Warning: Spoilers for The Last Jedi below!

To say I was excited to see the latest movie in the Star Wars franchise is an understatement. For me, this excitement started the minute the credits of The Force Awakens started playing. The Star Wars saga has been one of my favorite series since I was a little kid, so when my mom told me a week before I left college that she had already bought the tickets, it gave me the extra push I needed to get through finals season. Knowing I wasn’t able to see it until Saturday afternoon, I swore off social media until after I had seen the movie as someone had posted about every spoiler of Episode VII an hour before I saw it. And I am happy to say that my avoidance of spoilers was successful this time around.

I want to start my review by saying that I did thoroughly enjoy this film. It gave me everything I knew it would, a grand space adventure, intense lightsaber battles, and the rebels barely making it through another fight against the First Order, although I will say this one actually had me worried. The dynamics between the characters were great, some of my favorites being Finn and Rose, Rey and Luke, and of course Poe and everyone’s favorite droid BB-8. To me the character that stood out to me was the new character of Rose, played by Kelly Marie Tran, this was due to her outsider status from the main plot. Although she did work for the rebels directly, her first meeting with Finn to me made her seem nearly like a fan of Star Wars had stumbled into the universe. And I loved it.

Poe’s growth in this film also pleasantly surprised me since I didn’t expect that kind of story arc in a Star Wars film. Sure we have had characters like Han Solo who have a change of heart about their involvement with the rebels, but with Poe we got something different. His character growth didn’t completely change what we knew about him, but in fact gave us and him a different perspective on the war itself.

The main thing I didn’t like about the film however was the relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren. The trope as old as time, “will they or won’t they” was used carelessly to make viewers believe for a moment that Kylo Ren had actually turned to the Light thanks to Rey, after all this is Star Wars and crazier things have happened. And although he did kill Supreme Leader Snoke, I knew it couldn’t be as simple as him turning to the Light side, and I was right. It’s plot lines like these that confused me as to what the screenwriter was intending, because although like Episode VII followed A New Hope, this installment followed closely to The Empire Strikes Back. And yet at the same time it didn’t.

Rey and Luke’s training, while many saw the connection between Luke and Yoda’s training in episode V, didn’t exactly follow the same pattern. There was no Rey carrying Luke on her back through the woods and there was no cryptic talk of her parents. And yet we did get a brief Yoda cameo. This strange pattern appeared in Rose and Finn’s storyline as well. In their plans to hack the First Order’s main ship, their hacker ends up betraying them and they aren’t able to stop them from killing the rebel escape ships. But according to the Star Wars formula before, this ‘nearly impossible’ plan should have worked.

Although at the end of the day the film did live up to expectations, I could tell that Rian Johnson was trying to create an entirely different Star Wars movie and just couldn’t get rid of the tropes of the series that viewers love.