The Last Jedi Deserves to Die

Rating: 1/10 (9 May 2018)

Star Wars - the Last Jedi is one of the worst big budget movies in recent memory. It is truly terrible. The acting, the directing, and of course the insipid screenplay, all sink to rock bottom, even for a bloated Hollywood blockbuster. As a published film critic with many years' experience, I have seldom been angrier at a Hollywood studio for producing such a visually tiresome and narratively muddled mess.
Let's be straightforward: I squirmed through the entire two and a half hours of this artistically criminal waste of time and money, from the grammatically-challenged opening crawl to the ridiculous (and mindlessly telegraphed) anti-climax. Watching this movie was worse than having teeth pulled; it was the long, gut-wrenching and bloody agony of recovery afterwards.
Above all, this Disney-produced disaster was a cinematic embarrassment. At least with the absurd Marvel movies we have costumed heroes to root for, and our own world to fret about. Who could care less about the anonymous locations and bland characters of this latest assembly-line installment of the redoubtable Lucasfilm franchise? George Lucas once stated the Star Wars movies were made for kids. Watching The Last Jedi as an adult is a stupefying experience, leaving one wondering if any adult had anything to do with its writing or direction. Indeed, the movie feels as if a sugar-hyped horde of grade schoolers mismanaged the entire enterprise.
A film criticism usually begins with generalities of story and character and then moves on to critique specific aspects of the production, picking out special moments and positive components while throwing in a few negative zingers to entertain the reader. The Last Jedi is so completely bad I cannot comment on a single good scene. I cannot think of one. What else can I say? I suppose the visual effects were relatively benign, with John Williams contributing yet another journeyman score, but in a cinematic fantasy universe filled with black holes of plot, character and storytelling there can be no purchase. I was adrift watching this disaster - as any mature adult should be - so perhaps the only compliment I can pay to the production is "better luck next time." The problem with that is Jedi follows on the heels of the clichéd A New Hope remake The Force Awakens, which at least introduced new characters (even if they turned out to be the same old cardboard). The Last Jedi is so bereft of original thought and design, it makes The Force Awakens look like a brilliant new concept by comparison.
Still, as critic, I have a job to do -
Star Wars - The Last Jedi
TEN WORST CINEMATIC MOMENTS
10) The Korean space plumber kisses Finn. WTF? (as today's gadget-obsessed teens might say).
9) Vice-Admiral Dern suddenly becomes a hero. Wasn't she supposed to be a villain? Or at least a traitor?
8) The strange little bartender from TFA makes a sad, confused, animated cameo. Again, WTF?
7) The opening crawl. I mean, really, how much did they spend on this disaster, a quarter of a billion dollars, and they couldn't hire a high school English teacher to check the language and punctuation? A prelude to the horror to come.
6) The telegraphed meaning of the "bloody" footwork on the red salt planet. So we can figure out Luke is not really there. Though it's not made obvious enough to be obvious, or interesting. A perfect example of the movie's messy confusion.
5) All those amazing dialogue rip offs from other Star Wars flicks. Kylo/Ben: "Join me and we'll bring order to the universe." Seriously? Bring order to your haircut, Driver.
4) Speaking of Ben/Kylo - Adam Driver is astonishingly bad in this movie. As if Francis Coppolla directed him from a trailer next door. Cinema fans know this reference.
3) The bad acting overall. At least Daisy gives it her best. Everyone else phones it in (yes, you, Benecio) or seems to have been hired right off of Hollywood Boulevard. Abject evidence of a creatively absentee director.

2) The comic relief moments that were only painful. My favorite is when the Yoda ghost chides Luke for not having perused the Jedi text. A work sacred to acolytes that is actually unreadable? Sounds like Mein Kampf.
1) I could put the anti-climactic ending here, the rip off - er, reference to - The Empire Strikes Back, with the rebels in disarray and a black-clad evil avenger on their trail, but why ignore the best of the worst? The whole casino sequence! A hapless, CGI-stuffed "reference" to a James Bond movie, with gambling and shooting and car chases and 'SPLOSIONS - with a few cute alien critters thrown in for measure. So stunningly unnecessary it boggles the mind. All for a Benecio cameo. Yes, you, Benecio.
Okay, we had our fun. Now let us put blame where blame is due. The true villains of the piece. And they more than deserve it.
Kathleen Kennedy is a corporate suit with decades of producing clichéd rip-offs of better works from the past, who could care less about storytelling and character craft. Her concern is the bottom line. Period. Reducing a beloved film series to an assembly line process, and a greedy accountant's wet dream, seems to be her only goal. Running former series characters and storylines through a crass corporate machine, allowing broken cogs and cracked wheels to work them over, is no problem for such as she. Congratulations, Kathy, you got a Yugo.
As for the man credited with "directing" this dreadful mess, his name deserves no mention, neither praise or contempt will he receive from me for a complete artistic or even professional absence from this production (and the fact anyone would allow such a talentless hack to "create" more series movies only proves Hollywood to be the artistic hell with which most of us are very familiar).
Speaking of talentless hacks - Let us focus our blame on J. J. Abrams. Why? He produced the insipid faux SF TV series Lost, where a muddled mess of storyline was legendary. He ruined Star Trek with two blatantly unimaginative TV movie-style con jobs of third tier SF genre junk. His complete lack of originality, good taste or imagination is self-evident in everything he does. The Force Awakens was a blatant remake of A New Hope, and he did not stoop to care. Just have him move on to the Marvel universe and get it over with for goodness sakes. Perhaps Robert Downey Jr. can play Sherlock Holmes as Iron Man, a steampunk kind of thing. I'm sure the pork-bellied Comic Con fanboys would eat it up.
Lastly, there's Disney. This big business behemoth inches forward through profitability by consuming other companies and better artists' ideas. Without Grimm's fairy tales they would have been out of business way back with Steamboat Willie. Instead, they stagger onwards, spending billions acquiring Marvel and Lucasfilm, merging it all into a gargantuan postmodern corporate octopus with its slimy, Lovecraftian tentacles penetrating all of mass media. Their only concern is crass corporate survival, so they can continue to regurgitate (ie remake/reboot) the same stories and movies ad infinitum ad nauseum. Selling tickets is nothing compared to hawking plastic trinkets in warehouse stores. Disney extracts their consumer "entertainment tax" and the willing masses have no problem capitulating. Selling McDonald's happy meals is the be-all and end-all of their entire cinematic enterprise.
Finally, how about the fans? Many hated this movie and deservedly so, but mostly because of the way the studio suits treated the Luke Skywalker character. His story arc finished long ago, with Return of the Jedi. Personally, I am quite over his character. And the way Mark Hamill capitulated from his initial criticism of the suits having the Jedi Master crumple into fairy dust at the end of this vacuous episode makes my stomach turn. Yet the fans love Mark. He seems to be a nice guy. Too bad he has completely sold out. Folks, you get the movies you deserve. You continue to pay for stinky fish, you keep getting stinky fish. It's that simple. Let's face it, most Star Wars fans don't know (or don't care) that George Lucas ripped off countless other, better fantasy and science fiction for A New Hope. Has any of you fanboys/girls actually seen Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress?
Let us get to the point, because Hollywood junk peddlers like Disney drive it home: cinema is dead. The cinema we grew up with, loved and adored as fans and students of the art. The digital age (among other worse things, like crass mass media corporatism) killed it. As long as studio bosses and their small-minded, slavering minions greenlight assembly-line superhero movies, and the fans pay for it, nothing will change. When a movie as supremely awful as The Last Jedi makes bank, the bankers smile - and cinema never rises from the dead. Long live cinema.