The Last Jedi or the shadow of Luke Skywalker or the end of Star Wars!

Rating: 2/10 (14 January 2018)

What does a Star Wars movie separate from any other Sci-fi or fantasy movie? Star Wars has space battles, lightsaber duels, stormtroopers, action scenes and blaster duels. These are the optical things you expect in these movies and to some extent they are also there in The Last Jedi. Still there are also deeper meanings in Star Wars movies like the heart of friendship, sympathetic characters you can identify with, western and eastern mythology, the fight between good and evil and overcoming all obstacles. These are the things this new movie fails miserable and I start with the biggest failure, the characterization of Luke Skywalker.
We followed Luke from the naïve farmboy in A new Hope over his struggle to find his place in Empire strikes back to a matured warrior in Return of the Jedi. This was not even everything Luke showed us in the last OT movie, he even showed us forgiveness and humanity in the face of pure evil, when he did throw away his weapon and trusted his father to return to light and save him. It worked out and they celebrated the victory in Return of the Jedi.
Now 30 years later we finally learn Luke failed in everything from this point on. He failed to teach his sister (from Yoda :"pass on what you have learned") and Leia is not a Jedi. He tried it with some students and one was his nephew and prime student. But out of a sudden he enters his nephews room in the night and ignites his weapon to kill him, because he sensed some darkness in him. The his nephew awakes and it marks the creation of Kylo Ren.....what....who is this guy called Luke Skywalker in this movie? For sure not the same character we saw 30 years ago. Yes, characters can change over time, but it has to be a natural development and nothing is natural with a 180° turn, except lazy storytelling. Luke is used to create this strange Kylo&Rey force connection. As Mark Hamill said, he played Jake Skywalker instead of Luke Skywalker!
Now we come to the next big disappointment, Rey. Luke&Rey were expected to be the beating heart of the movie according to marketing, but what did we get? Grumpy, angry and broken Luke who wanted Rey to leave, that's the Luke&Rey plot as a whole. The scene between Luke&R2 was even the best scene of this movie and it showed a glimpse of the old known Luke. After this Luke agreed to train Rey a little, but was this really training? He acted like a senior primary school teacher when Rey reached out to the force. Ok, this was one of the failed comedy attempts. Rey continued like in The Force Awakens and she doesn't need a teacher, because she already knows everything, has no flaws, can use the force whenever she needs it, does not struggle with anything etc. There is even a scene in which Luke&Rey fight, after she thinks Luke is the bad guy and in this one Rey beats the Jedi master Luke (yeah one of the points where nothing did surprise me anymore). What did we learn about the force in this move? Hmmm, nothing really, only that it does not belong to the Jedi and so Luke decided to die on this island....what? (the visual dictionary goes even deeper and says Luke wants to do a final Jedi rite = suicide?).
We come to another big issue of this movie, the failed humor (or Marvel humor entering Star Wars). The movie itself started good with Poe attacking in his X-Wing the First Order to help the resitance escaping. But already 5 minutes into this movie, this misplaced humor started when Poe made a prank call to Hux. Never make the bad guys the object of slapstick humor unless you make a parody ala 'Spaceballs'. Hux was later more victim of more comedy when he was ridiculed by Snoke in front of the other soldiers. Luke was partly used in such a way too, when he did just throw the lightsaber over his shoulder, after one movie before was build up to this big moment of Rey handing Luke the lightsaber.....what? It was for nothing. Then we saw some of Luke's daily life and I wish I could get the scene out of my head with Luke milking this big pace creature for green milk....please noooooo. We also got a scene in which Luke wants to burn the temple tree after Rey was gone, but cannot do it and then Yoda appears and shows him that he did not learn anything in 30 years, because Yoda is still the master and force lightning style burns the tree...what?
After we already learned that we have again super Rey, so what about the other new characters? Finn, he is again used for comedy and lead together with another useless character, Rose, a mission that accomplished nothing.....what? They spend around 30 -40 minutes for a plot to get a codebreaker on a casino planet and freed some animals, but the mission as a whole was a failure. So we have Poe and the new leader Holdo (after Leia was out in coma for some time) and we get a dynamic of one soldier not blindly obeying another soldier...so far fine, but this made no sense and Holdo could have just told Poe the real plan, which had saved us the useless Finn&Rose mission. But so we got a stupid Poe, because he could not sense this great plan....One thing I forgot was Leia, she was again sparely used and in one scene she used the force to save herself. So she was blown out in space after an attack and used the force to survive in space and to he worse, she flies back like Superman or Marry Poppins to safety. Then she falls in coma....(ok at that point nothing in this movie I was like, whatever).
Let us come to the final stand on a left former mineral planet rebel base. So Finn, Rose and some other survived soldiers tried to attack a big canon who could destroy the base and Finn was about to sacrifice himself to save everyone, but.....yeah....(weird Rian Johnson twist)....and Rose takes his ship down with her own to get a kiss from Finn. So the canon still exists and this means big entry for the last one who could do anything (maybe)...Luke. He has a little emotional scene with Leia and they both agree that Luke has to stop Kylo. Fine, so Luke confronts Kylo and his soldiers and nothing can hurt Luke. Finally we get the Luke we have been waiting for since 1983...(wait until the movie is over, it is a Rian movie). Then Kylo enters to face Luke in a lightsaber duel and wow, it gets better. Luke is doing it Matrix style (and got a hair cut + hair dye before). Now it looks like Luke sacrifices himself like Obi-Wan and we learn Luke was just a projection, while he still meditates on his island. Wow...impressive ...(wait until the movie is over, it is a Rian movie)...and a second later Luke falls down on his meditating rock, crawls, has a face of pain and finally fades away....yes, Luke Skywalker died of exhaustion!!!
But the movie ends with super Rey who saved some old books from the first temple, saves the surving soldiers by levitating rocks and we a slave boy who plays with a Luke Skywalker figure at the end and force grabs a broom....so the Disney future is saved....but the Star Wars future died with this movie. Who wants to see super Rey versus whining Kylo the 3rd encounter in episode IX? I won't and I'm a fan for over 30 years with spending much money in the franchise and following the stories of my beloved heroes. A sad day to remember!!!