C'mon Disney......what was THAT???

Rating: 4/10 (15 December 2017)

I've seen every Star Wars movie since Empire Strikes Back on opening night, and I can honestly say I've never left the theatre feeling more disappointed and let down than I did after this one. This was a shockingly bad installment in the franchise, even by prequel standards. It left me wondering if Rian Johnson had ever even seen a Star Wars movie before, because this one certainly doesn't deserve to wear the name. It was more like a really bad episode of Battlestar Galactica than a Star Wars movie.
This movie was so flawed on so many different levels I'm not sure where to start. I'd say the major problem with this film was the incredibly weak story, combined with the total waste of screen time on ridiculous sub-plots instead of using that time to do some much needed character development and some backstory/explanation of the majority of the major characters. Combine this with taking almost all of them in the most wrong direction possible and you've got one giant mess.
Which is exactly what this film is....a huge, unfixable mess. *spoilers ahead* Not only did this movie fail in almost every imaginable way, but the mess it created with the story and the characters is so big it will be virtually impossible for Disney to fix it in the next movie and still make a good film out of it.
Snoke...what happened there? We got no backgroud, no development, no anything before he was effortlessly killed by Ren....why? They wasted some great potential here to create a really interesting and valuable character to the movie and it's inevitable sequal, and took the story in an absurd direction at the same time. So the character responsible for Ren turning to the dark side and the new Jedi falling was just some creep bad guy we now know nothing about? what? And no point in giving him a back story in the next movie, because, well, he's dead now and nobody will care.....absurd.
Leia...they botched this character big time too. Was it wise to make her now one of the most central characters in the story? With Carrie Fishers untimely passing, sadly, they were left with no choice but to find a way to remove her from the story at some point in this movie in order to be able to do the next one. They had plenty of opportunities to do so in a way that would have furthered the story, but they chose not to for whatever reason. When Ren changed his mind about killing her but the other fighters fired, that would have been a great time to do it because it would have added to Ren's character and given him new motivations for upcoming aspects of the story. What are they going to do now? Imply her death in some meaningless way inbetween the movies or just kill off a bad CGI version of her in the opening scene of the next one?
Luke....ok, if you're going to kill off LUKE SKYWALKER, the central character in the original trilogy, at least give it some real meaning and depth appropriate for the character. Like maybe while trying to save Ren and repair the past in order to set things on the right path. No....they chose to kill him off creating a diversion for the rebels to slip out the back door and temporarily escape the First Order. Wow.....what a waste of what needed to be a much more powerful moment in the story.
To wrap it all up, I'm shocked Disney let this one out of the gate. Didn't anybody at any point question any of this, or was Rian Johnson simply given free reign to do as he pleased with this project? However it all went down, Disney should be ashamed of themselves for ever allowing this movie to see the light of day.