The Last.... Time I Go Out To See A Star Wars Movie

Rating: 3/10 (17 March 2018)

Oh my, where do we begin....
Let's start with the humor. I felt that the humor was forced and really desensitized the stakes and the danger of the situation. You have Poe at the beginning facing Hucks (or however you spell it), who in the first film, was made out to be a serious character, and now completely deprecated for the sake of a joke. Really? You devolve this character's personality for the cheap laughs? Which is my next issue.
Complete lack of character. The main players of this film felt so hollow. Finn, Poe, and Rey were very interesting characters in the first one, and I was excited to see where this story would take them. Almost immediately I felt confused as to why Rey, Finn, and Poe almost have no development. What happened to Poe learning about reckless behavior near the beginning and literally an hour in attempts a mutiny? Perhaps to further the already convoluted and messy plot, but I'll get to that later. And Finn, with Rose, who I must say makes me miss Jar Jar Binks, makes no sense either. Their subplots goes from nowhere to nowhere and I found myself checking my watch to see when it was over. Which isn't a good sign. And another random character, Admiral Holdo, which made no sense either. Why does she get so much screen time instead of Leia? They perform practically the same duties, and it would've been more engaging to see Poe rebel against her instead. And to kill off Admiral Ackbar without any acknowledgement of his importance is just disrespectful. And when it comes to Luke, I can understand his reluctance, his PTSD with training new Jedi. What I cannot understand was why he did not ever learn the lesson to get over failure? This whole movie's moral was learning from failure, so why couldn't these characters practice what they preach?
Finally, the plot. If you can even call it that. They completely ignored common sense to further the story. Why didn't they send smaller ships from the bigger ships to take out the slower, and running out of fuel resistance ship? Why is Rey a master at literally everything without any training and could take on Kyle Ren, who's had his whole life to train? So if I teach myself karate, I could take on Jackie Chan no problem? See where that logic makes sense? Then you have the feeling of time moving too fast for some portions and too slow for others. Like my God, SKIP THE CASINO PLANET SCENE. DISNEY HAS NO RIGHT TO CRITICIZE THE VERY THING THAT GIVES THEM SO MUCH POWER, CAPITALISM.
Overall, I felt like Rian Johnson wanted to start off his own trilogy, make something different and subvert the formula, and add emotional depth over flash all at the same time, which left it a mess. You can't just ignore plot points brought up in the previous movie when this is a DIRECT SEQUEL TO IT. Do whatever the hell you want with your own trilogy, but don't try to turn this one into your own thing. Ignoring items in an established universe and cheating the audience by promising something different when really you promise them 2 and a half hours of confusion is just deplorable. If you could watch this movie and enjoy it by ignoring all the sh*t present in it, good for you. But as someone who loves a good movie viewing experience and expects at least remotely higher value as to not insult my intelligence, I could not love this movie. I couldn't even like it. Y'know what, I can't even dislike it, I hate it. It could've been so much better with minor tweaks, and that's what bugs me the most. Such a big misfire because of such little things. I was on the fence about Star Wars for a while, and now I'm gonna keep my money instead of giving it to Disney. Hey look, I guess I did learn something from this movie.