More of the same

Rating: 5/10 (15 December 2017)

The word is out that the very respectable Rian Johnson had put his watermark all over Last Jedi, but on the last line it largely comes across as more of the same Star Wars sausage as the previous installment from JJ Abrams. Whatever your feelings were about it, you'll feel the same about this one.
Expectedly glorious production values and uniformly good acting get bogged down by the script that is an uneven mess jumping all over the place. Ray's scenes with Luke don't go much anywhere but make a far more compelling thing to watch than Resistance's artificial standoff with the utterly incompetent First Order (which also has the disadvantage of the rulebook changing whenever needed) or Finn and Rose's contrived quest to find some random hacker and share a message about animal cruelty. After one central character, first reduced to a ridiculous clown, gets a deliciously laughable sendoff, hopes get briefly elevated there might actually be something at stake here, but then nothing much happens. So many die but nobody gets hurt.
The Last Jedi milks both Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi to such extent that it seems ever ready to toss away any reasonable logic to squeeze in another gorgeous throwaway fan-service variation of what was an integral part of earlier stories but now stands only for some nostalgic shivers or gorgeous cgi. This was already the case in Force Awakens, but if something positive should be said, the well is about dry after this one, and for the final episode they need to come up with something truly original - unless they go back to the beginning, once more, rebooting the copying within their reboot.