Review of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) by Stacy S — 06 Jan 2018

As a huge Star Wars fan, I felt that The Last Jedi was an utter disappointment. I could understand how this movie could be somewhat enjoyable to non-fans of the saga - it's not terrible as a standalone movie.

In the context of the rest of the movies, though, it's pretty damn bad. The visuals and soundtrack are great, sure, but that's a given - that should be expected of a blockbuster movie with a $200 million budget.

The real problems in this movie lie in the characters, the plot, and the pacing. As for the characters previously established in TFA - Rey is still only moderately interesting at best, Poe is no longer a well-rounded and interesting character - instead, he is now apparently nothing more than an idiot who flies carelessly into battle (yet still destroys his foes without even flinching.

..), and Finn is sent on a wild goose chase for the entire movie and gets tossed into an unnecessary (and cringeworthy) "romance". Snoke is now also dead with no explanation as to who he is. I will admit they did Kylo a bit better in this movie - in TFA, he just seemed like a wimpy emo dude with a short temper, while in this one he seems far more properly developed and interesting.

As for the new characters though, they are simply god-awful. All of them are uninteresting and forced characters - DJ is just a discount Lando, Holdo exists only to make Poe look like an even bigger idiot, and Rose is just an utterly atrocious excuse for a character, whose subplot/"romance" with Finn frankly doesn't even deserve to be in this movie.

For the original characters - Leia and Chewie are done pretty well, although I'm still 50/50 on how Luke was portrayed in this one. Now onto the plot, which was probably even worse than the characters.

During the excruciatingly boring 1.5 hour chase scene between the First Order and Resistance, the movie switches between the horrible Finn/Rose subplot and a decent yet flawed Rey/Luke/Kylo plot. For me personally, the way they portrayed the temptation of the dark side as well as the turbulent Rey/Kylo relationship was easily the most enjoyable part of this movie, but it was still unsatisfying to see that they ended up not joining forces, even after Kylo betrays Snoke, resulting in a pretty lame status quo ante bellum.

Luke's rejection of the Jedi Order was interesting as well, and indeed an unexpected turn of events, along with his new 'balance' explanation of the force. However, most of the rest of the plot was just mediocre filler content, muddled attempts at pushing messages (Was that Canto Bight story sponsored by PETA or what?) or just downright stupid moments, especially when dumb jokes were hamfisted into serious scenes, Porgs were present, or.

.. well, let's not bother bringing up that flying Leia scene. TLJ had its moments but overall it was a pretty big disappointment, especially considering that TFA was pretty good and it clearly set up a lot of potential for the sequel.

I don't exactly think it "ruined" Star Wars or anything but my hopes are definitely not high for the next one.