The wrong path

Rating: 4/10 (19 December 2017)

I was in absolute awe when Rian Johonson was chosen to write/direct VIII. I truly loved Looper and Brick and was ready for "the best SW movie since Empire". Jezz, what a let down. The movie started with Poe's prank and somehow my head went back to good old Spaceballs...
Leia flew back to the Mon Calamari cruiser...a big WTF was blinking in red in front of my eyes
By the Casino scene I was already scratching my head wondering if this was a sequel to Guardians of The Galaxy, not a SW one.
Every single time Holdo or DJ popped in the screen something felt off, like "I'm not watching a Star Wars movie"
And when Luke died for no apparent or at least well deserved (plot-wise) reason I got really angry.
In the end Star Wars is suffering because of the lack of a clear map of how this new trilogy was going to unfold. When Rey, Snoke, Kylo or the Lightsaber were introduced in VII I thought that they had clear in mind their overall arcs and backstories, but as Rian Johnson has admitted there was no plan at all. And man it shows. It's clear that the plot for VIII was not what JJ Abrams would have written, and that Rian didn't like what JJ did in VII. Instead, the new director was obsessed with avoiding the pitfalls of VII (a copycat of episode IV) and thus he tried to surprise viewers...with almost every important decision made gone wrong. And since the trilogy was not mapped at all he could basically do what he wanted to do. TFA very clearly tried to set up new characters, mysteries...and Rian simply doesn't care at all. He is a man on a mission: getting ready a clean slate but doing it in a very surprising way. And in the process he lost track of what a Star Wars story should be and having characters acting out of character, even the new ones.
Is the movie a complete disaster? Should its rating be a zero? No way. It's beautifully shot, Hamill and Driver just kill it, John Williams is back, the FX are top notch and somehow you feel that there is a good movie buried under a pile of bad plot decisions. There are brilliant and thrilling sequences that should rank among the best in the series. But sure, I understand that for most diehard fans (like me) some of the mentioned plot decisions eclipse everything else. Now, the funny thing is thinking how JJ will try to fix the situation in IX...he created something promising, Rian thrashed it, and now he is receiving it back with the aim of closuring it ...somehow. We'll see