A very disappointing movie in terms of Production, Directing, Editing and Storytelling

Rating: 1/10 (25 May 2018)

How should I describe this movie without feeling a traumatic headache at the end..?
As I write this review, 6 months have already passed so I will not consider anything written as a spoiler at this point in time.
The Last Jedi was a horrible movie by and large in every aspect of movie making. In this review, I will describe the different movie directing and editing aspects, as well as the story aspects.

Sound editing: the sound was horribly edited, where at many points of the movie scenes that should have the music feel more grave and sombre, the music was in fact mild and unemotional. This is of course not the fault of the music artist (as John Williams is still amazing in his musical talent) but rather the director's fault for wanting it to be bland.

During many periods of whispering discussions in the movie, the whispers were overshadowed by the musical atmosphere. Although not really perceivable in the theatres, this issue is actually apparent when watching it at home. The problem is due to bad sound gain levels choice.

Special Effects: Although there some scenes where the special effects are nicely done, there are only very few of them. We find ourselves most of the time witnessing unfinished work. Many scenes showed us a mid-rough work, such as the scene of Leia in space. We can also see several scenes where the background looked like 2D cardboards behind the protagonists (Finn & Rose at Casino, specially while running from danger mounted on the animal they helped free).

Even though such a scene was also rough on the Original Trilogy, in this day and age, with our perfected technologies, it shouldn't be as such anymore.

Directing: the movie's overall directing is far below average (and I mean crushingly below). The choices made by the movie Director were thoroughly disappointing. Where JJ Abrams, director of The Force Awakens, gave many possibilities to create character development and lore development, Rian Johnson, The Last Jedi's director, decided to throw everything JJ put in place into the trash bin. Rian Johnson's choices were made out of laziness and the personal need to save budget money. Every single moment where the characters could've gotten a great development, Rian Johnson decided that it was too much of a hassle for him to even bother to try and so instead he chose the easy answer, by giving no back story mysteries to the characters or even a grain of evolving insight to the characters (which would later have probably been a great opportunity to develop on either another movie or a book). Parallel to these, the misuse of everyone's beloved Jedi, Luke Skywalker, was saddening. Mark Hamill played his character to his best, and marvelously so, considering the disappointing turn of personality Rian Johnson gave him.

Among the choices made by the director that were disappointing was the unending and boring space chase scenes, where the First Order, following closely behind the Resistance's main spaceship and transports, were barely doing anything to take down their hated enemies. The lack of a TIE armada shooting the Resistance ships and the lack of Resistance fighters defending the transports and motherships is dismaying.
There are also errors in the movie that are painfully obvious, such as Leia not freezing over in space, or even right after, the lack of vacuum when she reenters the ship through the opening door, a weapon suddenly disappearing from the screen during the praetorian fight scene, Luke not wanting to be found, yet in the previous episode a map was made to show his location (yet another line of storytelling Rian Johnson didn't care to take into account), an impossible heirloom (golden dices) that stays after Luke's death, Luke's Prosthetic hand disappears with him. And these are just to name a few among myriads of errors, showing yet again the director's lack of care and laziness.
Supreme Leader Snoke was tossed in the bin as well. This is also part of Rian Johnson's choice to not have to put up with the work of developing the character. Not even adding a tiny dust of indication of where he comes from or what he is or whom he really is. And frankly, the viewers were not waiting for a whole background but just a tiny bit of indication. Adding to the mystery.
In choices of emotion, Rian completely rejected the idea of showing Luke mourning for Han's death. It was learned through Mark Hamill in an interview that Rian Johnson said that he didn't have time to shoot such a scene, saying it is unimportant and will hurt the pacing. Yet they spent a large amount of money and time to film Luke Skywalker milking a type of alien sea cow, and drink the blue liquid. An illogical choice from the director's part. Illogical if you don't consider it a way to say "I'm mocking you". The pacing could also have been done thanks to musical gravity and transition to Kylo Ren.
On the other hand, Rian Johnson seems pretty happy to show a childish reaction in Rose wanting to liberate the animals used in track races from Canto Bight.
Perhaps the only wonderful moment in the movie is Luke and Leia seeing each other towards the end. It was the only moment that actually was fine.
In terms of diversity, the movie shows an overpopulation of Human protagonists and crew. Rian Johnson has no care at all for Humanoid Sentient beings from outer space, and decides only to show very few in this movie. This seems to show that the universe is only filled with Humans. Our species, our Race. In a Galaxy far far away where a massive amount of different Humanoid Beings exists.
In terms of human diversity Rian Johnson put in a limited amount, enough to satisfy maybe Human diversity parameters in a movie, but still pales in comparison to the prequels. And the diverse humans are barely used in an epic characterization where they would be given very important aptitudes. Mostly they fumble and stumble during the many scenes of the movie.

Dialogues are bland and uninteresting, and seems to be just lazy rambling to fill the minutes (except for very few 1 minute exceptions where it is a serious matter), most dialogues seem to feel like emo moments, especially when Rose is in play.

The humor in this movie is equally bland. The humor doesn't mix well with the music, the atmosphere or even sometimes borders the cartoonish. In addition to that, Rian Johnson has just stuffed the movie with humor making the movie completely lose its seriousness and erases entirely the story's somber/grave atmosphere.

Rian Johnson in this movie proves himself to be quite a copycat artist. Not only the movie is about 70% a mixture of episode 5 and 6, but scenes where he declared on interview that were his own original ideas turned out to be just exact ideas and turnouts from other older movies. For example, Leia flying through space was taken from Mary Poppins and Luke's supposed Force Projection was a complete copy, beat for beat, of Kurt Russell in Escape from L.A.
Story wise, we have just about everything wrong for this movie to even be called Star Wars, it has no essence of Star Wars, no soul of Star Wars, no mysteries of Star Wars. It is only Star Wars because it is in space and uses bad guys and good guys group similar from Originals, but with different names, only the known characters keep their names.

The plot is boring to a point of disgust, and has no logic as a continuation of the previous. In fact, it seems to be completely oblivious of the previous installment. Luke leaving a map to pinpoint him but saying he doesn't want to be found, a Rey who needs only a couple minutes of training compared to the Original Trilogy where Luke is in Dagobah and it is implied that he is there for a certain amount of days or weeks, and even then he only mastered the basics. Rian fails to show a Rey that is challenged by learning, and instead is given total mastery of the Force without a single real effort except that of learning to feel the Force for the first time. She also masters combat skills without learning which is an impossible thing to happen, even with the Force.
In this movie, we witness the appearance of subplots that are painfully unconvincing and are pretty much useless.
A large part of the movie is a mix of the two last movies of the Original Trilogy, yet with a quality far below any movie average and of course far below the Originals.
In conclusion, The Last Jedi is a horrible and unending disappointment. A complete fail for a Star Wars movie. It is unimaginative, underworked, uncaring, unappreciative, unmoving and soulless. We can only conclude that the director is untalented, negatively deceptive, lazy and insulting. His work gives the impression that he hasn't left his school, that his homework is only an accumulation of copy paste from different pages he found on the internet, that he is someone who would just learn the minimum required to pass a mock test and that he is a young anarchist giving no importance to respect and good conduct. An uneducated person.
The Joker he is not, because even that character in the DC universe has a lot more personality, style and cunning.
A, sadly, very bad follow up to an already doubtful and wavering first sequel (Episode 7). One that will be nearly impossible to save from further disaster.