While not wanting to comment on a movie I haven't seen,I think there are more obvious pitfalls to anyone working with making a Star Wars movie.
First I want to say that I was weirded out yesterday by seeing this article headline somewhere on some movie news related website, which said something like "40 must watch movies in 2018". Why 40? Seems like a suspiciously high number. As if one would expect you to now go watch a lot more movies, making me wonder if it was now important to have "Hollywood" relying on having a steady income. And I have seen articles making a point out of how "Hollywood" has been making less money the last few years, and critics were sort of blamed for being too harsh on new movies these days. As for myself, there is basically two movies I won't watch: All the 'Transformers' movies (an annoying visual spectacle, with bad directing), and all the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' movies (an annoying auditory spectacle, with bad use of music).
I think the work of ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) in the 80's and around that time, shows a type of craftsmanship to working with geometry and design for miniature models in movies, that isn't there in Star Wars movies of today. And then, there is more to a spaceship design, than mere formalism, in which, you make a spaceship design mimic some recognizable thing, or, just adhering to some overly general characteristic where a spaceship becomes this characterless rounded thing. Then, there's a task for having things making sense, if only for being coherent, and in this, anything 'modern' then becomes more of an impossibility if just tossing out the old and brining in the new, as if it all was a matter of mass appeal, in some cynical view of what people would want to see. Not only would there as I see it, be no back bone by a director conjuring up "new stuff" for mere sake of fascination and spectacle (like with the *gack* Transformers movies), but I see a problem then that the task of working with design for a deeper meaning to things becomes then something trivial, and I think that in a lot of ways those trivialized aspect to a movie can easily be noticed, as long as you care. And I suspect that the fun people at Rotten Tomatoes, and professional movie critics in general, are simply not that into the design of the Star Wars universe, so as to be able to try recognize what makes good sense design wise, and what does not.
Now, it should be clear that the original Star Wars trilogy had obviously some goofy moments, and that was even made worse when George Lucas altered the movies further. Presumably, the goofy stuff was forced already in the original trilogy by Lucas, simply because he was the boss of it all. What then seems obvious, is that some minor things can be forgiven, when the rest is so very nice. And so I was not bothered by minor flaws in costumes and effects watching the original Star Wars trilogy, and generally, if remaining in the mood when watching a movie, I am usually not the one to all of a sudden want to start nit picking on a movie for the sake of just doing so. It is also tempting for me to think think that the movies in the old Star Wars trilogy had a densely layered approach to entertainment to them (music, colors, style, texture, mood, sound, humor, drama, arc typical stories, action, humanity, direction, and ofc. the use of very nicely designed scale models), as opposed to newer Star Wars movies, which seems rushed, superficial and when I notice all the stupid shit, I find it difficult to forgive the movie for that when there is not much else to be happy about.
Without having seen the last Star Wars movie, I've read/heard that The Last Jedi sort of makes some point about the military industrial complex, with arms dealers thriving. Not knowing how this was portrayed as maybe some kind of razor sharp criticism of today's world society, I can't help but wonder if maybe people felt reminded to invest in stocks for weapons manufacturers. Which would be terrible. And any instance of there seemingly being a spineless approach to direction with regard to potentially off-topic issues in a sci-fi movie, at the very least one would be forgiven to think of it all as being really shallow. If I as a viewer have to simply guess at what the intent was, for a movie I would probably be both annoyed and feeling a little uncomfortable. I am curious if there are instanced of the use of the word "balance", "balanced" or "balancing" in The Last Jedi, because people on the internet discussing video games, tend to abuse this word, such that, you end up having to guess at what is meant, which makes any argument discussing this vague idea of 'balance' to be rather pointless, when 'balance' is obviously would have to have a metaphorical meaning to it, when not pertaining to an established equilibrium between two weights on a scale, or something like that. 'Balance' in video games discussions tend to have the meaning of 'change' or 'changing', which hardly qualifies for this notion of there being a meaningful equilibrium, strictly metaphorical or in a literal sense.
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