Review of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) by Baldar A — 10 Jan 2018

It's very clear that all of the people responsible for the technical aspects of The Last Jedi were competently doing their jobs during the production of this film. These people, in my opinion, deserve a five-star rating for their enormously positive and skillful efforts to create a professional product.

Unfortunately, The Last Jedi was written as if it were a stand-alone movie, rather than the second part of a three-part trilogy. It completely ignores or sloughs off virtually all plot points either created, left open or unfulfilled, during The Force Awakens. As if this weren't bad enough, it also largely ignores the direction which that movie was obviously trying to take the new trilogy, and it does so, for no apparent reason.

What Disney/Lucasfilm desperately needed when they decided to create the next Star Wars trilogy was someone in a position much like that of the Marvel Universe's Kevin Feige, who directs the overall story line and keeps some level of creative control across the trilogy. This would have led to fewer issues between movies as well as an overall cohesive story line. Now all we're left with is this disappointing mess. Yes, it looks like a Star Wars movie. Yes, it sounds like a Star Wars movie. But, at the end of the day when taking an overall look at the plot, looking at the character development, looking at the story arc for the trilogy and comparing it to the epic-nature of the Star Wars franchise, this is more like a high-priced knock-off of a Star Wars movie than an actual Star Wars movie.

One of the glaring errors of judgement made is the heavy-handed political message, which has no place in an epic space-opera, and that's a problem. I don't know why both of Kathleen Kennedy's Star Wars movies are more interested in inserting politics at the expense of their audience into what should be a politically-neutral epic. I don't know why inserting this heavy-handed political message was more important to her and Rian Johnson than just telling a good, non-divisive story which virtually everyone could enjoy.

In the end it doesn't matter. All that matters is how much money is in the till at the end of every week. That, hopefully, will make someone way high up in the Disney food-chain take another look at the negative-direction their $4 Billion investment is taking. Maybe, just maybe, it will cause some Disney executive to make appropriate staffing changes to correct the course this mess has taken. I hope so. I really, really hope so, but I'm not going to hold my breath. And when "Solo a Star Wars story" and "Episode XII" come out, I'm going to wait to see what all of the spoiler reviews on YouTube have to say about them before I decide if I'm even going to bother to see them in the theater. Kathleen Kennedy, J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson may have made this bed, unfortunately, the rest of us have to sleep in it.