all over the place, kind of weird, uniquely subversive, heavily controversial

Rating: 7/10 (8 April 2018)

For the first ten minutes of this movie, I was left unamused and mostly disinterested, and prepared myself to regretfully hop on to the more mild mannered back of the 'Last Jedi is trash' (mostly internet) bandwagon, but as the film went on, my opinion totally flipped around. I was entertained and surprised and I fell in love w/the film's strange, messy style. It was so horribly flawed, yes, but that added to the charm. It didn't feel like some kind of cash grab, it felt more like an actual movie made by human hands. And, regardless, it was super fun to watch. And the characters became much more complex and interesting since the last time around. The character dynamics were well fleshed out, various inner conflicts added a certain layer of more impressively thought provoking material that was, to me, very unexpected. I even loved the casino planet material. Although it had no real "reason" to be there, I thought it was super entertaining and enjoyable to watch. It is true that a lot of the humor unfortunately falls flat, but I did genuinely laugh a few times during this film (mainly during one great, totally out of the blue sequence featuring a long lost, long loved character I will not name), although sometimes my laughter could have been unintentional oddly enough, but even when this happened I was being entertained. So, even if my opinion is enormously controversial, I refuse to back down from defending this fearlessly bizarre and surprising installment of an over saturated saga that should have ended over 30 years ago, as its originality and ridiculousness and just overall sense of fun (that doesn't really get in the way of its more dramatic material) feel like they practically saved 'Star Wars' from all of the over marketing and the disaster that was 'Rogue One', despite the fact that MANY seem to have expressed an exact opposite opinion!