Disappointing,

Rating: 2/10 (28 March 2018)

A sad day for Star Wars. And a good waste of money.
The Last Jedi deserves every ounce of critique it has garnered over the last months.
It tries to be stylish and smart, elevating theme over story, which might work in an Indie movie, but in Star Wars rings hollow and pretentious. Especially when it's poorly executed.
Rian Johnson basically threw the baby out with the bathwater when decided not to continue with JJ Abrams's take. As a result the continuity errors and tonal differences are too big to ignore.
Was Abrams movie hopeful, Johnsons take is nihilistic not even sparing Luke Skywalker's character, making his "hero's journey" all for naught.
It also invalidates TFA, it's McGuffin, the last piece of the Map to Luke Skywalker, it's whole raison d'Ãªtre, was to find Luke to train Rey. And now Luke doesn't want to be found and he doesn't want to train Rey -so why leave a map to be found?
This is but one of the examples.
It lays bare what most of us feared when JJ Abrams was not to helm Episode VIII: There was no creative director to ensure continuity, tone and direction across three movies. RJ came in and flipped everything that JJ set up.

It's premise is laughably bad: the slowest chase in film history ever. It picks up right after TFA, which will creates issues with character arcs.
It has major plot holes. It cannot keep up with it's own logic.
It has pacing issues. Especially the Canto Bight sub plot.
The plot is blatantly contrived, there is no natural from x follows y flow, all events that occur, all decisions made by the characters seem to be in service of the plot, even though the decision itself is ludicrous.
There is no hero's journey, not for Rey, not for Finn, not for Rose, not for anybody. Rey waves a magic wand and is a Jedi. Making her officially a Mary Sue.
There are too many porgs and porg-jokes. The movie tries to be too funny by launching too many jokes at the viewer, as a result the jokes are in general poorly timed, destroying the impact of a serious scene just before.
The prank call by Poe in the beginning is funny, but would suit Peter Parker better, for Poe its like he's acting out of character . It also undermines the New Order. Making them seem weak and incompetent.
The movie also tries to do things different, but ultimately fails.
The character motivations are shallow and don't lead to any character growth.
The twists (to do things differently) are more "gotchas!", without any real impact.
They don't have a resonating pay off like "Luke, I am your father" had.
And worst of all, it ends like the movie was a two parter.
Our intrepid heroes are safe. There is no cliffhanger, no hooks, no lines, no slider that makes you want to go and watch Episode IX.
At the end of the day, The New Trilogy isn't doing anything new. They conveniently set the story up, that it's a small rebellion against a big mean bully and TLJ tries to drive this home by decimating the Resistance (apparently that was all it was), because the Millenium Falcon is too small to take everyone on board and fly everyone to safety at the end of the movie..
Now there are some positives. The music, the art direction, the visuals, the acting , the action. It's all stunning, Gorgeous, Masterful, but too much Michael Bay to me: style over substance. Smoke and mirrors.
I know there are people that loved this movie, and I tried not to summarize all examples I can think of, of continuity mistakes etc, but this movie kept pulling me out of my suspension of disbelief. I normally accept movie-logic for what it is and enjoy the ride, but this movie failed miserably in doing so