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Here is the simple reason why, in my opinion, everyone is over-analyzing this movie:

People get old; their characters either die or get recast.

What do you do with a generational classic like Star Wars? I was a high school movie theater usher when the first film came out -- at MY theater! I can't tell you how many times I saw that movie, forwards, backwards, inside-out...

But here we all are, 40 years later, Alec Guinness, Peter Cushing, and Carrie Fisher are dead, Peter Mayhew has chronic arthritis, Harrison Ford has had some recent high-profile incidents with judgement, and the remaining actors aren't getting any younger.

So, what do you do when a beloved cast becomes too old to maintain the characters? Either the characters age with the actors, or the storyline remains fixed in time and the characters are recast, or the characters are killed off and replaced in the epic.

Star Trek offers a comparative glimpse. Before the actors became too old, the franchise handed the baton to "The Next Generation." In my mind, the only flaw was in how they handled the death of Kirk. If Star Wars fanatics are forming a petition to remove the latest movie from canon, why not petition to redo the death of Kirk, too? Of course, I'm being facetious, but the similarities remain: Scotty, McCoy, Spock, Nurse Chapel/Computer, are dead (in their actors), only Kirk, Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov remain from the principle cast. Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford are still with us, as well as Billy Dee Williams and Anthony Daniels (as active performers), but that's it. And for how much longer?

So what is a franchise supposed to do about it?

-PJ

I think you are over analyzing your analysis. The issue isn't with the fact that the actors are getting old and dying, it is with the moral relativism and political correctness that has infected this franchise.

The premise that there never was any "good guys" has long been a staple of left propaganda. The thing they hated about Reagan was his unwillingness to see "gray", drawing instead a stark contrast between "good" and "evil."

Rather than being an epic battle between the forces of light and darkness, this movie recalls the immortal words of Homer Simpson.

"It's just a bunch of stuff that happened."

“So, what do you do when a beloved cast becomes too old to maintain the characters?”

That was the problem with Casablanca 7, when Rick and Ilsa’s illegitimate son becomes a communist in reaction to being illegitimate, and we find that Victor Laszlo became a transvestite at the end of his life when he realized that Ilsa really preferred Rick.

Why couldn’t they let the first 3 Casablanca films stand on their own?

I understand and agree with what you said.

But to make our beloved heros entire lives meaningless and miserable and then kill them offhandedly to be replaced with characters we really care nothing about is an insult.

The rebels are weaker than ever. Apparently killing the emperor accomplished nothing in the original trilogy. And if that were not bad enough, Luke lives out the rest of his life in misery and regret alone milking stranger animals tits, and then just ... fades to nothingness. WTH?

It would be like... making more Harry Potter movies that start with the death eaters in control for no explained reason (ignoring the original happy ending) and led by Ron’s son who is obsessed with killing Harry Potter, who is living alone after his Jennie divorced him. The series starts with Rons son using new powers to uttery destroy Hoggwarts and the Ministry of Justice. Harry also has cancer and could care less about the death eaters being in control and just wants to be left alone to milk house-elf tits.