Of the directors who have helmed projects in the Star Wars universe since George Lucas sold Lucasfilm and the Star Wars brand to Disney, only JJ Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan have made an "agenda" film, so this statement is not really accurate.
The opinions of a very small group of entitled crybabies don't override the facts, and the facts are that Gareth Edwards, Rian Johnson, and Ron Howard simply set out to make Star Wars movies...and succeeded in doing so.
I love this logic. The movies you like, the directors obviously set out to make "Star Wars" movies. The one you don't, the director obviously had an agenda. And Ron Howard didn't set out to make a Star Wars movie, he came in to clean up a mess. http://ew.com/movies/2018/02/09/ron-howard-solo-a-star-wars-story/
My eyes started rolling all the way back to 1983 when I found out that ROTJ would feature another Death Star. To go for a 3rd with TFA is even more creatively bankrupt. Sure, you can spin it and say that Kylo is the ultimate fanboi and lack of creativity is his character flaw, but it's still just not satisfying. And this coming from JJ who said he crafted the film to be a "delight". Familiarity beyond a certain point becomes repetitious and boring. TLJ just went the opposite direction as a sort of over-compensation. The ideal SW movie is somewhere in the middle of the two extremes.
The ideal film varies from person to person. My dad, SW fan since the original release, loved TFA and TLJ. My wife, more casual fan, loved both films and was fully engaged in them. The "repetitious" elements have been a part of SW since its inception. It's all in how they were presented.
The Last Jedi is a messy bloated film that has too many characters it doesn't know what to do with. It has a mishmash of tones that don't go together, annoying micro-twists and a script that takes too many liberties. It ultimately fails what it tries to achieve. While TFA is mediocre at best, it's a much more coherent and competent film than TLJ.
This is false. The facts are not predicated on my own personal likes and dislikes because that's not how facts work... And the facts demonstrate that Abrams and Kasdan had a very specific personal agenda in play when they wrote and/or directed TFA, whereas Gareth Edwards, Rian Johnson, and Ron Howard did not.
While at the same time cribbing from the basic plot structure of TESB, so it still managed to pull a JJ. But imagine if the star destroyer had gone into that thing!
The connections between TLJ and Empire are loose at best. We knew Rey would have to train and the 2nd film in a trilogy usually ends on a downer. The Cait battle I guess was visually hoth-like albeit a different climate. So a stylistic crib there. But TFA was much more of an A New Hope retread.
@DigificWriter doesn't know. It just sounded good. People start throwing around the word "facts" as a supposed trump card to an argument, even though they have none.
The A plot has a wanna-be Jedi student training with a master in exile who is initially reluctant to train them, while the B plot is a space chase with the other protagonists continually running from the bad guys because they can't escape by going to hyperspace. Which movie am I talking about?