Review of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) by Fatalxception — 18 Jan 2018

This movie was such a disappointment to me. I've been such a Star Wars fan for such a long time, and this movie, is the first time I've really disliked the whole movie (I mean, nobody liked Jar Jar, but he didn't ruin the whole movie).

So when Disney decided to un-cannonize the expanded universe, that was hard enough, after all, it was the incredible popularity of those books and comics that brought Star Wars back into popularity enough to spawn off new trilogies and spin offs. But we could deal, it wasn't that bad, the new cannon would borrow some of the best story-lines and characters and make a whole new and interesting followup to finally finish off the stories.

This movie kind of feels like a slap in the face to all big fans of the Franchise. It decides to either not answer, or flippantly answer many of the big questions we had coming out of the last movie (who is Snoke? Who were Rey's parents?). The entire Finn/codebreaker story is superfluous to the movie. They've gotten rid of the classic "bombers" from the past and introduced some kind of slow moving gravity style bombers instead of missile style torpedoes (in space??). Just awful. Instead of homages to the popular ideas coming from the expanded universe, it stomps over everything we've come to love, the new ideas are bad, their execution poor.

The pluses are what you might expect. The movies does have a nice big budget for effects, and nice balanced cast, and mostly good acting (I didn't like the role they wrote for Luke, but that isn't his fault). So it does have some epic fights, great music, and big scenes. These things are hard to enjoy; however, because there are so many huuuuuge plot holes in the movie, and it draaaags on for an incredibly long time. At the end of the movie, the most disappointing thing for me is the overall arc they've taken the universe in. We went from new republic, to dictatorship with the empire, then rebellion. But then after return of the Jedi, I Han and Leia split up, Han lost the falcon, Luke went into seclusion, and the rebellion got crushed? We've now lost so many of our beloved characters, even the death of Akbar was just brushed past in seconds. By the end of this movie the rebellion is down to a dozen people running away in the rediscovered but damaged millennium falcon? The final ground fight was going to be the "seed of a new rebellion"? Why would anyone be inspired to join a rebellion anew, the last one was apparently ruthlessly crushed, to the point of irrelevance. I'll go see the last movie, but these films no longer feel like an ever enriching, consistent expanding universe and storyline, but rather they just do a deus ex machina whenever they want to take a hard left turn or right turn for the plot, and take stories in random new directions. I have more hope for the spinoffs.