Last night, I finally watched TROS for the first time since I saw it in theaters, and I have some thoughts. First off, I felt that one of the film's biggest weaknesses was its dialogue.

The prequels are often criticized for their strange dialogue and awkward line delivery, but I think the dialogue in TROS was even more profoundly uninspired. Characters rarely seem to respond to each other in a natural or organic way.

I was trying to pay really close attention to the Rey and Kylo scenes in the first half of the film, but I found it difficult to recall what *exactly* was said immediately after the scene ended. The dialogue is quite literally un-memorable.

This actually brings me to the main positive take away I still stand by: they didn't completely screw up Kylo/Ben's characterization (which I found to range from "acceptable" to "great"). In addition to the marked transformation back to "Ben" at the end, which I loved...

I didn't really think that he was "out of character" in the beginning of the film. It certainly wasn't exactly what I wanted, but his character seemed to be more or less stagnant between the end of TLJ and the beginning of TROS. He's still trying to do the supreme leader thing;

He's still trying to get Rey to "take his hand" (I believe he uses some variation of this phrase 3 times), and he tries to get her to do this by telling her things about her parents and offering her his evil empire. This is exactly what he did in TLJ.

But the same actions come off as "colder" here because of (1) the bad dialogue and (2) the return of the ridiculous mask. These two factors obscure the emotion that TLJ was so much more effectively able to convey.

I know a lot of people complain about Ben having no lines in the last act of the film, but I feel that this was really a blessing in disguise. I don't think it's a coincidence that the scenes I found to be the most effective were almost entirely nonverbal.

I also found the Han and Ben scene to be quite effective, but there, also not so coincidentally, the dialogue happened to be lifted almost word for word from the parallel scene in TFA.