This post contains no major spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi—but it does include some aspects about the film already known to the general public, through marketing material and interviews. If you want to go into Episode VIII pure as the driven salt on the mining planet Crait, now is your time to leave. If not, let’s dive into whether this movie earns all 152 minutes of its very lengthy run time—or if there is some intergalactic fat that needed trimming.

In the two years since The Force Awakens debuted to rave reviews, crowd-pleasing cheers, and a record-breaking box office, there’s been some shift in public opinion about the J.J. Abrams-helmed return to the Star Wars franchise—led by those who think The Force Awakens is a little too much like Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. (That’s the gentler version; some harsher critics will call it a beat-for-beat remake.) And though that’s not an opinion I share, it should come as no surprise to either The Force Awakens fans or detractors that The Last Jedi—the second installment in this new trilogy—shares plenty of D.N.A. with The Empire Strikes Back. If you’ve followed any of the marketing around this film—including the Vanity Fair cover story—you’d know that Rey (Daisy Ridley), like Luke (Mark Hamill) before her, will spend a good deal of the film separated from the action of her rebel friends, training in a remote location with an eccentric Jedi. Just swap the swamps and caves of Dagobah for the foggy cliffs and caves of Ahch-To, and you’ve got Luke and Yoda born again—only this time, the Skywalker student has become the master.

The great news about The Last Jedi is that every part of this plot sings. Star Wars is always in danger of losing its light-adventure-loving fan base when it dives too deeply into the mystical world of what Han Solo once called a “hokey religion,” a.k.a. the Force. But thanks to a number of factors—including the best live-action performance of Hamill’s career, a parade of delightful new critters, some very light and self-aware fan service, Rey’s earnest, muscular devotion to what she believes is right, a critical examination of a light and dark philosophy, and a final, crucial element of the Ahch-To scenes that I won’t spoil—everything involved in this story line feels tight and never drags.

But the successes of Ahch-To cause problems elsewhere in the film during the first watch. Whenever the action strays from Rey, it seems impatient to return. There are urgent mysteries for her to solve: the identity of her parents, what happened to force Luke into hiding, and whether we will ever seem him play hero again.

In The Empire Strikes Back, while Luke was spelunking sleevelessly in Dagobah, the other half of the film followed Han, Leia, C-3PO, and Chewie to Cloud City, where Lando Calrissian led our rebel heroes straight into Darth Vader’s clutches. To quote Stefon from S.N.L., the Cloud City plotline of Empire had everything: the salty will they/won’t they of Han and Leia, the fussy fright of C-3PO on a mission, space capes, daring hallway-blaster fights, and surprise Vader.

The Cloud City equivalent in The Last Jedi, however, suffers in comparison. The rebel fleet—including Leia, Poe Dameron, Finn, and newcomers Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern) and Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran)—is trapped in a glacial game of intergalactic cat and mouse with the First Order, led by Domhnall Gleeson’s General Hux and Andy Serkis as Supreme Leader Snoke. Without diving into details as to why, it’s been revealed in marketing material that Rose and Finn go on a side mission to the glitzy city of Canto Bight—and here, as several dozen fans, journalists, and critics at The Last Jedi premiere agreed with me, is where the movie risks losing its audience. Yes, Canto Bight was controversial even before The Last Jedi premiered to general audiences.