So much potential blown out of the sky.

Rating: 2/10 (16 December 2017)

Let's think back the The Force Awakens (we will be doing a lot of that) -- the entire movie centered around a single plot device: Luke's lightsaber.
So after waiting two years to learn the significance of this, Luke the old takes one look at the lightsaber hilt and nonchalantly chucks it away, essentially slapping us in the face for having been so stupid as to trust the filmmakers to pay this off.
But having insulting payoffs doesn't end there. How about the whole mystery of Rey's parents? Well it seems the filmmakers wanted so badly to disprove all the fan theories that they decided to hand us another lump of turd by saying that her parents were... drum roll... NOBODY! Not the way Anakin had no father, but as in "nobody" significant.
The obvious place to begin with this review is to state how it blatantly rips off scenes from both Empire and Jedi, or perhaps that it decided to one-up Force Awakens' lame lightsaber battle by giving us NONE AT ALL, but instead I'm going to look at this from within the context of the Star Wars universe, in which 3 films stand out as particularly memorable -- Episodes IV, V and III.
All of these films had interesting storylines, complex characters and took those characters to a place by the end where their entire world had changed.
The characters in Episode VIII do nothing remotely close to this. Rey's so-called training on Degoba-er-Luke's Island, consists of little more than Luke voyeuristically watching her dance around with a lightsaber. Sure she has a scene like Degoba's deep dark cave where she sees herself reflected, but in this case it did nothing more than point us towards the red herring of her parents. In the end her "new changed world" was simply her using the force to move some rocks to save her friends. Not much of an accomplishment for someone who already used the force in much more powerful ways in the previous film.
Much like Force Awakens did, this one took familiar characters from the original trilogy and put them into a blender. Reluctant mentor Yoda became Luke, ethnically diverse character who turns on the heroes to save his own hide in Lando becomes both Rose and DJ (Del Toro).
And yet none of this stupidity seems to be at the core of what annoyed the majority of Star Wars fans. There were two things that did...
1. Leia miraculously surviving an explosion and getting sucked into outer space by using the force to fly to safety... now personally I don't mind the force part of this, to me it was almost the same way they can draw a lightsaber to themselves, she just did the reverse. But how the hell did her head no explode in deep space? What was she breathing?
2. Luke's hologram at the end and demise. Yeah it was a bit of a cheap trick, but worse than that, it felt completely unnecessary. Not only that, it opens the door to a lot of potentially stupid things in the next movie, like maybe Rey has multiple holograms of herself for Kylo to fight (if they do this I think I'll die a little inside).
I know I'm coming off as harsh, but there were some good moments. The film started out promising. Although Poe taking on the entire fleet by himself was a stretch, they sold it pretty well. I likes the scene where Snioke first talks to Kylo Ren because he calls him out immediately for two of the things that annoyed me about The Force Awakens: the fact that he wears a helmet for no reason whatsoever, and the fact that he was bested by a noob.
There was also a scene towards the end where Finn was about to sacrifice himself to save the alliance... but just like the other previously mentioned scenes, they immediately went on to cock up something that had the potential to be really good. That's actually a good metaphor for the entire film. Even the comedic moments felt out of place - one in particular felt like it came right out of Spaceballs.
I didn't think it was possible to anticipate a Star Wars film less than I anticipated this one, but they've managed to get me to a new level of disinterest. If that was the goal... job well done.