Review of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) by Jamie S — 23 Jan 2018

This films farts in the face of everything I like about Star Wars. It lobotomises and castrates the character of Luke Skywalker, it is riddled with plot holes, bloating and utterly unnecessary plot arcs, is badly paced and quite frankly, boring. And the least said about Princess Leia's Superman impression, the better.... For a long-time Star Wars fan who was pretty impressed with The Force Awakens (until judgement set in and I realised they had borrowed 80% of the original plot of A New Hope), this is a massive downer.

The writing is horribly poor, the characters are ridiculous and shallow and the story makes almost no sense. To see my favourite film franchise of all time brought to its knees with such dross, such an utter lack of effort to be either original or committed is deeply saddening.

One of the bright points of The Force Awakens were the teo protagonists, Finn and Rae. I found their characters very engaging, especially the idea of a rebellious stormtrooper with a conscience. John Boyega might just as well not be in this film however. His talents and his character are utterly wasted by the kindergarten standard writing. The only plot arc he is truly involved in is a pointless diversion seemingly designed purely to lecture us on the evils of free market capitalism. As for Rey.... ugh. The apparent sucessor to Luke Skywalker is now boring because it's very clear that she doesn't need Luke, Jedi training or character development. Whatever she turns her hand to she is immediately expert at. Luke on the other is a grizzeling coward who just wants the universe to go away and stop bothering him, despite being the most powerful being in it. It's sort of the Force meets Basil Fawlty. Gwendoline Christie is horrifically wasted AGAIN, despite being a superb actress with the stature of a valkyrie playing a character who should be an even better villain than the whiny emo who never grew out of his teen angst that is Kylo Ren. But she caps maybe five minutes of screen time in both films combined by being easilly and pointlessly killed by Finn. How the writers had the gall to waste Christie, who should have been a classy, female Darth Vader, is beyond me. Every female character in this film has been undermined and made to look stupid by cornball, amateur writing. Leia is now Mary Poppins; Phasma was a straw doll given a tiny fraction of screen time that she should have had; Rey is just an overolled munchkin with zero development and no proper arc and Rose... poor Rose. Her character is there to give us the message that the power of love and construction will beat the power of hate and destruction. She does this by quixotically sabotaging a heroic attempt by Finn to bring down the First Order's forces, putting possibly thousands of Alliance lives needlessly at risk. This makes NO sense. It's as poorly written as Vince Vaughn's character in Jurassic Park 2, who was supposed to be a heroic, undercover environmentalist, but who was actually a murderer who repeatedly put the lives of his friends at risk through incompetence. Considering Star Wars has a decades-long history of portraying women and minorities (some of them not even human!) as dashing heroes with fascinating stories, it's hard to see how one single film could blow a gigantic hole through the lot of it. Somehow though, The Last Jedi did.

I will give the film two stars instead of one as the effects are at least good enough to erase some of the memory of the execrable ones in the Prequel Trilogy. But that's where it ends. Visually and audibly very good, but is essentially a large turd coated in nail varnish.