Hands of something

Not so much inside jokes but TLJ relied a lot on your knowledge and affection for the previous films for its emotional beats and story structure. What is the force? What are Jedi? Is it a good or bad thing there are no Jedi left? Were they corrupt somehow? Are the good guys rebels or the resistance? What's the difference? Why is that random hologram R2D2 played affecting Luke so much? Who even is that? Why is Bigfoot just sort of hanging around with Rey, what's his deal? Why does anyone even need Luke, all he does is provide a brief distraction and die, is that going to do anything when the enemy has all these crazy huge ships? Can people just hyperspace to and from the good guy ship to go on side quests and no one notices? Why don't the bad guys just do that too? Were Luke and Leia lovers before? Why did they break up and why wasn't he helping her before the end? These were some of the questions I was trying to answer. All the neat callbacks to lines from other movies, the affection we have for the characters, if you strip those away TLJ is pretty rough for newcomers. I don't blame them for being disappointed by it.

A friend of mine tried to explain it as if someone sat you down and had you watch a really weak episode of season 4 of a series they really liked. All the backstory, the callbacks, inside jokes, etc are completely lost on you, and it gets increasingly awkward as it's clear you don't like it. Something that sort of threw me for a loop: he had no idea who Yoda was. I was like how can you not know who Yoda is! He's a part of pop culture! He was sort of generally aware he existed but he is relatively young and foreign born, so him appearing as a ghost out of literally nowhere, talking like a Muppet with broken English and throwing lightning bolts seemed deeply stupid to him. And I couldn't really defend it. It is sort of stupid. Without the nostalgia element it's just a new scifi franchise that had a lot of initial hype that it didn't live up to. A lot of foreign audiences are as excited to see Solo as Americans are to see a prequel about the Tars Tarkas from John Carter of Mars.