Snyderian. That’s a word I’ve coined this evening. Warning: no spoilers ahead, other than for my general impressions of a mooovie.

The post-TLJ rules of the Star Wars universe are so loose that it’s impossible to have any sense of what’s meant to be a feat and what isn’t. Even, what’s meant to be possible and what isn’t. Can [redacted] do [redacted]? Can [different redacted] do [a third redacted]? Apparently! Or no? Roll a dice! Or a die, as to your preference of pluralities.

Star Wars has never concerned itself with the detail, that’s always been Trek’s arena, but in ROS it’s at its zenith of unconcernedness, which is 100% a word – which, no, does not mean it is 100% of words, it means it’s definitely a word. Does a character need to be at a location? Oh there they are! Does a character need to be not at a location? Oh there they aren’t! It’s more contrived than this “review” is, and boy do I like making these things contrived.

There’s plenty of moments I genuinely loved, and ol’ Daisy Riddles is bloody fantastic. I get emotional at the drop of a hat these days, and it doesn’t even have to be a nice hat, so this isn’t a particularly useful yardstick, but this film got me several times. It’s also way less of an insult to the lore than TLJ was, even gently-directly kicking back at TLJ on a couple things, which was nice to see.

ROS has some good stuff going on, some resonant emotional moments, but h o l y b a l l s is it Snyderian in its messiness.

I rate it “a shame” out of “what could’ve been, if only Disney had actually had any semblance of a plan; why isn’t Kathleen Kennedy doing a Kevin Feige-esque job, I mean w h y i s n ‘ t s h e, someone needed to be at least; and no I still don’t want to know what Lucas’ plans for episodes 7-9 were because they’d probably have been worse anyway”.