I am utterly incapable of providing you with a dispassionate review of a Star Wars film–I do have a Rebel Alliance insignia tattooed on my right arm, after all–so I’m not going to bother trying. I do want to say that I loved this movie, and I’m going to try to articulate why:
It has all the seriousness, grandiosity, and gravitas with which a person like me, who grew up loving Star Wars so unbelievably much, imbued the events it chronicles as I constructed and imagined them in my young (and old) mind. It was not afraid to take itself just as seriously as I’ve always taken it. I appreciate that. I understand that this is also often a recipe for terrible, terrible genre art–the attempts of 35 year olds to justify their love of kiddie culture they’re embarrassed about liking by making it Grim And Gritty And Serious As A Heart Attack. The difference here, and I understand I might be parsing things in a too-indiosyncratic way, as some of my interlocutors have suggested I did in trying to differentiate between what Lost and Twin Peaks and Palomar do versus what Guiding Light or General Hospital do, but the difference here is that George Lucas was never embarrassed, and neither was I.
That’s all. I assure you there is next to no point in trying to engage me on this–my fault, not yours–but I’m not going to stop you if you feel you must.