Severely Let Down

Rating: 1/10 (23 April 2018)

I made an account just to review this.
The Force Awakens was meh, but I understood what its purpose was: to rekindle excitement for Star Wars after over a decade of decline with the prequels and Star Trek starting to garner hype.
Rogue One was brilliantly done, original, and had perhaps the best space battle scene I've ever seen. It gave me hope for The Last Jedi ("TLJ").
I saw TLJ twice in theaters when it came out. Usually I reserve this honor for really good films or dense films in which I hope to pick up additional tid bits that I missed the first time around. For TLJ, it was because I was so shocked and disappointed with the first viewing it was surreal; I had to confirm my disappointment. I also rented it today to give it a third try. I won't be buying it.
Disney has done severe damage to the Star Wars franchise with this one movie. You can see it in the wide chasm between critic review ratings and non-elite, non-Hollywood review ratings. Everyone I talk to on the ground hates TLJ, with its contrived non-Star Wars humor, its strong injection of third wave feminism/SJW viewpoints, its lack of originality, and its disjointed/jarring storyline.
The story opens with a "spoof" on Hux by Poe Dameron. The first time I saw this in theaters (opening night), not a lot of people were laughing. It was cringe worthy and felt so out of place that it seemed like an SNL skit of a Star Wars scene. The original trilogy was humorous but without being contrived or turning characters into clowns. A lot of scenes with Han Solo attest to this. Stop trying to force comedic scenes or comedic moments. That's not why Star Wars fans come to watch Star Wars!
It feels like the writers for TLJ genuinely haven't seen a Star Wars movie before.
Star Wars fans also don't come to see Star Wars to have one sided political reflections of our current society thrown at them. I'm not going to go into it in detail, but why are the demographics of the First Order (the bad guys) so different than that of the "Rebellion" (the good guys)? Also Canto Bight was cool but spare us the hackneyed lecture from Rose about rich evil people and poor oppressed people that was shoved unnecessarily into the script.
They should have let Leia expire on the blown into space scene. It would have been the easy out. Instead we get a completely unprecedented scene in which she not only survives space but either pulls herself back to the spaceship or the spaceship to her. Come on man... Powerful Sith and Jedi have been marked out with far less than that.
Also with Leia, on Crait, what the hell is with the anime scene of her posing right off the bat? It was extremely vain, like, look how pretty she is audience. The rebels are being chased, hunted, and killed by the first order and she has time to change, redo her makeup, and do a Vogue magazine pose by the front door? Give me a break... Is this Star Wars?
There's so much more I didn't like, but that's all been touched on ad nauseum by other reviewers. The neutering and shoving aside of Luke Skywalker, a brand new Star Wars universe where everything is made up on the spot and doesn't matter, the recycling of original trilogy scenes/themes in TLJ, Mary Sue Rey who literally has no training but can take on Ben Solo who has what appears to be at a least a decade of combined Jedi/Sith training and she lifts dozens of boulders for the end of the movie escape effortlessly when even Yoda struggled and had to concentrate to move heavy objects (Luke's X-Wing, platforms in the fight against Palpatine), etc.
Did Disney have any plan when they started this new trilogy? Let's have different directors and writers for each one! There needs to be consistency! You can branch out beyond the original trilogy themes while remaining true to the Star Wars universe. There's a whole expanded universe of books out there! You seem to be doing the opposite, recycling the original Star Wars themes while destroying the Star Wars universe and fan base. You're hollowing Star Wars out with movies like this.
I didn't think I'd ever say this....but this film is worse than any one of the prequels. It's the worst "episode" Star Wars film made yet. If I do end up accidentally purchasing, it will be because it comes along (unfortunately) in a box set.