Safe, forgettable, and entirely unoriginal

Rating: 3/10 (24 December 2017)

I have seen it twice. I recognize that Rian Johnson had a difficult task, and lots of people were expecting TLJ to meet the standard set by ESB. I was not. However, I was also not looking for a movie that rehashed every plot point in ESB and ROTJ (to the point of parroting back dialogue), without even developing the new heroes we had come to love from TFA. As a female fan, I was excited to see the vulnerable, nuanced character of Rey in TFA, and spent the last two years defending her from "she's just a Mary Sue" detractors. Well, bad news, in this movie she actually is a Mary Sue. (Speaking of Mary Sues, when did Finn learn how to fly? A major plot point in TFA revolves around the fact that he can't, and now he can just hop in a cockpit and all's well?)
At its heart, TLJ doesn't want to be a Star Wars movie, but it fails to take us in a new direction, or any direction. The plot and characters are stuck in place (literally). Prolific jump cuts make it impossible to build any tension and effectively diffuse what little there is. John Williams' score is actually tiring and tonally out of place with what is on screen. The short shots allow no time to develop musical themes, so we're basically reduced to "Is Rey on-screen? Rey's theme is playing." "Is Luke on-screen? Force theme." "The Resistance? March of The Resistance 1000x!!" The soundtrack is like dessert all the time, and leaves you feeling sick.
My dislike of TLJ does not stem from being a butt-hurt fan with wish fulfillment issues. The few things lauded as gutsy in TLJ were actually telegraphed in TFA and I was on board with them. A particular aspect of Luke's past did not sit well with a number of people, but I was pleasantly surprised and felt that it worked. I won't say that TLJ was good just because it touched on a couple of interesting things that were teed up for it. This movie has almost none of the threads from TFA, none of the heart of ESB or ANH, and none of the mythos that underscores the whole franchise. It's just a poorly edited, hollow exercise in irreverent predictability.