Jar Jar was the key to all this....

Rating: 2/10 (20 December 2019)

Sitting in the theater as this movie rushed from plot point to plot point, no single scene was still long enough for me to absorb the situation. There was so much potential for them to settle into a scene and talk but it was like a roller coaster, it never stopped for a second. About twenty minutes into the film I wondered how a two and half hour film could already feel so rushed. It had no atmosphere, it never felt like anyone stayed at any place long enough. I was visually assaulted with images just popping up all over the place. I recall a tiny alien popping up like a cartoon in a star ship. Setting, after Setting, after Setting. The plot just went all over the place.
Visuals were good as it has a good budget, it's Disney. Though it felt like a blinking strobe light at times. Too much going on, so much stuff thrown at us all at once.
Audio wasn't noticed, I can't recall anything that really stood out. The score didn't even cross my mind and I can't remember it.
So many character's were introduced, but nothing was really done with them save a few expository lines that made quick superficial arcs. It's like they don't try to put any weight into the movies anymore. It's a check list, introduce all these characters, give them one thing to say and resolve it nice and neat by the end of the movie.
Even the older characters felt shallow, Lando Calrissian was just passed by and then returned to help save the day. General Hux, much like Snoke, is thrown away after a very shallow revelation that he was a spy. Nothing about Hux's character went anywhere, it looked like they were leading to something but he just gets killed off. Snoke is now reduced to nothing more than a puppet for Palpatine, some bizarre clone. It's subversive....but you can disappoint people by snuffing out their expectations, we've learned this before. A surprise isn't conducive to good or bad.
Character's feel like they appear out of the woodwork when the plot demands that they are needed. This is an example of Deus Ex Machina. Where the heroes are saved at the last minute. While Deus Ex Machina can be done tastefully, usually it's done because the writer has written themselves into a corner and needs to change the situation so their characters can survive what would have been overwhelming odds.
The duality between Rey and Kylo had a lot of potential, it was probably one of the stronger story lines in the film and only suffered because of the poor pacing of the movie and the sudden ad hoc addition of Palpatine, who detracted from the potential chemistry the two characters could have had by just facing each other and playing off of their conflict.
Leah was utilized very tastefully in how she unified people. May she rest in peace.
Several characters are added to this film, but they only get a few lines to really develop themselves and seem trivial to the overall plot. A romance is suggested between Poe and the woman with the helmet, (I can't for the life of me recall their names off of the top of my head that's how poorly developed they were) but it goes nowhere, and because she wasn't introduced in the other films, the helmet woman has no real gravity for the audience to back her.
The other female character is only really in the movie to form solidarity with Finn because she was another storm trooper that rebelled, and it's like that's the only reason she was in the film, to just show that more people were like Finn. This would have been a really interesting story line to follow if they had established it in the earlier films and developed them.
This is sad, I noticed a lot of potential is wasted.
Rose Tico and Maz Kanata, introduced in the other films, are basically abandoned, with only a handful of lines. They don't really do anything, they're just there to be there. Dominic Monaghan is in this movie....that's it, he just says a line or two. Wedge Antilles gets a cameo....the director's friends get cameos too. It's like cutting off pieces of meat and allocating it to your friends around the fresh kill. DO SOMETHING WITH THESE PEOPLE, don't just establish them in one movie and do nothing with them in the next like some toddler who grows bored with old toys tossing them away for new ones.
This leads to my other problem. Poe and Finn had REALLY good chemistry in the film. I noticed it right away, if they had written the previous films with these two characters doing things and going through adventures this trilogy could have had the potential to be great. They almost did do that in the Force Awakens. It's as if the writer's had some really good potential plot lines, but instead for whatever reason, made some bizarre choices throughout this trilogy that obfuscated everything. It made me realize that too much stuff was going on, too many characters were doing too many things, like they decided to take all the potential good stories they could have developed over the trilogy and mash them together....making it ineligible. Again the characters they added throughout these films felt tacked on, instead of going further with (for example) Rose Tico, or Maz Kanata, they added in new characters that took too much time that could have been utilized to create a film with more focus and more atmosphere, something Rian Johnson, despite the choices he made with the narrative, had accomplished in his film. I actually felt an atmosphere when watching The Last Jedi, there was depth, the choices he made just took it in a direction that was hard to follow. Perhaps the strict deadlines need to be forgone, though greed will prevent that.
We find out that Poe has a criminal past, something never even hinted at in the previous films, but would have made those previous films more interesting. But seeing that originally they were going to kill Poe off in the Force Awakens, they must have waited to develop his character, and it shows.
Things just randomly appeared, I'll preemptively defend the example of the yellow light saber at the end of the film only to counter it. The defenders are going to tell you what the light saber represents Rey becoming the balance of the force. But it appeared out of nowhere with no real buildup, she just pulls it out and the audience is expected to know what it means. Was it Leah's Lightsaber?
The Emperor was obviously thrown in to replace Snoke. The entire scene with all the explosions and life sucking and lightning destroying everything felt like a Marvel movie. It was just the Return of the Jedi but with more CG, and more explosions. The voices of all the other Jedi characters, though a quaint gesture, was typical for films like this.
The force is cheap as dirt, overused and a plot contrivance, it can do anything the screenwriters want it to. Whenever a character is in a pickle, the force (ironically named) becomes the Deus ex Machina that swoops down and prevents any real stakes in the film. People who defend this will argue that the force is unpredictable and should be imaginative that it's power is unlimited. I counter that you want this movie to be interesting, you can accomplish this by limiting the force as a crutch in a way that actually makes the force rare, and challenges the writers to come up with ways to challenge the characters. Instead of the force suddenly telling you out of the blue that Chewbacca is in that ship, or one is suddenly able to heal wounds or teleport items across the galaxy (which was only used to rush the plot) you could expand on the problems the characters face and fix the pacing of the movie while building the characters.
Two characters are played off to die only to be saved by plot armor. Chewbacca is teased to be killed by Rey, but because we all know the audience would hate Rey for accidentally killing such a beloved character, Chewbacca is instead suddenly on another conveniently mentioned transport. If you didn't have the balls to do it, you shouldn't have put it in the film to begin with. I'm no fan of Rian Johnson, but I have to say I appreciate his work far more now after seeing this film. He at least had balls.
The other character is C3-PO who nearly won me completely over by his near sacrifice, only to be resurrected by R2-D2. They're playing it safe. People didn't like Rian Johnson's risks, so instead they take absolutely no risks.
This shows how this company works. They are too reactive to criticism, left or right, too loose with their creative teams. They simply didn't plan this that well. Having two directors make a trilogy with barely any collaboration is a mess, and the audience rightfully points this out, only to be overly reacted to, and then antagonized. This bizarre enmity between the critics, journalists and the fans is pathetic.
I still maintain that Rian Johnson's film probably contributed to the way that this film was made. There were too many cooks in the kitchen and I'm beginning to think that Rian Johnson, despite his odd choices, could have handled the final film in a better way. This isn't to disparage Mr. Abrams who could have, and probably should have, directed all three films. There was a hint of a different story forming at the beginning but it's obvious that Mr. Johnson's direction altered that course, and caused Mr. Abrams to have to do a lot of explaining that should have been done in Episode XIII. I feel like this movie could have been split up across the trilogy and we could have put parts of it in the first two movies.
Overall this trilogy suffers from a lack of planning, a lack of coordination, and the current political war seeping into the fray causing bad decisions to form rifts between people who should be enjoying themselves. The Disney corporation would have been better off not doing this, and Star Wars would be better off just ending at this point. Redefining for a new generation is unnecessary, the new generation will create their own stories, the galaxy far far away never needed to be continued in order to be remembered.