Star Wars Fans Should be Ashamed of Themselves - Not this Film.

Rating: 10/10 (19 December 2017)

Don't believe the hate, this is a good film. The problem lies in the "Star Wars fan" who has for so long taken ownership of the franchise to the point where they, themselves, have turned into their own echo chambers of misconceptions and poor film analysis. It's never been disgusting than it is now, as evidenced by fake down-voting campaigns on social media and the sheer level of boneheaded distaste in ever single user review I've seen on this site. Have yet to speak to a single soul in person that didn't like the film, the film boasts an "A" CinemaScore among the average audience member that saw it (because in real life you only get one vote, you wack jobs), and it has lit the internet on fire and made Star Wars, for better or worse, more relevant than ever. If you really think that a film which makes its bed in not taking the easy way out of any creative decision is just "too corporate" then you've clearly lost all perspective as a movie-goer, frankly. Count this as one film and series where the critics have way more insight here than the "fans". Yeah, I put "fans" in quotations like that purposely, you're not fans, you're idiot children.
But I don't want to review the fanbase that I'm currently embarrassed to be a part of, I want to review the film. Rian Johnson fed us all some very bitter pills, but it isn't without purpose, meaning, or substantiation. Any assertion to the contrary is, in no uncertain terms, false. Let me first address a few misconceptions:
1. "Why did Luke Skywalker die like that!!?? He just basically slipped on a banana peel!!!" - The film informs the viewer during one of the first "psychic" exchanges between Kylo Ren and Rey that such a feat, a force projection like that into another system, would kill the user. Ren was initially under the assumption that Rey was force projecting herself, you see. Luke chose to sacrifice his physical form to save the Resistance. But no one is ever truly gone, as he says, and we see Luke become one with the force as Obi wan and Yoda did before him.
2. "The Canto Bight subplot was just a waste of time!" No it wasn't, without that event the entire finale of the film doesn't happen. DJ (Benicio Del Toro) sold them out to the First Order to save his own skin. That led to the deaths of thousands of Resistance fighters and the pursuit of the surviving Resistance to the planet Crait. To the character development, we see 3 major characters make decisions that contribute to this, most notably Poe Dameron. It was his plan to send them to Canto Bight because of his own personal recklessness. The failures of key characters are a huge teaching tool in this film in shaping them into leaders who may actually one day win this thing. The sequence also offers Finn and Rose their personal arc of reestablishing many of the themes that Star Wars was built upon way back in 1977. Just because a plan does not work does not mean it has no cinematic value, children. Learn something about cinema and writing before opening your electronic mouths for a change. "Plot" is what happens, "story" is why it happens, and the two are equally important in delivering a narrative.
3. "Leia flying around in space was ridiculous!" Leia didn't fly. There's no gravity in space. She used the force to pull herself back to the cruiser. Force pull. "Fans". Pah!
And so on.
Rian Johnson presented a very wise version of Luke, someone who had a point to make about the place of the Jedi in the universe. As Yoda once said "the force surrounds us and binds us". Life creates it, makes it grow. The force belongs to all of life, not to the Jedi. To say that the force belongs to the Jedi is vanity. That is Luke's point, that is his perspective, and he is restrained not by cowardice but by this measured rationale. Take someone 30+ years ahead, they will not be the same man that they used to be. They don't have to be. The key is in having Luke make sense with the man he used to be. And that is intact. Just not in the way that one would expect, and that is a bitter pill to swallow. But it isn't without its rewards and insights.
Through Luke, the force has been deepened and fleshed out in cinema for the first time, really, since 1980's The Empire Strikes Back. That is a reward. Imparting that knowledge to Rey is a reward. Luke saving the Resistance and assuming his place as an inspirational figure for a new generation of soldier and citizen, alike, is a great reward on this character and a fitting tribute. (But you can't tell that to "fans" who just wanted to see a Jedi Master, of all people, show up and start slaughtering storm troopers).
Using Luke Skywalker, Rian Johnson has returned the series to its foundational heart, and that is a reward. I think it just requires a little deeper look into things than all the fan-theories of Snoke being Darth Plagueis...