Review of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) by Sherri C — 01 Jan 2018

If you click the little question mark by "Audience Score," it says " The percentage of users who have rated this movie 3.5 stars or better," so I guess they aren't counting most of these reviews. I'm not going to change my review to be counted. It's a solid 2 out of 5 stars. I love everything Star Wars. I even loved the prequels. I loved The Force Awakens, too.

This movie is like crack (I would assume). When you are in the theatre, you register the big WTF moments, but the pacing and action carry you pretty well through the film so that, by the end, you are like, "That was pretty awesome." But once you come down from the adrenaline high, you crash pretty hard. It's when people start thinking about the film logically, that it starts falling apart.

I loved all the main characters. I think the actors did a great job with what they were given, but the story is just bad. I keep seeing all these reviews saying that it is "New" and "Bold," but it really isn't. It's basically The First Order Strikes Back. It does literally everything thing that Empire did and some of what Return did. I would have been fine with that, if it had been done better though. Half the time, I was wondering what the f.

First Order was waiting for. Why didn't they blow the resistance ship up? Why did they just sit there, watching them? It didn't make sense. Even if the long range weapons couldn't do the job (which obviously they could, what with shooting all the escape pods and all), why didn't they send the tie fighters out?

They intrinsically changed Luke from a character who would give up everything for friends and family and who walked into certain death to save his dad because he felt a glimmer of good in him, to a person who goes to his sleeping nephew's bedroom in the middle of the night to kill him because he senses the pull of the dark side in him. We needed something more than that to understand how he got to where he is now. Also, he unleashed the most powerful wielded of the dark side since Vader unto the galaxy and then runs and hides leaving Leia and Han (but mostly Leia) to clean up his mistake? Sorry. That just isn't Luke.

The ending might have been better if he'd actually gone to Crait or if we got some sort of a scene showing us why he couldn't raise that X-wing and fly off to join them. I'm fine with them killing him off, but it was a bad decision to make in light of Carrie Fisher's death. I understand that the movie was in the can when she died, but they had a whole year to work with it. There were two really great places in this where they could have let her go with dignity. The space flying scene was stupid, especially since current canon when out of its way to explain how Leia had no desire to learn the force. That scene would have been a fitting end. Or she could have taken Laura Dern's place. Surely a year would have been enough time to coblble together some movie magic (that would have been far less stupid than the flying scene) to put her on that ship. Then Dern (who I really didn't like, but others seem to) could have been the new leader. As it stands now, we are either going to get a film where Leia was killed offscreen, which isn't really fair to the character, or where the actress will be replaced, which would likely not make people happy. Poor JJ.

Poe will, hopefully be a new leader, though he was thoroughly chastised for being a hotheaded flyboy because that apparently doesn't fly in today's Star Wars.

Poor Finn was screwed out of any meaningful part in the film because Johnson did not seem to know what to do with him, so they sent him on a pointless side quest so that he and the audience could be lectured at by the new character. What ticks me off about it the most is they went to a planet that screams Lando, yet no Lando. Johnson said, "There is no place for Lando in this film." BS.

Phasma and Snoke were pointless, but I didn't really care about them anyway, so it didn't bother me. I liked all the Rey / Kylo interactions. I see why people call her a Mary Sue, but I like Rey anyway. I think Kylo is lying about her family, but we'll see.

I'm really sad that Hux was turned into a buffoon. He was a pretty strong and charismatic leader in TFA. There is no way Kylo can lead the First Order in any logical way from what we have seen of his character in this film and the last. Here's hoping Thrawn is waiting in the wings with an ysilemari.

It's a pretty film, and it's exciting, For me, it rates on par or above Clone Wars because I think that JJ can probably salvage it, but they really should have had him or whoever write the whole trilogy rather than turning it into an exquisite corpse. I can only hope that, beyond all the damage control Disney is doing right now, that they learn from their mistakes.