About watching the new Star Wars trilogy

Well they ignored the prequels almost entirely... and they picked and chose what they wanted to ignore from the OT... may the force be with you (you'll need it).

Sure, you can watch the sequels without having seen the prequels. There aren't many overt references to the prequel trilogy - there wouldn't need to be, not like any of those characters are still alive - and the few that are there don't play an essential role in the storytelling any more than, say, Luke asking old Ben about the clone wars in the original film.

What Martin said

Prequels are definitely flawed, but are much more interesting than the new  trilogy.I'd fully recommend watching  the first two seasons of The Mandalorian though, which is probably the best live action Star Wars content since the original  trilogy.  The new trilogy almost completely killed my enthusiasm for wanting to watch anything Star Wars related ever again   but The Mandalorian was really good, and has the qualities that people  liked so much about the original trilogy,  without just being an uninspired copy of it.

You don't need to watch the prequels in order to understand the sequels, but I think they're actually interesting to view back to back in a way because both trilogies are failures overall but in very different ways. The prequels are very poorly executed but have some good ideas and are clearly the product of a singular vision... you can see potential in its broad outline. The sequel trilogy (with the exception of The Last Jedi, which has some truly great and inspired stuff in it) feels more like committee-made product and pandering fan service that is much less cohesive as a unit because of the shift in writer/directors from film to film.

Not sure if anyone has seen this video from last year, but it's an excellent, extremely well-researched investigation into the process of developing TFA after Lucas sold the rights to Disney and how/why his own storyline for the sequel trilogy was discarded. It's really really really long (broken down into sections thankfully) but pretty fascinating in how it exhaustively presents the conflicting accounts from JJ Abrams, Kathleen Kennedy, Bob Iger, Mark Hamill, etc., how much of a plan there was at the outset, and the timeline of events during pre-production.
 
The main point of the video is that the author doesn't consider the sequel trilogy to be canon but rather licensed fan fiction because they aren't Lucas's ideas (he only considers material from the creator to be canon), and he primarily holds Abrams responsible for discarding Lucas's ideas. He's pretty vitriolic towards Abrams but is kinder to Kennedy, and is also rather critical of the segment of the fanbase who claims that Rian Johnson "ruined" Abrams' "precious plans" for the trilogy. The weakest part of the video though is when he attempts to actually critique the sequels themselves because he doesn't really argue his criticisms in any depth, so it seems pretty surface-level and simplistic - a lot of his critiques seem like he doesn't think very hard about how certain things are motivated by broader thematic ideas or more complex character psychology, so he does seem like a butthurt fanboy when he talks about certain creative choices that he doesn't like. His tone can be condescending at times, but he can also be pretty funny too, especially in his critique of Abrams' "mystery box" philosophy. I recommend the video mostly for its journalistic aspects.

Curious what people's thoughts are on it, though I get it if it's way too long to sit through.

    

Out of curiosity, guys: Thoughts on the spinoffs? I've only seen Rogue One, which I thought was really good. One-dimensional characters, but very clearly drawn in their archetypes, and all of them entertaining. And it is the only time (outside of the final battle in A New Hope) that this universe ever felt like Star Wars.

I can't quite pin down when this became some blazing hot take in geekdom but I thoroughly enjoyed Force Awakens and Last Jedi, I thought they had so much energy and heart. I love the whole vibe of those two.

Rise of Skywalker was pretty bad, Rogue One was fine, Solo okay, Mandalorian pretty good. The prequels aren't as bad as they were made out to be but now I feel like people who hate the Disney stuff really overcompensate in defending their merits. They are just kind of dull except for some climactic action moments when Lucas wakes up a bit, and McDiarmid in III.

And no, the prequels aren't necessary to understand the sequels.