Star Wars: The Last Jedi... From a Certain Point of View ***SPOILERS BELOW***

Rating: 3/10 (5 May 2018)

***SPOILERS BELOW***
I've given this movie several repeated viewings now (it's been out on blu-ray for a couple months at this point), and my opinions have not really changed since I left the theater the first time. Each repeat viewing, I went in purposefully aiming to find a different perspective in which to enjoy this film. By the end of the film, however, I keep grimacing to myself, proclaiming, "man, I really don't like this movie".
The Last Jedi just doesn't sit right with me -- and most Star Wars fans, it seems. Everything in this film feels somewhat... shallow. Expectations (Snoke's fate, for example) were diverted not so much out of creative or clever writing, but out of a sense that it was just "cool to do something different" (by not providing backstory and by, seemingly, aiming instead for mere controversy). Sure, it's great that Kylo Ren is now the top dog, but I still know nothing about Snoke, who was built up to be this incredibly powerful character, yet was removed from the story with absolutely nothing about his history revealed. I understand Rian Johnson's reasoning that "Return of the Jedi did that with Palpatine", etc. etc., but this simply isn't Return of the Jedi... We have six Lucas-era films of previous story, and someone as prominent within that chronology as Snoke has to be accounted for somehow.
I also have a hard time caring for Admiral Holdo's sacrifice because I've never seen or heard of her before this film. The impact would have been much more emotional if Leia had chosen to stay behind, but instead she lets her pupil sacrifice her life.
Another gripe is that you simply don't hire an actor of Benicio Del Toro's caliber to play such a small character. DJ's purpose in the film was to help the "new rebels" (ugh) break into some room on the enemy's ship. I will, however, acknowledge that he did serve another purpose in enlightening Finn (to some degree, at least... we'll see how his character develops in the final film) to the pros and cons of both sides of the war.
Speaking of sides, the Star Wars saga is now a trilogy of trilogies. In history, there's a certain rise-and-fall cycle of worldly events that just repeats, by nature, whether or not anyone cares to notice it. Star Wars has, consciously or not by George Lucas, chronicled the same repetition of historical events within its own universe. The prequel trilogy chronicles the rise of Palpatine and his empire: peacetime leading up to wartime. The original trilogy chronicles the struggle: wartime cycling back round to peacetime. Now, you'd think Disney/Kathleenfilm would have noticed and/or continued this cycle: peace to war to peace to war to peace to war etc etc etc. However, the sequel trilogy jumps straight back into wartime, bypassing peacetime, so the whole trilogy now feels somewhat disjointed, unnatural, jarring, pick your adjective. There's a Natural rhythm that's been broken, and so it's difficult for me (I won't go so far to assume that everyone else feels this way) to establish any meaningful connection with these new characters and their struggles, because I haven't known how things were before they came to be/afterward when Luke, Han, Leia, etc. came to adapt to post-Empire peacetime.
Moving on to "new" characters: Luke Skywalker. Mark Hamill, I think, gives his best on-screen performance as this character than ever before. That said, this iteration of the character is, indeed, something we aren't familiar with (or with Hamill himself, for that matter). He's given up. He had the briefest of flashes of instinct where he almost decided to prematurely end his nephew's life, and immediately regretted that stumble in judgment. He's bottled up his shame and disappointment, and banished himself to a distant planet. Luke is human now, not simply a "legend"... However -- yes, there's a flipside to this narrative choice -- Luke is now his own character. Whether you like that or whether you liked him more as the "Hero archetype" to which you could project yourself onto is now irrelevant. He is now his own character with his own thoughts and feelings. He's a legend not so much to real-life audiences but to the in-universe characters, as shown by the admiration of him from the pauper kids in the final scene of the film. Whether this is a "good" or "bad" thing is up to you... As is his death by strenuous Force use.
Speaking of strenuous, this movie is (un)admittedly over-bloated (by Rian Johnson). Some of the best scenes (Luke's third lesson/Rey barging in on the frog nun celebration) were left out of the final cut of the film (which actually reminded me more of original trilogy Star Wars than any other use of puppetry in either The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi), whereas milking sea cows and spending time in a space casino is obviously more important. The brief moment Luke takes (another of the cut scenes) to mourn over Han's death is piercingly impactful. Luke sits, tears well up in his face, he looks down, and the scene cuts to a shot of Leia, on her ship, face down as well and similarly struggling. It's a nice, short moment that carries a lot of weight and connects these two characters across a galaxy. Scenes like that dumped in favor of cute things, like Porgs.
A lot of other choices made by director Rian Johnson don't seem to sit well with me, but I'll conclude with the points made above and reiterate that this film feels shallow. In its quest to provide weighty drama, I personally think the end result backfired and, instead, left me wanting less, unfortunately, and not at all more. It's choices and directions are bold, but it seems there was more thought put into the "moving forward" of things than in the "connecting of things" within the universe as a whole. "Letting the past die", in hindsight, does not seem to be the smartest choice if I constantly want to watch the original films. Sadly, we'll never see a reunion between Luke, Han, and Leia on screen. It honestly breaks my heart to be reminded of that. And as much as the prequels leave a somewhat bland taste in many peoples' mouths, these new films do as much as possible to sweep the past under the rug as they can, when the opportunity to enrich the Star Wars history by incorporating them into the whole chronology was likely a smarter choice. These new characters have no connective tissue to the previous films, and so, as a continuation of the saga, it's hard to connect with them as an audience. Of course, people who loved this film can argue against all these points and argue them well, but all in all, it's difficult to ignore that many -- and I do stress many -- Star Wars fans also didn't feel the Force in this one.