Review of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) by Tomsnowball — 03 Jan 2018

Although visually impressive, this film is a real mess of pointless plots, zero character development, and ultimately unsatisfying gotcha moments which attempt to 'reset' the Star Wars franchise with 'something different' but ultimately leave the viewer confused and confounded. As a stand-alone sci-fi/fantasy flick it is perhaps not too bad, but taken as part of a long epic story it seems to make absolutely zero sense. Cliffhangers and characters set up in the 'The Force Awakens' turn out to be red herrings and are dropped unceremoniously. New characters are introduced (Purple hair lady, random annoying Asian chick) out of the blue apparently to appeal to diversity quotas. Old characters are either killed without ceremony (Admiral Ackbar) or come back to life in Superman style (Leia). Bad comedy permeates nearly every scene, puncturing any attempt to create suspense. What plot points do work are shamelessly ripped off from the original movies.

The franchise's great hero returns and is a miserable old man sitting on a rock who doesn't want to play ball any more. He has gone from being the great optimist to a curmudgeon with a whisky bottle. Why? His teenage nephew was a bit angsty. When he finally gets off his ass to do something he just becomes a hologram or something and vanishes into thin air. Is that it? Luke Skywalker is now Jeff Lebowski with less humour and white russians. The new lead character Rey is able without any explanation to use The Force without any training. Entire subplots divert to meaningless planets which go nowhere. Hamfisted political points (capitalism and patriarchy bad, mmkay) are shoehorned into this film, despite the irony of it being a multi-billion dollar global franchise which never really had a 'diversity problem' in the first instance.

But nothing matters, this film will make squillions of dollars and Disney will milk this cash cow for all it can get (the second thing we see of Luke is him milking some weird alien cow on his rock, surely an in-joke about this very fact) and The Last Jedi will fade into memory while an endless stream of CGI sequels stretch into space and devalue the epic majesty and wonder of the original trilogy. Somewhere in a galaxy not very far far away, fat Hollywood execs are laughing all the way to the bank....