Quite possibly the worst Star Wars film ever made.

Rating: 5/10 (21 December 2017)

Firstly, lets talk about what this movie does well. The directing is top notch. Practically every frame looks stunning with the perfect blend of practical effects and CGI. The sets are highly detailed and convincing. The cinematography is quite possibly the best it has been in a Star Wars movie since Empire, with some shots in particular being phenomenal.
The editing for the most part is solid, however I did have some issues with how scenes were linked together during the halfway point of the film; they seemed to jump from one to another far too quickly making it difficult to pay attention to what was going on. The soundtrack is once again composed by John Williams and is certainly an improvement from The Force Awakens, but still wasn't very memorable. And the sound design is as always amazing.
But then we reach the 'plot', if I can even call it that. The Last Jedi is a Magnum Opus of inconsistent storytelling.The story and writing in this movie is totally contradictory and a complete mess. It fails to capture any semblance of structure. I would barely consider this a film. It feels like a strange anthology of different smaller movies that don't even correlate to one another at all.
Plot points will be explored for 30 minutes and will lead nowhere and contribute nothing to the overall story, particularly true for Finn's arc which is downright awful. The dialogue is terrible and made me squirm into a foetal position in embarrassment at what I was watching. Character motivations make no sense and are all over the place. I do not care about any of these characters anymore. Rey is one of the worst characters in Star Wars. She's a boring Mary Sue who is perfect at everything without any explanation or arc. Kylo Ren is once again an afterthought and is probably the most inconsistent character in the film. But he at the very least changes as a character and actually contributes to the story even if his contribution makes no sense. The plot in this movie practically renders every positive aspect of the directing and sound design completely redundant because there is no context for anything happening.
This film squanders all potential from Episode VII. You thought Rey's backstory and how she gained all of these force abilities and lightsaber training out of nowhere would get explained? Nope. You thought Snoke's relevance to the story would be elaborated on? Definitely not. In fact, Snoke is given one of the most laughable treatments of a character I have ever witnessed. This movie not only leaves established plot points from VII totally unanswered but it also ruins a vast majority of them. The Last Jedi advances NOTHING from The Force Awakens. Nothing is different by the end of this movie aside from one change of leadership.
But worst of all is what this movie does to the entire Star Wars story. If you were to try and imagine every possible way to ruin the character of Luke Skywalker and the story of the original trilogy you would not be mentally capable of matching what Rian Johnson manages to pull off. This is probably the most magnificent failure of a sequel I have ever seen. It is so detrimental to everything that is Star Wars that it feels intentional.
The pacing is also abysmal. I feel like the movie was an hour longer than it needed to be. None of the scenes with the Resistance were relevant so they could've been easily removed or made significantly shorter to make this at the very least bearable.
The acting is fairly dull across the board. Mark Hammil, Andy Serkis and Carrie Fisher are standouts as expected. Oscar Issac is a great actor but his character is given absolutely nothing to do in the movie. The rest of the acting is mediocre. But in all fairness it is difficult to act when the script is as horrifically bad as this.
*SPOILERS*
There are too many plot-holes to count. How do the First Order have so much influence? How are the rebels reduced to a small fleet when they controlled a portion of the galaxy for 30 years and were backed by the Republic during that time? How is Rey capable of defeating Luke in a duel when she didn't even know she had the force a week ago? How is Snoke killed just because he wasn't paying attention when he can visibly force choke across space, incapacitate anyone with the force and throw Rey around like a rag-doll without any effort? How did Leia become space Mary Poppins when it isn't physically possible to be exposed to the vacuum of space for more than a second without instantaneous death? How did the First Order get the technology to track the Resistance through hyperspace? And the list goes on.
*END OF SPOILERS*

With all of these glaring problems in mind, this ultimately still isn't a BAD film. It is a uniquely messy film. I feel as though Rian Johnson read a Star Wars predictions sub-reddit for days and tried to write a story that was unpredictable and different in opposition to the incredibly interesting theories that the fans came up with that would've made this film infinitely better had they been used. But it is unpredictable in the worst possible way to be unpredictable; making no logical sense.
Sod's law is strong with this one.
5.5/10