Review of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) by Bug D — 24 Jan 2018

===Summary===.

Two words - Executive meddling.

This abysmal, ridiculous travesty is a classic case of executive meddling and possibly one of the worst examples in cinema history. I would guess that what we witnessed was only a tiny sliver of what the director originally intended - what we got, instead, was a crappy, plastic, Disney film with Star Wars flavouring and an amputated soul. It seemed to be openly insulting to fans and disrespectful to both the late Carrie Fisher,.

Mark Hamill, George Lucas and the Star Wars legacy itself.

I might say that it's the worst Star Wars film ever, by a mile, but that would mean acknowledging that it actually is a Star Wars film, which it isn't. There is not one scene that carries any weight at all and when it threatens any sort of gravitas - there's a cheap throwaway gag to diffuse the tension. It can only be ranked below The Holiday Special.

It's incoherent, tone-deaf, stupid and badly-written from start to finish but I'm giving it 1 star for the following reasons:-.

1) Mark Hamill's performance, despite what he was given to work with.

2) Skellig Michael's performance as Ahch-To. What a waste of a beautiful and fragile location.

So, this review contains spoilers and sarcasm.

===The experience of watching it (a month ago)===.

I had a bad feeling as soon as we heard the opening phrase of the score, right after the crawl - borrowed/re-used/recycled from A New Hope - which was worrying. Then we had a brief glimpse of the rebel base before we saw the Star Destroyers arrive with no establishing of scene or characters. We then see Ade Edmondson as Hux's lieutenant which took me right out of the film - I was expecting him to start talking like Vyvyan, which he looked like he really wanted to do.

After laughing nervously at the 'jokes' in the opening battle scene, which was like watching a video game someone else is playing, I started telling myself that it was just a shaky start and any minute, it's going to stop being shit. I was wrong.

When we finally saw Luke and Rey on Ahch-To, I was relieved and relaxed until he tossed the lightsaber over his shoulder like it was a bag of dog turds. Two years for that. Thanks.

I stopped laughing when we got to the milk scene. There might as well have been a scrolling ticker tape subtitle saying "Look - we're milking this Star Wars cow. Just try and stop us!". Mark Hamill looked like he almost.

Winked at the camera - perhaps he did and they just cut it out to preserve the subtle intrigue of the scene.

There was a point when I started to get angry - we had seen Rey swing her lightsaber repeatedly close to a giant piece of rock and then she chops it off with the rubble crashing down and nearly squashing a fish nun far below (one of the few concepts I liked). So you have established this beautiful island temple with its ancient rocks and structures, tended to by an equally ancient species of sentient aquatic nuns and you have your heroic lead decide to vandalise an enormous rock, nearly killing one of those creatures. That is not Star Wars.

By the time they couldn't even be bothered to show us Admiral Ackbar's death, I was checking my watch and resisting the urge to walk out. I booed during the credits and approached one of the staff members as we left and asked if anyone had complained or asked for money back - that sort of thing. The kid said yeah but that he liked it - when I asked why he said something like "the Porgs were good". I started to back away slowly, made my excuses and left.

===Criticisms===.

I'm not going to into everything that I thought was flawed because they've been highlighted at length elsewhere, so here's some other stuff:-.

I am not going to praise the Cinematography and SFX because because I didn't think it was that good, there were some awful shots and a lot of murkiness. Decent effects almost become irrelevent when they're serving such an awful, half-baked story.

They couldn't even get the bloody crawl right.

They couldn't even be bothered to include "I have a bad feeling about this". Beeps don't count.

The set design and creature design seemed hurried as they just looked cheap and crappy - Snoke's red pimp palace and the roasted Porg, which just looked like a plastic bath toy, are just two examples I can think of.

It felt like John Williams just phoned the score in - I can't say I blame him - if you are one of the most distinguished film composers ever, you can have a fruitful artistic collaboration with a distinguished director but you can't with a bunch of Disney executives.

One of my favourite characters from TFA was Maz Kanata and I was looking forward to seeing how her character would develop. Turns out she's the shoe shine guy out of Police Squad - you can Skype her anytime and she'll give you the answers you need, even if she's in the middle of a hectic and immersive 3D video game.

For all the people that want to see it removed from canon, you can just write this film off because nothing happens at all, characters haven't developed and as for Snoke - who cares? Did any else notice that when.

Snoke lost his temper and was flinging Rey around Red Pimp HQ, he actually sounded like Sith Gollum:-.

"We hates them, nasty fat Jedises!".

Of course we'll see Mark Hamill again but the only thing that can't be undone is poor Admiral Ackbar. That's a real shame.

Then there's this...

===Priness Mary Leia Organoppins===.

As we all know, we've had to completely re-examine and re-evaluate our comprehension of physics since this film came out. We now know that space isn't a vaccuum it's just that the weather's different and the oxygen's a bit thinner. Gravity is much slower so bombs take much longer to fall out of space ships, which adds to the tension.

So, this scene could have been the highlight of the film and a wonderful call-back to the original trilogy, when Princess Leia's home planet of Krypton was destroyed by the Empire, and we could finally get to see her use her super Force Flying powers that have been talked about so many many times but again, they managed to ruin it:-.

1) Why did they not use John Williams' Superman theme?

2) Why wasn't Princess Leia holding a special Resistance umbrella which would've protected her from all that freezing cold space rain?

3) How did they all know she wanted to come back inside the spaceship, after all, she didn't ring the doorbell?

4) Space is extremely muddy and she didn't wipe her feet when she came back in. I think everyone noticed but were too polite to mention it - she IS a Princess after all, I suppose.

===Conclusion===.

I don't think I ever want to watch this again but I also don't think it's ruined Star Wars because there is hope. This is either going to be the norm or an aberration - I think Disney know it's the latter as they appear have been back-pedalling, flooding the internets with PR and sending crates of booze to every major critic out there. There are two issues, I believe, that need to be addressed:-.

1) Time.

Traditionally, Star Wars episodes have generally had a production cycle of 3 years, now it's 2 years because money. You could argue 1 year to develop the script, one year to shoot and one year post production. It's glaringly obvious that the script was not ready by the time shooting was scheduled, so either they revert back to the 3 year cycle, which seems unlikely or just put more resources into script development. Much much more.

2) Seniority of the director.

I reckon that the only thing Rian Johnson can be blamed for is not standing up to the executives, thus becoming nothing more than a puppet. This seems true, especially when you consider the context of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller being fired from Solo and Colin Trevorrow suffering the same removal from the director's seat of Episode IX. You need clout to stand up to these executives so that there's at least some compromise. What major moneyspinning blockbusters to his name could Rian Johnson point to when they started messing with his script? In this Disney age, only a senior and accomplished director can do the job and stand his ground. I'm sure we can all think of a few auteur directors that could do real justice to Star Wars.

By the way, if Episode IX begins with "Some time in the future, in a galaxy quite, quite near..." I'll admit that this is all truly over.