These are the most expensive kids' movies ever made

Rating: 5/10 (18 February 2018)

My wife and I saw this just last week, when it was really at the very end of its theatre run. From the IMDb vote breakdown I see that women rate this one notably higher than men, in all age groups. But also that male voters outnumber female voters by 7 to 1, which isn't surprising. The median vote is 8/10 but -- no way. If you remove the nostalgia factor and the "modern myth" juggernaut status of the Star Wars franchise complete with all the spinoff books and TV -- it just doesn't stand up very well as a movie on its own merit. I give it 5/10 because it's technically very competent, but inside the surface layer of actions and special effects it's an empty shell. There's lots of activity to keep your eyes moving, all the favorite characters get their chances to strut and fret their hour upon the stage, but ...

More than anything it's just overstuffed. I'd say it was about 40 minutes too long all told; there were at least two stages where it looked like it was going to wind up fairly nicely but then went on into another 20 minutes of another subplot.

Like all the others in the series, the dialog is about at the level of lazy 10-year-olds. What was fresh and energetic in the first film ("Episode IV") is now just numbing. The characters spend a lot of time stating the obvious or looking "meaningfully" off to the side. With the budget these films have, can't they invest more in scriptwriters who are capable of challenging and delighting their viewers at a deeper level? What's even worse is that this simplistic dialog, designed only to set up equally simplistic action scenes, has the side effect of reducing all the actors to the same low level. And there are some excellent actors here -- Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Lupita N'yongo, Benicio Del Toro among others, so a lot of raw talent was wasted.

To get further into the content: IMHO it seems to me that a lot of people went to The Last Jedi expecting to see a lot more of Rey and Luke together, since that was the Big Windup in Episode VII and the obvious segue to VIII. And we got something, but that sequence was so chopped up with cuts back and forth to various superficially tense action scenes that this key central part all felt shortchanged. Rey was the central hero in The Force Awakens (yay!) but her role was sadly reduced in favor of more boys'-club action.

The scriptwriters can pull any devices they want, of course, since all the action and plot here is arbitrary in the first place, but the clear message from The Last Jedi is that Kylo Ren is just evil. Forget those constant hints about him being misunderstood or misguided or conflicted. He's doing what he's doing because he wants to rule the roost, and he says so right out front. Forget whatever issues he had as a youngster; like Darth Vader and mad dogs, he needs to be put down, period, for the good of the Galaxy.

To give credit where credit is due (SPOILERS!!), I did enjoy a couple of genuinely surprising and inventive tricks: the first was the way that the evil emperor Snoke was killed off by Ren with a remote-controlled light sabre (but see above -- Ren didn't do this because he was being drawn to the Light -- he did it because he wants to take over). That surprised me, because following the pattern of the IV/V/VI trilogy I was automatically expecting that Snoke would meet his inevitable end only in IX. The second fun bit was having the rebels' cruiser zap into warp speed right through the enemy battleship, which gave quite a nicely done (and new) CGI effect. (But then we watch Finn and Rose on that broken battleship run around for a long time trying to get away *while the broken structure is wide open to empty space*! Don't they need to breathe all of a sudden?)

But there's just so much here that doesn't make any sense. The basis of the action is about at the level of the ancient Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon black-and-white movie serials though dressed up with CGI that is several generations better. (And I can't help recalling that the first Star Wars film was in large part a loving, retro homage to those even older kids' serials. That's how it started.) The last straw was when the small band of remaining rebels reaches this last isolated moon (conveniently with breathable atmosphere, which they all seem to have) but in about 5 minutes they are surrounded by Ren and zillions of huge mechanized war machines of all kinds. How the h*** did all that get there so quickly? When the following blizzard of firing and explosions went on is when I finally leaned over and said "this is ridiculous" to my wife. She'd reached that conclusion a lot earlier.