Review of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) by Fitzy-1982 — 02 Jan 2018

Wow. Where to begin. Ok, first up. The script is bad. Not just on a technical level (I'm a writer, and it is, it realy realy is), but also because Rian Johnson seems not to like Star Wars. The dialogue is atrocious, and makes the cardinal error of spelling out everything that is happening.

This is screenwriting 101. The tone is just OFF. It isn't Star Wars. There are tonal lurches all over the place. Bad humour. No sense of jeopardy. Idioms from the real world circa 2010-2020. The source of tension was so ridiculously contrived as to be non existent.

The thing that realy makes this hurt even more, is that a lot of good ground work had been done beforehand with the Force Awakens, which wasn't perfect but gave us a nice set up. Rian purposefully throws it all in the bin (when he isn't aiming jibes at Star Wars fans).

I also thought Rogue One was pretty excellent. You managed to tease me in to thinking it was possible to get semi decent new Star Wars, and now this. There's more. Much more. But I'm not going to go in to it.

I actually can't believe they managed to murder it this badly. The one redeeming element was the performance of Daisy Ridly and the fact Rian isn't directing the 3rd one. The special effects, while often tonally off at least clearly had a decent amount of talent behind.

What a shame it was so badly misdirected. I'm off to watch Rogue One. That's how you do it. Please, please, Disney. Don't let that man near another Star Wars film. Never mind a whole trilogy.