Dear Internet, the division about The Last Jedi is completely normal for Star Wars.

I have been a Star Wars fan since the 70s.

I have seen all of them in theaters in their original run.

Everyone is going on about how divisive the new movie is, and how fans hate it.

This is completely normal.

Pretty much every Star Wars sequel has dealt with this. Some more than others, but they've all been "divisive".

Even Empire had a lot of haters back in 1980. Seriously, despite its status today as "one of the best movies ever made" a lot of people hated that movie when it came out.

You wouldn't believe the amount of complaining about Return of the Jedi. It was comparable to what we're seeing now with The Last Jedi. Seriously, it was, we just didn't have the internet acting as a megaphone for it.

A lot of people complain about what we didn't find out in TLJ. Which I kind of expected.

First of all, it's a bridge movie. It's not supposed to answer all the questions. It's supposed to leave things open and lack conclusion.

There are things I didn't like about it, but I honestly didn't think it was any worse than Return of the Jedi.

It certainly isn't the worst Star Wars movie. I don't see how anyone can think that in a world where Attack of the Clones and Phantom Menace exist.

Unless the sequel is absolutely awful to the point that it kills the franchise, I think time will be good to it.

A lot of the praise Empire gets today is a direct result of how things were tied up in RotJ. It gave conclusion and resolution to a lot of the unanswered questions Empire left.

Darth Vader being Luke's father wasn't a given prior to RotJ being released for example. A lot of people didn't believe Vader was telling the truth. Nerds argued about it exhaustively in the years between the two films. Nobody really knew it was true until Jedi came out and cleared things up.

Now, I'm not claiming that it is a great movie. The majority of the casino sequence should have been cut, and I could have done without the "Liea of Steel" scene. It is definitely not the best Star Wars movie. ANH and Empire still have that distinction.

Still, I honestly see the complaining about this movie as totally normal. This happens with every movie in the franchise to some degree, and TLJ is pretty much in the middle of the pack.

Don't panic. Given time, I'm fairly sure this one will end up pretty much in the same place as RotJ and Revenge of the Sith. Firmly in the middle of the pack of the franchise.

It does a lot right, even though when it drops the ball it drops it hard. I still think the good outweighs the bad overall.

I'm confident TLJ will come out fine in the end. Not at the top, but as a workable bridge between TFA and Star Wars Episode IX: From His Nap.

I've seen this happen enough times before, so I don't take the complaining about TLJ as the end of the franchise, or as anything but what it is: totally normal.

Submitted April 06, 2018 at 07:24PM by contrabardus https://ift.tt/2GG9j2q