, despite neither Snoke nor Kylo being actual Sith. And so the Apprentice becomes the Master.
The bombers - yeah, lots wrong there. Allegedly they have magnetic launching racks to slowly toss the bombs downward, but I strongly disliked that scene. It made little sense - "We're going to put 3+ people, people we REALLY NEED, in these fragile, unmaneuverable, REALLY slow little ships that *HAVE TO* overfly their targets at very close range to "drop" large quantities of high-explosive onto their surfaces". With one exception I can think of, all "bombing" seen in the films up through Episode 7 (and even a good bit of it in Rogue One) was done by missile or unguided rocket. X-Wings, Y-Wings, A-Wings, and B-Wings all had forward-facing launchers - Ys and Bs just had a larger missile load. That one exception was the TIE Bombers in ESB, which dropped charges onto the asteroid surface while trying to flush the Falcon out of hiding - but they had a visible mechanism to DO that, where all the other ships showed that they fired forward. But you could fire from far enough away that you weren't taking fire from every gun on the target. In R1 (with Y-Wings when bombing the gate, which REALLY bothered me due to breaking with previous canon and their attack on the Star Destroyers elsewhere in the movie) and now here in Ep8, we see vertically-dispersed bombs. Ehhh, not buying it.
The bombers were, as noted, FAR too fragile and slow and unmaneuverable to hold them in such a tight formation. They WANTED to call to mind WWII bombers, but those things were TOUGH. These fell apart if someone sneezed in their general direction. That's a fail on multiple fronts.
Rey's parents, on the other hand, being nobodies? That is a pure, unalloyed WIN. That and Broom Boy both nicely reinforce Luke's statement that the Force doesn't "belong" to the Jedi, that it doesn't have to be passed only through certain "favored" bloodlines. it's a part of everyone and everything. Her parents didn't NEED to be anyone special for her to be special, and I think her Act-3 calm and resolve and success came from her accepting that and moving on with HER life, not the one she imagined she'd have when she found out who her parents were.
But was Kylo actually telling the truth? Whether or not her parents NEEDED to be anyone special, lying to Rey would have served his purposes by helping him to draw her closer to his position. Which would have made him stronger, if she'd joined him, because a powerful Force user was dependent on him the same way he'd been dependent on Snoke. It didn't work, but I could see him trying that.
Kylo was, I think, a better character in this film than in Ep7. His instability is a plus, as noted, BECAUSE it makes him unpredictable.
Luke... I was one of those people posting the "I better not see with my own two eyes you killing off Luke Skywalker" meme on FB. I have wanted to be Luke Skywalker for 40 years, since first seeing Star Wars (no episode number or anything then) for about 50 times in 1977. Man, of everything that happened in that movie, Luke was what ALMOST pulled me out of it. First what I saw as a change to his character in hiding away from the galaxy, and then his end scene. BUT. Look at his character prior to ROTJ, where he actually did grow up a lot. Look at ROTJ, where his impulsive anger almost had him fall to the Dark Side in the fight against his father. Look at BOTH of his teachers, who ran and hid from the galaxy when Order 66 went out - sure, they couldn't win right then, so a retreat was necessary, but they NEVER CAME BACK OUT. And Yoda didn't even want to train Luke, when he finally arrived, Ben had to convince him to do it. Coupled with the magnitude of his own failures, both in service to the galaxy and to his sister by failing to stop Ben from falling to the Dark Side, and personally in even for a moment contemplating taking "the easy way out" and murdering his nephew in his sleep, Luke's retreat from the galaxy makes more sense. He failed so very badly, with all his own power, how could he do any good? Better just to go into reclusion, into hiding, and let the galaxy deal with its problems without the complications of the Jedi. He almost didn't learn his own most important lesson, Yoda had to remind him of it. Everyone fails. Everyone has moments of weakness - and in the most powerful, they can have a greatly-heightened impact. That's what we learn from - where and how did we fail? Okay, we need to do that differently. And he did. It took Rey coming to find him, pointing out his errors, and leaving again. But his humanity made him more relatable, at least to me.
And his final scene against Kylo? Perfect. Every piece of it, right down to the final reveal where he allowed Kylo to learn that he never had a chance to get the final showdown he so desperately wanted. That he was never going to beat Luke Skywalker.
