Milner's story (spoilers for this and the original)

I know this movie is much-maligned and criticized as being inferior and confusing and everything else, and after trying to watch it recently, I too found it to be a bit...much. However, I really did enjoy the John Milner story (he was my absolute favorite in the original, one of my favorite movie characters ever, and on top of that I enjoy professional drag racing along with most other forms of racing) and I was wondering if anyone else did.

If you did enjoy it, I was wondering if you also were hit with the kind of foreboding sadness at points, since we know from the epilogue of the original that he will not survive the night. Of course, that all reaches it's fever pitch with his last victory celebration and then his declaration of love to Eva (via Ole) and then the haunting image of the Deuce Coupe's taillights and the truck's headlights disappearing and neither ever reappearing.

That bit of sadness and foreboding serves to make it, at least to me, a satisfying epilogue for a character that, as I said earlier, is one of my favorites. If he was going to go out in such a senseless way, at least it happened after a day of racing and such an improbable and hard-earned victory, which was great and dramatic in itself (especially with the use of Jan and Dean's "Dead Man's Curve" for the climactic race).

Like I said, I know there seems to be widespread, if not universal, disdain or at least disappointment for this movie, but I'm hoping someone else enjoyed John's parts as much as I did.