One of the best Star Wars films

Rating: 10/10 (15 April 2018)

The Force Awakens got criticised for too closely resembling the original Star Wars, but that's because those critics were looking out for things they recognised. TFA used the broad iconic pieces of Star Wars as scaffolding, within which it told a new and different story: an insecure adolescent bad wannabe dude, a stormtrooper who switches sides, an orphan from nowhere who discovers she has huge power. None of these things have been seen in a SW movie. All the character stuff was different.
The Last Jedi seemed to set off a massive outpouring of nerd frustration, but only from a particular narrow part of the audience: people who had spend two years theorising and convincing themselves that the story should go a certain way. They were obviously disappointed. Meanwhile the vast majority of pro critics and the general audience had a great time!
The same nonsense is repeated over and over: they didn't follow the "rules" (all broken by the previous movies), there's too much political correctness (code for "I'm such a racist I can't deal with non-white characters"), there's a Mary-Sue (code for "I don't mind characters being super-capable as long as they're men").
The truth is, it's so good that while I watched it on Blu-Ray it felt at times like it was much better than any previous SW film. Particularly great is anything between Luke and Rey, and also between Rey and Kylo. Mark Hamill is amazing, and by tearing Luke down to feeling like a total failure, Hamill gets a much juicer role to act than he'd have got if he'd been some bland, confident let's-do-this hero. And the story even finds a way for him to become that hero, at the last minute, and it's brilliant. Which reminds me, the brief Luke and Leia scene is incredible - impossible to believe it's the same actors who sleepwalked through that awful nighttime scene in the Ewok village in ROTJ.
Even better, while the story was genuinely surprising on first viewing, the second time it is even better. It's a satisfying journey, and a lot of details reveal themselves when you take another look.