hell-bent on dissapointment

Rating: 5/10 (20 April 2018)

After seeing The Last Jedi at the cinema last December and being somewhat underwhelmed I was stunned to find out yesterday how little replay value this newest installment in the sprawling space saga holds. I literally couldn't make it through that dragging excuse of a story. Everything the rebellion does is either downright stupid or totally in vain or both. It's a long drawn out exercise in failure peppered with too many bits of comic relief and incessant soulsearching. The prequels were lacking in almost every respect, but at least I enjoyed revisiting them from time to time, they were fun, the storyteller's intentions seemed honest. Not so with the sequels, especially The Last Jedi. It's not only downbeat and endlessly meandering but also mean spirited in its attitude towards the source material. It's willfully disappointing viewer's expectations in the crudest and often least original way possible. You start to choke as if Vadder himself was extending his force grip over the audience. It's all so pointless and half-hearted. The rebellion gets decimated to literally a handful people, but it all seems to be fun and games for the characters, even the bad guys, with a lot of naive pep talk about the spark of the resistance thrown in every ten minutes or so. It's like the director undertook to disappoint viewer's expectations so radically, that we the audience end up with nothing but this choking feeling of disappointment. In fact, the narrative strategy forever flip-flops between those failed expectations and the constant lip service that is paid to the loyal fanbase. It's a schizophrenic experience, one that I'm not too keen to repeat because it leaves the distinct impression that a product is being sold here.