If you have watched The Last Jedi or read Resistance Reborn you may have noticed something is becoming very important that wasn’t before, fuel. The whole plot line in The Last Jedi was related to the fact the Resistance only had 18 hours of fuel left. I understand what the writers are trying to do here but they are doing it all wrong. They are trying to show how down, and almost out, the Resistance really is.
In the Original Trilogy, the Rebellion was well funded and supported, then the Empire was defeated. After this the New Republic was formed, but it was not the Republic of the Prequel Trilogy, this was a fractured government. 
With many mini-governments forming throughout the galaxy, the New Republic needed soldiers but was scared of amassing a standing military due to the Empire. This is covered in the Aftermath Trilogy, so the Republic kept a secret military, which was the Resistance. The secret was, as the Republic got stronger the Resistance was needed less and less, so their funding started to dry up. Then the First Order came and destroyed the New Republic and with this, the Resistance lost its main cash flow, and a lot of its allies. The Resistance was now in a bind. It’s not cheap to keep a standing military, and some resources start to become scarce. The writers in the Star Wars universe picked fuel to show this dire situation, because it was easy, but it didn’t play well.
The hard thing about unofficial resistances, even in the real world, is unless they have funding and resources they usually fall. Bullets, food, medical supplies, people and even fuel start to run out. When this happens the resistances usually start to fall apart. I really believe that the writers in the Star Wars universe are trying to show how bad off the Resistance is, but they could have done it so much better.
I think if they wanted to get the point across in The Last Jedi we should have seen more of how a resistance falls and less of a slow and kind poorly played out chase scene. Imagine, troops going AWOL because they are hungry. 
A battle in which we’re watching the heroes really needing to pay attention to how much they’re using their weapons. The Resistance pinned up against the wall, stealing weapons off dead Stormtroopers just so they can keep fighting. I mean the Finn and Rose’s B-Plot could have been a heist plot with them going to steal supplies to keep the Resistance up and running. Instead we got a semi-OK plot that used Benicio Del Toro not so well to get a point across about war, again. I can only think how much better The Last Jedi could have been if they took the time to focus on the fact the Resistance lost almost all of its senior leadership, a real hit to the Resistance! This is something that Resistance Reborn explores well. Instead they focused on fuel, and to me it just seemed to play way too big a role and just didn’t get the point across of how close the Resistance was to being extinguished throughout the entire movie.
I know it’s in vogue to crap on The Last Jedi, which I just spent almost this whole write up doing, but I actually think it’s a really good movie and had the most original plot to a main Star Wars movies since The Empire Strikes Back. With all that said in some areas it didn’t do the best job getting some of the subtleties of the story across. I am sure a lot of people didn’t look upon the fuel issue and see a resistance on it’s last leg. They saw something they didn’t fully understand. So I guess my ask is, for Star Wars writers, go a little farther and get that point across. Maybe it’s because they lost Joseph Campbell, who was key to the Original Trilogies mythology, but that’s a story for another day.
