Preface: I don't know what to spoiler-tag, honestly so much of the plot points felt utterly inconsequential, and the biggest "spoilers" really happened in literally the first 5 minutes or were in the trailer.
I don't think that was an intentional joke though.
I lost it at the opening crawl. Holy crap was that a way to get Palpatine back. And then I got rewarded with Snokes in a Jar two minutes later. Beautiful. I found myself keeping track of all the stupid things that happened, here are some of my thoughts from watching:
- Palpatine comes out of nowhere. What a huge plot point to introduce in the beginning.
- Chewy on a second transport was a complete cop-out just for an emotional moment.
- C-3PO's "death" was also just for an inconsequential emotional moment.
- The Ach-To scene was extremely short and pretty useless, and definitely felt like another retcon of Luke.
- Literally all the galaxy comes for Lando after nobody came for Leia in Ep VIII.
- Beating Palpatine with two lightsabres.
Agree it was a complete mess of writing, but to me, more importantly, it was a massively incompetent
trilogy. Characters come in and out of nowhere: Rose has more time in VIII than most of the new people from VII, then gets a minute in IX. Palpatine literally just appears. Maz Kanata never gets explained by the end, and it's unclear why she's even in IX. Oh, and I'm forgetting Captain Phasma too, who only existed for marketing purposes. The endless retcons: Rey's heritage going from "Who are her parents?" to "Her parent's don't matter!" to "
...But her Grandparents do!". Snoke made the dyad, but Snoke was Palps, but Palps didn't know and the dyad still existed post-Snoke? There were so many great things about all the movies, but taken as a trilogy, they really feel like a joke to me.