Fanboys are the worst

Rating: 9/10 (20 December 2017)

When Disney and Abrams restarted the Star Wars saga in 2015 with Force Awakens, they gave us a delicious, candy-like confection that gave us everything we loved about the space opera: adventure, earnestness, humor, and lots of space action. Now, with venerated filmmaker Johnson at the helm, Last Jedi is something decidedly-less immediately pleasing, though undoubtedly heartier. The nature of good-and-evil, the import of passing-time, the difficulties of truth. Sure, it's not quite revelatory, but it reaches for it...and is plenty of fun along the way.
There's a whole lot going on here. Rey is being trained by Luke, and that stuff is great. Leia and Poe are trying to evade the First Order while leading the rebellion towards a new base, and that stuff is (mostly) great. Finn and newcomer Rose team up with an awesomely enigmatic codebreaker on a first-world planet, and that stuff is hit-and-miss. Kylo Ren struggles with his finding his place in a universe stuck in the past, and that stuff is transcendently fantastic. The design is beautiful, the cinematography is sweeping, the humor is strong and the fight scenes are among the best yet. It's all bold and kinetic and flawed and jagged and fun. In other words, a Star Wars film.
Luckily, unlike the overstated claims that Force Awakens was just a nostalgic reboot, Last Jedi is very much its own beast, working in a mold while consistently finding ways to break it. Director Johnson has managed to walk into a money-making machine and put his personal imprint on it. Even if Last Jedi isn't quite as instantaneously satisfying, it thankfully moves the galaxy into new and meatier territory.