Missed opportunities

Rating: 1/10 (29 December 2017)

Where to begin? Firstly, I feel hugely let down by The Last Jedi, I was hoping that Disney would want to open with a bang, and particularly after the disappointment of Force Awakens and the shot-in-the-arm of Rogue One giving fans a new hope, but no, an uninteresting and weak effort aimed at marketing plastic crap to pre-teens with little or nothing for long suffering Star Wars fans. Sure - it looks pretty, and there are some (but not enough) passable action sequences.
Almost midway through the movie I had the urge to walk out, some grocery shopping maybe, or go home and face the washing up. The Last Jedi is that uninteresting, and probably worse than the four preceding prequels - mainly because (and aside from the terrible script and leaden plotting) it features Luke and Leia but does little with them. Two of the most important characters in the Star Wars parthenon are just chucked out. There's no "passing the torch on" as many professional critics have written - Luke might as well have ended up in a retirement village - it would have been more compelling.
My disappointment in this disaster is manifold.
Plotting is terrible. So the First Order can track us through hyperspace? Sounds fishy, sounds like there might be a traitor secretly transmitting. Let's ignore that and go for a dull mission where we have to shoot off on some contrived subplot and waste valuable time while the rebel fleet slowly runs out of fuel - oh, and they had to find someone with a red flower in their lapel. Really? There were so many plot holes and stupid unbelievable elements that I can't enumerate them; Leia's odd space revival, suspension of Newton's laws - bombers in space, a spacecraft needs fuel to maintain velocity. Science fiction works when the audience can forgive small crimes against physics - the sound of explosions in space, gravity within spacecraft, faster-than-light travel. Last Jedi took this too far, and if it's unbelievable it's not enjoyable.

Let's ignore Jedi lore and just make Rey magic. It's easier, and means we can pretty much ignore Luke, which is what they did. The time Luke and Rey spent on the island was stultifying - what a missed opportunity. What we saw was a ham-fisted attempt at teen romance via astral travel. They might as well have being texting. We could have seen Luke training Rey, reluctantly at first if you must. When Luke pole vaulted to the next island I thought - finally they are going to start training, they are going to introduce the force to all these little kids in the cinema. But no, he merely speared his dinner while she moped like a teen waiting for a text. The weird cave scene where someone got to show off some CG was umm, pointless. When I saw the sunken X-Wing, and when Yoda turned up I thought - awesome, Luke is going to lift that out of the water, tip his hat to Empire, jump in it and kick some ass. Nup - ignored.

Snoke - sounds more like a dry cleaner than a super villian, but anyway, the character did represent some of the only tension in the movie (the descending iron as well) - lets kill him off in a really inane way. It would have been more interesting if he had food poisoning or was killed in a plumbing accident. The best thing he did was tell Kylo to take that stupid helmet off. They wasted Snoke, here was a character itching to have a boss fight with Luke. We knew nothing of him. Who was he? Where did he come from? Who cares? Luke and Snoke could have fought, some exposition could have been given, Luke could have died a-la Obi Wan, I don't know, but something - anything!

Kylo Ren is an awful character. You can't be a super villain if no one takes you seriously. Would anyone laugh at Darth Veda behind his back? The Terminator? Reinhard Heydrich? No, they were genuinely threatening, commanding characters. Ren is a puerile teen with too much power, more suited to the Twilight fantasy than Star Wars. Killing off Snoke means that Ren has been promoted way beyond his ability. It is a shame, he was threatening in the first few minutes of Force Awakens, but once that mask came off (what was the point of the mask anyway? To hide the fact that his voice hadn't fully broken?) he was revealed to be all conflicted and angsty.

Killing Phasma off was stupid. I mean why? She was - again one of the only points of tension in the movie. Normally an audience cheers when a villian bites the dust, I was sad when Phasma died. The franchise seems to want to eat itself.
Others here have pointed out the plot holes and inconsistencies better than I can. I came out of this movie genuinely angry at what they had done to the franchise. This is my first review of any movie, and I was so disappointed that I wanted to get some words down to reflect that.
Star Wars is public property, it's owned by us, and it has been constantly vandalised. From the utterly derisible prequels, to Lucas' "director's cuts" to the original movies to Force Awakens to this lacklustre attempt. Last Jedi commits the worst crime though. Apart from being a dull leden forgettable piece of cinema, they killed off Luke and Leia in such a cack-handed way. It's a shame, and a missed opportunity.