The Last Jedi Movie

Rating: 1/10 (16 December 2017)

"Thought it was a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. A magical power holding together good and evil, the dark side and the light. Crazy thing is... it's true. All of it".
So said Han Solo in The Force Awakens. It turns out, though, that Disney *do* think it's all a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. The only thing they believe in is making money. Lots of it. And boy, there's lots to be made by selling little penguin lookalikes so cute they turn even poor Chewbacca into a life long vegan. Why worry about the story, the script, the acting, the plot, you know, the stuff that makes a movie really great and enjoyable to watch, when you can milk a generation of newly minted fans for soft toys for the rest of their pre-pubescent lives?
And the sad part is that I know all that and I still suffered two and half hours of this awful film in utter disbelief and didn't ask for my money back after it was over. I suspect we have all been turned to the dark side of the Force and enslaved by the Empire - except in our galaxy they go by the more innocent sounding name 'Disney'.
I won't bother with the details of why this movie was so bad. The atrocious dialog, the cringe-worthy and ill-timed attempts at humor, the gaping plot holes, and the wooden acting could all have been forgiven if the movie had not been turned into a caricature of itself. But the director and writer Rian Johnson managed to achieve this feat by poking fun at all of Star Wars characters and themes and stripping them of any deep philosophical, moral, or intellectual meaning. Meet the new Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck: Luke Skywalker and Supreme Leader Snoke.
It's a good thing Han Solo died in the previous installment of this declining franchise. After seeing this one, he may have started to once again question his belief in the Force.