The reason Rian Johnson was so skewered by Star Wars fans was because he was handed both characters and lore he didn’t create and given carte blanch to do whatever with them. It’s pretty clear his inspiration came from projects like Aliens, a film that only loosely connects to the original and bares the signature touches of its current director

This was where he ran into trouble…..

Regardless of how anyone thought JJ Abrams did as a writer and director of TFA, he clearly had these characters (both new and legacy) set on a (flimsy) story arc that Johnson decided he would upend in order to sigh subvert audience expectations

The problem with that is now we all know in hindsight that neither Disney nor Kathleen Kennedy had any idea of what story arc they were trying to tell beforehand, and were subsequently left with a middle film that relied on the succeeding director (who was not Rian Johnson) and screenwriter to coherently tie all of our subverted expectations together and still stick the landing, both of a trilogy of films and a trilogy of trilogies.

Sadly…they could not, and what we got as a mea culpa was a loud, silly fan service final film that no one particularly liked

Rian Johnson treated the Last Jedi like it was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or Back to the Future Part 2-essentially a stand alone plot in a series of films; what he should have tried to emulate was LOTR: The Two Towers-the middle section of a three film saga