The Last Jedi: Long, Busy, and Boring.

Rating: 3/10 (20 December 2017)

I would like to preface this by stating that I didn't go into this movie expecting a lot. After seeing The Force Awakens, and Rogue One after that, I had a vague idea of what to expect. However, even I was surprised at how much this movie waned on me as it went on. The entire time I was sitting in the theatre I routinely thought "It can't get much worse than this". And to my amazement, it did.
I'm first going to cover the very few things I liked about this movie, then go on to justify my disdain in three main categories: the film's overblown length, the myriad of shenanigans going on in it, and how the combination of the two made for a movie about as interesting as watching paint dry.
First, I have to admit that it wasn't all bad. There were several moments I liked/I thought were executed well. First was the scene with Rey's "first lesson" with the force. Taken completely alone, I thought this scene was well shot, directed, acted, and paced. Furthermore, it was very cool to see Rey learn from Luke, and see her expose herself to the force's raw potential and come to understand how and what it is. It was a very telling scene which had great potential, and really showed what this film could have been. Unfortunately, this scene is only good out of context because we've already seen Rey's competent understanding of the force in TFA, which renders this scene almost completely moot. The only payoff in the movie, by the way, is when Rey quips "something something gotta move rocks" and then proceeds to move AN ENTIRE QUARRY'S WORTH OF ROCKS.
Next thing I liked was the opening battle. It was well shot, good VFX, solid acting, and kept me intrigued. That's it. nothing special, just a competent moment in an otherwise bland production.
And the last thing I can say I liked was the six or seven frame shot of the rebel cruiser shattering the First Order dreadnought. I thought it looked cool and was visually unique from any other part of the film.
As you can probably tell, I'm really grasping at straws here to give this movie complements because, as an overall product, the movie was not good. And I say that more as a definitive statement than as an opinion because the problems I have with it are technical, not subjective.
The first problem I have with this movie is the length. This film is two hours and 41 mins long. And oh baby, you can certainly tell. Even with the film's frantic pace, you can still feel it begin to drag on as the two hour mark approaches. Furthermore, there are several distinct moments in the film where I thought I was witnessing the climax, only to have it matched by something equally as over the top later on. The beats the movie hits as well are scattered and inconsistent, and this only adds to the mounting boredom experienced.
But this issue pales in comparison to my second and much more pressing complaint, which is this movie's desire to do so many goddamn things in one movie. When the movie gets chugging, there are 4 many main threads going: There's Luke and Rey, Fynn and the Rose( and later the other guy), Po and Leia (and the vice-admiral to an extent), and then Kylo and Snoke. And the movie tries to treat all of these with the same amount of importance. This leads to awkward cuts and transitions as we try to frantically keep up with what everyone is doing. And ultimately this leads to certain story elements feeling rushed or contrived, such as the codebreaker guy's ridiculous escape from the jail cell, and then the escape from the casino. Or the mutiny aboard the frigate, only to have it immediately fail. Most notably, is the interactions between Luke and Rey, which realistically should have been the most important central focus of the story, quite often just took a backseat for minutes at a time while the rest of the stories rushed to catch up. And for a movie billed to be a story about "The Last Jedi", we spend very little time with this segment of the story, which happens to be the most interesting and character rich portion of the story. It's almost a shame that this movie wasn't exclusively about Rey talking with Luke, learning about him, her, Kylo, and the interplay between Kylo and Luke, and how this affects his ability to impart knowledge onto Rey. But none of that matters anyway since Rey has seemingly unlimited and sharply tuned force powers and combat skills from the moment she was on screen in TFA. Let's not forget that she's already bested a trained warrior with little effort on her part, and already has a mastery of Mind-Tricks and levitation and other force-related powers.
This leads me to my final complaint, which is this movie was boring. And when I say boring, I mean it. There was very little keeping me engaged with the screen, aside from an ever dimming ember of hope that something would happen to pique my interest. Of course, nothing ever did. What was supposed to be the central focus of the film, Rey's "training", ends up being boring shlock about how Luke can't teach her/ time for the Jedi to die. It didn't even really make sense because, as I've stated and everybody has seen, Rey already has a mastery over many elements of the force, and just from some idle self-practice she becomes a goddamn warrior? I don't buy it, and that's precisely what makes it uninteresting to watch. The rest of the plots were either boring or aggressively stupid. Fynn and Rose wandering around a casino lamenting about the woes of capitalism until they're miraculously saved by the codebreaker, Deus Ex-Machina style? Boring. Kylo being a salty loser who wants to stop being a sissyboi? Boring. Po trying to explain to the admiral that her plan is dumb, except it works, except it almost doesn't, and then she dies? Aggressively stupid. All in all, none of the stories amount to anything, none of the main characters really grow or change, and nothing is accomplished. Just a boring sequence of audio-visual experiences chained together into a nearly three-hour snooze-fest.
So, in summary: Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi is an overblown, bloated snoozefest with few likeable characters, no compelling story or plot, way too many "Are you serious?" moments, and a complete lack of any of the charm a Star Wars move should have.
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