Deus ex machina overuse and a bad script made even more painful by good acting and a lot of wasted potential

Rating: 6/10 (26 December 2017)

What I found incredibly professional was how serious and well everybody acted in what was clearly a joke of a story, yet instead of phoning it in, every actor did great. Like any force user turned towards the dark side, I felt conflicted, sitting there in the theater, admiring the technical work of CGI artists, actors, set designers and so on, while being taken for a complete retarded idiot by whoever wrote the story. Scene after bad scene, the heroes are stuck in impossible situations, only to get out again and again by means of tricks that make no sense with heroic music on the background. Either an all present, invisible and intelligent robot or a cute yet proud animal or some technology that could have been used three scenes ago with devastating results but for some reason no one thought of it, but at every step something that is no merit of the characters involved had to save them in order to further the stupid plot.
And what hurt even more is that in this jumbled mess of childish storytelling, there was a beacon of light, a moment that could have turned the whole franchise towards a better side, one that was neither good nor bad, neither white nor black, but something new, a fresh idea that could have made Star Wars into a greater work and taken full advantage of the talent already employed. In this scene that I don't want to spoil, if every character in it were acting as they were built for several movies and a half, it would have revolutionized Star Wars and made me forgive all the sins of this film. But no, they went completely out of character and it just went downward from there, with a final act that was even more deus ex machinas, saving animals, mysterious blind spots for the enemies that acted like frustrated four year old children, the high contrast good vs evil crap and a return to a tired and really bad canon.
I swear, all it lacked to be a complete travesty were a flock of eagles coming out from nowhere and saving the stranded heroes. Like the bland black and white story the film portrays, it is also made of starkly bad versus good elements, but I am afraid in the end it leans heavily towards the dark side.