Where The Force Awakens borrowed heavily from Star Wars, I felt The Last Jedi borrowed heavily from Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. How is Empire structured? An early battle, someone (Luke) learning Jedi stuff while other stuff happens to fill the time between Jedi-learning scenes, and a showdown. How is TLJ structured? An early battle, someone (Rey) learning Jedi stuff while other stuff happens to fill the time between Jedi-learning scenes, and two showdowns (Rey v. Ren and Ren v. Luke).
I liked what they did with Luke Skywalker. Maybe they could have toned down the snark but I loved the brooding mopefest. He failed in a big way that mirrors Obi-Wan Kenobi and he hates himself for it. His reluctance to teach Rey makes perfect sense. I'm fine with just about everything from the Luke-Rey side of the film. My problems lie everywhere else.
The space chase side of the film contains all the timeline issues of Empire Strikes Back but amplifies it all by setting a hard number for the timeline (sixteen hours of fuel I believe?). That makes everything happen almost too fast for me to believe. In Empire, Luke seems to learn enough about the Force in a few days (maybe two weeks at the most?) while Vader chases down the Millennium Falcon. Granted, they set Rey up to be surging in Force sensitivity but I find it hard to believe that she learned much to strengthen her skills in the two or three days she was on Ahch-To. She's still raw, so I hope they bring Luke back to teach her more, especially after that Yoda scene. This begs the questions: how synced up are the timelines of Ahch-To and the space chase? Yeah, yeah, faster-than-light travel warping and bending the flow of time, but seriously- how long are the days on Ahch-To?
The side-mission to Canto Bight ended up being a waste of time because it accomplished nothing but setting up a fight scene inside a bisected mega-star destroyer. Even the romance between Finn and Rose failed to flourish like the romance between Han and Leia. Sure the space chase gave us a brief mutiny and a short case study on hotshot heroics and their misogynistic leanings but it felt like time poorly spent in order to fill the void between scenes with Rey.
I also have a hard time believing that the Republic didn't have some kind of army. Maybe I'm wrong, but I understood the Resistance to be a Republic-funded band of guerilla fighters acting inside First Order territory. If the old Rebel Alliance didn't beef up an army to deal with pockets of the Imperial loyalists, then they deserve to be wiped out for employing lousy military strategy. If the Republic chose to eschew a formal military in order to avoid the risk of becoming the Empire all over again, then they were naive. This is why I had so much trouble with no one responding to Leia's transmission. It's not like Starkiller Base is still around. Maybe when people get the memo that Snoke is dead and part of his fleet destroyed, their spirits will perk up and they'll find their fighting spirit again.
Either way, I'm intrigued to see what comes to be in Episode IX. There doesn't seem to be much of the past left for them to lean on and borrow from. The way forward is all wide open.