1) Kylo Ren. Making Luke want to kill his nephew due to the darkness that he found for even a brief moment? You know what, I’m okay with it. The **** has Force rabies and needs to be put down ole yeller-style, and I’m okay with it under one condition: they have stop trying to make Kylo Ren act like he’s good. Make him irredeemably evil in the end and that is why Luke knows, absolutely, that he cannot be saved, unlike his father. Instead, they are trying to make him like Anakin in which “maybe he can be saved” is constantly in the background. Additionally, it makes no sense: Kylo is conflicted a decade later, correct? So what, Luke thought he was completely evil when he’s a teenager, just learning of the Dark Side? It’s stupid and lacks coherency. Make him evil, make him be the one that tricks Rey into believing he can be saved in a long con plot to kill Snoke. Make him orchestrate the plan to get Snoke killed from the moment Papa Snoke laughed at him for being a little boy in a mask. That would make him menacing and a force with which to be reckoned. Instead, by playing this back and forth stuff, and I don’t mean his struggle with it, I mean the actual idea of him being redeemed from a writing standpoint, all they did was make him seem like a whiny, self-righteous, indecisive little bitch, incapable of doing anything on his own. By making him scheme against Snoke via Rey, it would make him cold, calculating, and most of all, dangerous and make us question whether Rey can actually beat him in the 9th movie.
2) Luke. His character sucks and if that’s how Rian Johnson viewed Star Wars, he shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near this movie. Luke’s regression completely voids the entire point of Return of the Jedi, nay the entire Original Trilogy, where Luke beats Vader through love, not combat. He threw down his lightsaber and refused to fight, fully confident that his feelings for his father would save him. It’s a shame that Rian Johnson took one of the greatest characters ever, a pure hero that learned from his mistakes and conquered his demons, showed that he would never give up and never surrender, and regressed him to force a very cynical view point of “no one changes” into the movie. But let’s say that Luke’s character wasn’t ruined, they still screwed up in how they went about his character. I don’t like how he ran off in shame after having a brief moment of thought of killing an evil son of a bitch, but they could have saved this plot point with one change: it had so much more potential in having him run off because of the death of his students. “I failed my students. They trusted me to guide them, to teach them, show them the way, and most of all, to protect them. I failed them. It was the will of the Force for Ben to fall, but those innocent students? My students? I failed them.” That would have been a real, true arc for him, I feel. It would give him a constant reminder of all the death that he caused by not being able to handle Ben, and with Rey as his new student, his pain would bubble up and force him to overcome his grief about their deaths. By having him run off because Ben fell completely erases the entire point of his saving Vader, his father, and that to me is an incredible mistake.
3) Snoke. So what do we know about Snoke? Oh, nothing? Okay, then…what’s the point of the Force Awakens now? There was very little point in having Snoke be this mysterious dude if all he was going to be was a throwaway villain that we don’t know anything about and was only there to make Kylo seem powerful and show Kylo’s struggle. Yes, we didn’t know much about Sidious when he died, but there were movies before Return of the Jedi that would shed light on his history (it was episodes 4-6, whereas this is episode 8 with 7 movies in front of it and already established canon). Here, Snoke will never be told who he is in the context of this trilogy because he is dead, there is no reason to discuss him in the 9th installment. It would simply be exposition without purpose. And they also ruined any chance they have him being interesting in a prequel because he went out like a bitch and literally did nothing but die. However, because there is still another movie, this is just bad for me, rather than in the ugly section. All they had to do was have Rey ask Luke after Luke mentioned Snoke, “what is Snoke?” A quick, ten second answer from Luke would have sufficed, but it’s apparent that Johnson had no interest in the character and said as much in recent interviews.
4) The porgs. Listen, I know this is Disney and it’s a kids movie and they need to sell merchandise, but they literally did nothing. If anything they should have given the caretakers a cuter design and have them be the porgs—that way, the cute characters are also ingratiated into the story, rather than just being annoying to Chewie on the Falcon. Or have the porgs just be baby caretakers, who rascal about as their parents do work on the island.