The Emperor has no clothes ...

Rating: 4/10 (15 December 2017)

I can't quite believe the hype this movie is getting from professional critics. It almost feels like people have agreed that any technically well-made film with the Star Wars name on it has got to be a great film. Well, let me be the party-pooper by pointing out the fact that, to me at least, the emperor is strolling around town butt naked.
Just like "The Force Awakens" and "Rogue One" before, this new exercise in flogging the dead Star Wars-horse relies way too heavily on fan-nostalgia and countless elements, moments, shots and dialogue lifted straight from the original trilogy.
Whether it's bigger things like the Rey/Luke relationship, which is a carbon copy of the Luke/Ben or Luke/Yoda-relationship, or small details like Luke meeting R2 after years and years, which is a straight rip-off of a very similar scene from ANH where Obi Wan is reunited with R2 on Tatooine.
And that's a real problem for someone like me who grew up on the original films: I went into TLJ having avoided spoilers completely and yet I could predict the "plot" at almost every turn. And before someone brings up the word "homage" or George Lucas' infamous quote about poetry and rhyming: This goes way beyond that.
The whole movie is a mish-mash of the three original films - most elements come from "Empire" though - and to me it felt like the screenwriter went through a checklist of original elements he wanted to plunder and cram into this new movie.
Whether it's the separation of the main cast, our young hero getting training from an exiled old Jedi-Master, a land-battle on an ice/salt-planet involving speeders and AT-ATs, the force ghost of a former mentor appearing for a talk with the young Jedi in training or a big confrontation involving a powerful, disfigured arch-villain, his apprentice and our young hero - there simply isn't much that is new or original in this film.
And all this gives the new SW-films a certain taint - these aren't stories a writer/director wants to tell, these are business-endeavors designed to cash in on nostalgia for a series of movies from a long-gone era of film-making.
I guess it's like one of the more critical reviews I came across said: The franchise is a hostage of its own legacy. As long as enough elements from the old films are shown on screen and as long as the poster says "Star Wars", people will go watch these movies. God forbid they would decide to make a Star Wars film without any references to the Empire, the Death Star or Darth Vader. Which is kind of understandable from a business-perspective, considering what these films cost to produce. From a creative POV however, this is a pretty sad state of affairs.
I just wish someone at Disney would grow a pair and dump all the original-trilogy-baggage and decide to start a brand new saga from scratch. Don't these people want to tell their own, unique stories? Where would, say, the arts be today if every painter after Leonardo da Vinci had decided to simply re-paint the Mona Lisa over and over again...?
5/10