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Rewatching The Last Jedi, it astonishes me how many opportunities the movie chose to squander. I have never seen a sequel so determined to do absolutely nothing with any of the setups or characters from a previous installment, or to remove the scenes that would carry the most emotional weight, and it’s really, really depressing to me. 

1. It retreads the Empire-Rebel conflict. The setup was there for a small, outmatched First Order, which had lost most of its resources with Starkiller Base, up against a mostly-intact New Republic, but I guess no one in the NR cares enough about the state of the galaxy to fight back. The NR is completely ignored and never even seen as a functioning entity, and everyone seems to use “Rebels” and “Resistance” interchangeably.
2. A Force-using protagonist was introduced who’s shown to be quite aggressive and reckless, potentially making her a more morally-grey character, then she turns out to be good by definition no matter what she does because she only exists to balance out the evil antagonist.
3. A former member of the Evil Army of Evil, who turns out to be one of the most empathetic characters in the saga, who used to be a cog in the machine, deserted them on moral grounds. You want subversion, there it is. A faceless, disposable mook became the deuteragonist. Or he was. Now he has his experiences as a child soldier played for laughs by making it seem like he was the entire First Order’s janitor instead of an capable, promising soldier who rejected them.
4. They had an antagonist who’d modeled himself after Darth Vader and was deliberately shown to reject redemption when offered, then the second movie is devoted to showing he’s potentially redeemable only to reiterate the same point.
5. There’s a journey to the first Jedi temple. Nothing is learned about the origins of the Jedi, or who the first Jedi were. The original Jedi texts are present. They are never read from. Very little information about the Jedi can be gleaned from this location, aside from what appears to be a focus on balance between the light and dark, judging from one mosaic. Luke’s criticisms of the Jedi apply to the order during the prequels, he doesn’t explain anything about how they began.
6. The temple has been watched over by a group of caretakers for an unknown amount of time and for unknown reasons. They appear in two scenes, both of which are comic relief, and answer next to nothing about them or their culture.
7. Rey’s training under Luke consists of two lessons (out of three he had promised, the third was deleted) and swinging a lightsaber around, unsupervised, for about thirty seconds.
8. Rey picking up the use of the Force so easily was a waste. Characters training in fiction is a great opportunity to see how they face and overcome challenges, and in the case of fantastical settings, to build up the mechanics of the world and how scifi/magical elements work. This is why Luke’s training with Yoda in ESB was so interesting. We can’t see Rey siphoning the skills from Kylo’s brain, we need to be told that’s what’s happening to explain how she got so strong so fast. The fact there’s an explanation for it doesn’t make it interesting to watch.
9. They didn’t even go all in with making Rey a completely independent character. If you want to contrast her with Kylo, being someone with no significant background or family vs someone born to a legacy and loving family who spat on it all, show why she’s worthier of it. Now instead of showing she’s a better heir than Kylo while having no blood relation to Luke, her interactions with him are tense at best and physically violent at worst. Instead of the expected outcome of her being important because she’s related to Luke, she’s important because the Force made her Kylo’s antithesis and dumped a bunch of power on her. Another character is still the source of her involvement in the narrative, just for a different, less-interesting reason. Instead of having the torch passed to her by her father, Rey gets shackled to a Neo-Nazi school shooter. 
10. They wanted to show a hero coming from an unassuming background, and did nothing with Finn, whose background is unknown, never implied to be important, and considering the FO probably doesn’t bother to keep detailed records of its child soldiers, potentially impossible to find out.
11. Didn’t have Leia mourn Han at all, and removed his funeral from the film despite initial plans to include it.
12. They deleted the scene showing Luke grieving over Han’s death.
13. They deleted the scene that develops Phasma by exposing her cowardice, develops Finn by letting him be the one to confront her over Starkiller’s destruction, and develops the stormtroopers by depicting them as real people with their own doubts and the potential for revolt. All that was gone in favor of “Let’s go, chrome dome”.
14. They deleted the scene set during the evacuation depicting Connis warning Poe that they needed more time to escape, which is what motivated him to go against the FO fleet and buy time, showing his devotion to his comrades and willingness to throw himself in danger to protect them. This is cut, and Poe is repeatedly implied to be hot-headed and glory-seeking despite his actions being based around the aforementioned motives and no alternative scenes were included, we’re just told he was being reckless despite his behavior in both movies being inconsistent with that. Poe’s actions cost the bombers, but it took out the dreadnought and saved the people on the transports.
15. With all the talk about the core theme of “failure”, instead of having the Resistance attack on the dreadnought fail, it succeeds. They could’ve shown the plucky, rag-tag fighters utterly fail against the First Order’s indomitable war machine, but instead, they accomplish their goal. Yeah, they lost their bombers. Costing about 50 casualties and the most incompetently-designed ships in the franchise doesn’t matter much compared to 215,000 enemy combatants and the FO’s second-largest warship getting taken out. That’s a damn good resource exchange and I don’t know how much better than a 4000:1 kill ratio Poe would need for people to stop criticizing him. It’s probably higher than that already depending on how many people went down with Starkiller Base. The attack on the first Death Star cost all but three of the fighters sent to destroy it, suffering heavy losses doesn’t make it a defeat.
16. With Paige dead, and the movie treating the successful destruction of the dreadnought as a disaster and entirely Poe’s fault, Rose never confronts him about how he led her sister into the battle that killed her despite interacting after Rose’s introduction focused on her grief. 
17. Rose is established as a mechanic, and never shown making use of those skills.
18. Admiral Ackbar is killed after giving him a single line anyone else could’ve delivered. Yeah, he’s liked by fans almost solely because of the “It’s a trap!” line, but that’s no reason to do absolutely nothing with him.
19. Jessika Pava and Temmin Wexley are just gone, apparently. They were minor characters, but they were still there, they could’ve been interesting, and now they’re gone. They’re either dead, which sucks, or they’re off with other Resistance forces elsewhere, which undermines the FO’s single-minded focus on the fleet we’re shown. A sequel should not rely on people being ambivalent to characters from previous installments to make sense.
20. Finn and Poe are prevented from interacting by separating them.
21. Rey and Finn are prevented from interacting beyond a hug, and they deleted a scene where Finn sees Rey’s parting promise to meet him again, shown to him by BB-8, who tries to comfort Finn. Like with Poe’s deleted scene, this provides context to his actions and was removed to make the character look worse, even though we can infer his motives from his development in the last movie.
22. Luke and Leia are prevented from interacting by putting Leia into a coma.
23. Leia is put into a coma so she can’t do anything else, either. When she’s finally out of the coma and calls for help from her allies across the galaxy, no one responds. Leia Organa, the last princess of Alderaan, who was present at the biggest battles of the Galactic Civil War, who led the Resistance against the galaxy’s would-be oppressor, can’t inspire anyone to action.
24. It’s asserted that the Jedi do not own the Force, which is a well-established aspect of the universe in many other Star Wars works. Then no new insights into it unconnected to Jedi teachings are provided. The film ends with Rey carrying on the Jedi’s legacy anyway.
25. Maz Kanata, a Force-sensitive non-Jedi, appears for a brief cameo and is not connected to the whole anti-Jedi bent the film’s on at all.
26. Both Rey and Kylo state they’ve had visions of each other’s future which inform their actions and expectations of each other. Neither are shown or described in detail. In Kylo’s case this might be understandable because he’s almost never the viewpoint character, but Rey was shown visions of herself by the Force in that cave, something could’ve been added there.
27. What happened to Luke’s green lightsaber? I assumed it was destroyed when that hut collapsed on him in the flashback, but I can’t find any confirmation of that. It’s the saber he constructed himself and wielded after losing his father’s, it’s relevant to his character, but it’s completely forgotten. Including by Luke himself since he Force-holograms up the old blue one.
28. No information is provided on the Knights of Ren and the film doesn’t even acknowledge their existence. They are presumably other students of Luke’s, but neither they nor the other Jedi-in-training they presumably killed are seen. Apparently they were considered as replacements for the Praetorian Guards, but were cut because that wouldn’t make sense and there was no room for them otherwise. Here’s a thought: if Kylo Ren is taking over the First Order from Snoke, have him fight the guards alongside the knights.
29. No information is provided on Rey’s parents aside from their irrelevance. If what Kylo said was true, have the guts to show the damn drunks explicitly and stick to that explanation if you’re going to do it. It also doesn’t address who was on that ship in Rey’s flashback in TFA.
30. No information is provided whatsoever about Snoke, including him being completely absent from the flashback scenes showing the moments before Kylo Ren destroyed the new Jedi despite his explicitly-stated relevance to Kylo’s development around that time.

It’s nothing. This movie is nothing. The problem isn’t “subverting expectations”, the movie actively doesn’t use what it’s given and then replaces potential payoffs with nothing. These are all setups provided either by The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi itself, and the movie either ignores them or cuts them out for the sake of time. It’s become a cliché criticism to bring up the milking scene, but the fact they left that in while cutting out all those deleted scenes shows how monumentally fucked up Rian Johnson’s priorities are. What really hurts is that it could’ve been great, but everything that could’ve had emotional weight and character depth was deliberately stripped out.