Pun Salad

Finishing up my own saga: I watched original Star Wars at the Uptown Theater in Washington DC with not-yet-Mrs. Salad. We've been to every one since then.

And now it's over (sob).

I am prepared to tell you this movie is OK, but I can't shake the overall vibe I got, roughly: "Well, we said we were going to make this, and here it is." They got their characters into a bad situation, they have to figure out how to wind things up in (checks IMDB) 142 minutes.

I think the previews of coming attractions went on almost that long, too.

So, various mysteries are resolved. We find out Rey's parentage. We find out that (spoiler!) Wedge Antilles is still around and still a pretty good shot in an X-Wing.

As Mrs. Salad observed, there is a lot of fighting. Not a lot of effort went into coming up with coherent character-driven plot threads.

Since The Last Jedi ended so badly, there was unfortunately no act that compared to the thrilling rescue of Carbonited Han Solo in Return of the Jedi. Too obvious? Maybe, but still would have been preferable to whatever happened in the first act in this movie. See, I've already kind of forgotten.

I'll say that I appreciated the references to previous movies, though. And the end is a nice bookend to the entire series.