Before I begin, have you heard of the thing where you determine your Star Wars name by putting a space in the name of an Italian food?

Anyway...

"Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. That's the only way to become what you are meant to be."

That quote is pretty much a heavy handed thesis statement for the Disney Star Wars movies, which is their excuse for taking a giant dump all over the characters and even the franchise and institutions which fans have loved for years. They're doing new and awesome things and they don't care about your affection for established stuff! You can totally trust JJ Abrams, who, despite a much more extensive track record than George Lucas had in 1977 (or even 1999), has not produced anything a fraction as enduring or original on his own. His movies include a Godzilla derivative, an ET derivative, a Star Trek fan film and a Star Wars fan film. Rian Johnson has made a teen murder mystery nobody saw, and a plot-hole-ridden sci-fi film most notable for the makeup job giving two actors the same mouth. They absolutely deserve the faith of the audience that they can start fresh and produce something just as good without the base of the stuff we love.

And all they're doing is proving their inferiority. If you are going to let the past die, why do you have to keep making the exact same movies? Swapping out attractive young white people for pudgy Asians, or elderly women, is not much a change compared to being completely unable to break away from the story of scrappy underdogs fighting an all-powerful empire. Of a forlorn hope attack on a massive superweapon or the outnumbered rebels hastily evacuating their stronghold before a larger enemy traps them there. Or the heroes can't use their hyperdrive, so they need to rely on a duplicitous gambler's aid, except he sells them out.

Disney's idea of letting the past die is when they staged their throne room confrontation between the disfigured, berobed ruler, the desert-planet-raised protagonist, and a descendant of Shmi Skywalker, with a propensity for black clothes and the Dark Side of the Force, it's "Vader" who attacks "the Emperor" first, and the efforts to redeem him FAIL! Waaaaay different! We have COMPLETELY killed the past! Now let's get on with sending speeders to fight walkers, ahead of a trench line, defending a giant metal door! Let originality rule!

Also, if you want to hammer the diversity message, don't just have women cathartically bullying conventionally charismatic light-skinned men, have them, I don't know, SUCCEED at something?

Because Carrie Fisher had a vagina, her death is supposed to be the greatest tragedy ever and because she's dead, we're supposed to be in awe of her character who was, like, awesome or something.

Yeah, no. If you told Star Wars fans ten or twenty years ago, that when parts 7-9 finally come out with the original actors, and that Leia is the only one who does not get killed off in the first two, the reaction would be, "Oh, hell no!"

She was, at best, one of a trio of leads, and easily the third and least important of the three. Luke was the protagonist and Han was the audience favorite, and Leia's hairdo was a joke.

When you get right down to it, her character's accomplishments in the original trilogy were helping them out of the frying pan of the detention corridor into the fire of the trash compactor, which thanks to the assets Luke & Han had with them, turned into a viable escape. Then Han subsequently diverted a bunch of guards, Luke got them across a chasm, and Obi-Wan bought time for their escape, so Chewie could fly them to safety, and Luke & Han could shoot down their pursuit. Leia was able to note that they were being allowed to escape...but she lets them lead the Empire right to the rebel base...? Uhhh....girl power? Then she watches while Luke and Han defeat the Death Star & Vader.

In Empire, Han saves Luke when he's lost overnight, and other troops found and brought them home. All Leia contributed was delaying Han's rescue attempt by alienating him with her carping so he ignored her calls. And what was said carping about? An immature overcompensation for her own attraction. The actual general gave Han permission to leave to settle his issues with Jabba, because he is being reasonable, and this is a rebel alliance, not a conscripted army. Han has a legit problem, and the general cites the lethal threat which is apparently common knowledge among the rebel leadership, but Leia nags him like he's deserting for a pleasure cruise. Luke makes critical contributions during the rearguard action, Han rescues Leia during evac, and their escape until they get to Bespin is pretty much all his skill, brains and daring. He was the one who maneuvered them through an Imperial blockade and asteroid field, found shelter where Leia & 3PO thought he was crazy to look, and then was the first only one to perceive the environmental danger. Once on Bespin, Leia was, as with the Death Star escape, intuitively right not to trust Lando, but what good did it do? What was her plan to avoid him stabbing them in the back, and what did Han do against her counsel that got them locked up? After being tortured, and facing his own possible execution, Han is able to talk Chewie down from suicide by cop by appealing to Chewie's better qualities and thinking of other people. Leia, meanwhile, will later encourage Chewie's mindless homicidal tendencies to the detriment of Lando's attempt to rescue Han, and they end up moments too late. Moments that might have been better used, chasing Boba Fett, instead of strangling the guy who just uncuffed you and took a squad of Imperial troops captive. She did turn back to save Luke, after he used the Force to call her, and it was R2 who saved them from Vader.

In Jedi, Luke organized a whole rescue attempt for Han, with Leia being the only member of the team whose capture was not on purpose. Her part in the escape and rescue was killing an effectively quadriplegic foe, getting R2 to unchain her from the massive corpse, and then misfiring the barge's cannon during the fight so Luke was forced to yell for the only time in the whole battle. While she was wondering what plan their badly coiffed leaders were going to present, Han and Lando were proactively securing general's commissions so they could lead the two vital assaults of the second Death Star attack. She managed to take down a biker scout with her own crash (and had to be rescued, while Luke got himself back to the team), was rescued from other captors by Wicket and made friends with the Ewoks... which did jack-all when they decided to eat the more vital members of the mission, until Luke saved them. She shot some people during the attack on the generator, but that was all Chewie & the Ewoks, and Han and the other men planted charges while she recuperated from an arm-wound.

The character has been coasting for three decades on a garbage chute, a bikini and a couple of appallingly rude first-ever comments (from someone who self-identifies as a diplomat) to Luke & Chewie.

So, all in all, it's not surprising that under her supreme leadership of the Resistance, the First Order is completely un-phased by the loss of the Starkiller Base, and goes on to take over the galaxy, and the Resistance's personnel numbers are reduced to the passenger complement of the Millennium Falcon. When the general who had a reasonable policy about personal time and did not make a habit of shouting at the handsomest man in the movement was in charge, the evacuation of the Rebels from Echo Base was a coordinated symphony, testament to training, preparation & discipline. People were calm and collected, and there was very little scrambling around or yelling, like they already knew what they were supposed to be doing. We saw orders being issued in unhurried manner, that pertained to tactical changes based on the nature of the attack. Aside from some men in the rear guard and a few cannon and speeders, it was largely successful, with no transports getting shot down and the fleet presumably safely off somewhere else. The speeder pilots fell back to their X-wings and took off on their own. The rebel force was saved to fight another day. Under Leia, there is no fire cover, fighters are deployed haphazardly, there don't appear to be any considerations taken for defense, aside from an improvised plan Poe rammed through against the boss's wishes, we see people yelling at one another about what to bring, and basically, everything is lost, and the few survivors make it out by virtue of coincidences they could not possibly have anticipated. But that's Leia - dive into a garbage chute and hope someone else can think up the next step.

Also, she finally gets to use the Force, and while Luke's big Force moment in this movie is to comfort his sister, confront the enemy with some harsh truths, and create a critical diversion to allow the Resistance to escape the latest cul de sac into which Leia had led people, Leia's action enables her and her alone to survive an attack that killed anyone who was near by her. All those people who died in Ren's attack are her fault and her responsibility, as the commanding officer in that battle, but it's only herself she saves. The important thing, though, is a WOMAN used the Force! Yay! Consequences? Costs? What's that?

And then there was Han, whose contribution to this movie was a comment that he wasn't thrilled about his bratty emo son being trained to mess with the energy field that binds the galaxy together and control people's destiny. He had the best character arc in the original trilogy, where he stopped looking out for himself, put his friends and a cause first, and even offered the use of his beloved ship to a friend who had once betrayed him, which might very well have been the difference in Lando's success and certainly survival. His last words were an offer to sacrifice his own feelings for those of his friends. And what do the new movies do? Throw all that out. Now he's right back where he was when he met Luke & Ben in a cantina in Mos Eisley. All that growth and development and commitments to the greater good, to something bigger...gone, off-screen.

And Luke, whom we accepted couldn't be the hero anymore, and was going to be the mentor this time around, didn't bother. I tried to rationalize his disappearance after the last one, I gave it every chance, but nope. He's just sulking pointlessly. He's refusing to even have anything to do with the Force, just because he's upset about how things went down. Remember the guy who fought for the good he saw in a monster who destroyed planets and tortured his two best friends? Well THIS guy comes within a hair of murdering his nephew & the son of his oldest living friend, because he might be talking to Snoke. When the heroes of the prequel trilogy went into exile after their defeat, they did so with definite objectives, and made concrete plans to use their time constructively. Luke...not so much. The guy whose flaw was caring too much and wanting too much to do something to fix problems, even when he might make them worse has been replaced by a whinging waste who thinks more about himself than people he loves. All his time learning to master the Force, which a Jedi "uses for knowledge and defense, never attack" and his first choice about what to do with knowledge is to attack a student in his sleep. This is the work of a committee of hacks deliberately sabotaging their predecessors to disguise their own inferiority and ineptitude.

These people WANTED to make Rose and Leia and Admiral Holdo awesome, they are just so stupid, they don't know how to do that, and tell an action story at the same time. All they understand is "powerful bad guys, scrappy underdogs, plot twist!" There is no narrative reason to explain a 180 degree character change in Luke or a complete reset of Han's entire arc. The former happened because the filmmakers wanted to be contrarian and especially did not want to have a white male actually teaching anything of value or legitimately correcting a woman, much less overshadowing a matriarchal resistance movement with his hard-earned, long-honed skills and powers, and the latter happened because they didn't know how to tell Star Wars without the characters from the original movie.

"Young Skywalker. Missed you I have."

Me too, Yoda, me too.

Oh, and having your imposed diversity hire say such politically correct, anti-1% lines as "I want to smash this beautiful city" and end with "We're not going to win by fighting what we hate, but by saving what we love!" is neither consistent characterization, nor is it actually an arc, unless you give ANY reason at all for her to come up with the latter line. And she didn't save anything, she just negated the sacrifice that was Finn's choice to make, without doing anything good. She didn't take his place and destroy the cannon, it went ahead and blew through the door. Her decision left her and Finn lying in a pile of wreckage, with a non-ambulatory casualty, directly in front of the First Order's lines. They only survived because of Luke's appearance, with which they had nothing to do, nor any means of anticipating.

And that's pretty consistent in the movie, which entirely consists of men wanting to do things, women telling them they are wrong and stopping them, and the situation getting worse and worse. Maybe what the franchise needs is some grown-up directors whose balls have dropped enough to tell Kathleen Kennedy where to head in.

• Cann Oli