Not as bad as some of these people say, here's my take on the movie...

Rating: 6/10 (21 December 2017)

The newest installment in the Star Wars series has critics and a portion of the fans divided. While, I can't say The Last Jedi is without its problems, overall I did enjoy it and consider it to be an improvement over The Force Awakens. In some ways The Last Jedi is predictable and rips off The Empire Strikes back, but director/writer Rian Johnson took some left turns and added some plot twists that made it interesting. I thought Mark Hammill gave a excellent performance as Luke with this new take on the character. The film looks great and is fairly on point with action and special f/x. The characters are beefed up are and there are more layers to them and the cast did a fairly good job. The creature/critters are there for little kids that like that crap, but are mostly in the background and did'nt bother me too much. On the downside, the story could use some tightening up. The film also is too long and could have edited some of this stuff out to make it flow better as a whole. Some scenes and humor go way past ridiculous as well. The Last Jedi is a kind of mix of highbrow and lowbrow elements that does not always work and won't please everyone, but it is far from being a bad film and at the very least entertaining and not completely predictable. It also must be noted that movie productions with gigantic budgets have a lot of people's hands in the creative side of this, with studio executives, producers,etc that go out of their way to try to make this appeal to as much of a wide audience as possible, so some of those problems are probably a product of that of what elements to throw in/take out. It is doubtful that on a big studio production like this how much creative control Rian Johnson really had or how much material made its way in to generate money and appeal to the lowest common denomenator. As of this moment, I found this to be interesting and enjoyable, how well this holds up, time will tell in the years to come.