A truly monumental waste of talent, budget, and potential. A foul pile of excrement on the franchise.

Rating: 1/10 (18 January 2018)

While the preceding 'The Force Awakens' was somewhat of a 'by the numbers' reboot, it certainly nailed the vibe of classic Star Wars. It certainly asked a lot of new questions, successfully introduced interesting new characters such as Rey and Finn, and treated classic characters with respect and even wonder, in the case of Luke.
With The Last Jedi, from the very opening moments, it's clear that Rian Johnson has zero interest in making a Star Wars film, and from the word go works purely to drop plot points, ignore common sense and the lore of the previous 7 films, and worst of all, completely fail to capture the characters correctly. The tone is jarringly uneven, the plot pacing is horrible, it's just such a waste of potential that I can't help but be angry at the director, who as writer must shoulder the blame for this disaster.
First, some notes. I've seen some notable political sites infer very heavily that the people that don't like TLJ, do so because it's feminist, or some such garbage. Perhaps there are some trolls out there exactly like that, but I believe the larger number simply recognize that it's a BAD movie. I loved Rey in TFA. I was looking forward to seeing her and General Leia kicking ass. The strongest characters being women and the supporting cast / enemies being men makes no difference to me AS LONG AS THE STORY AND MOVIE ARE GOOD.
What I didn't expect was to see Rey get basically zero training from Luke, and for Leia to basically have zero plan other than to run away with a three stooges style 2-hour-long plothole of a slow motion chase scene. It goes on so long that you can't help but boggle at the stupidity of the failed logic : if the bad guys don't have the fuel issues that the rebels have AND they have perfect tracking of the rebels, why don't they just warp IN FRONT of the rebels. Movie over. Or send more than 3-4 fighters after them. Kylo and the nameless fighter pilots easily cripple the capital ship of the rebels, sending Ackbar to a completely useless death that is barely mentioned, and oh boy, it's LEIA POPPINS suddenly force flying through space with an effect that brought back seeing re-runs of The Flying Nun on Nick at Nite. The audience laughed at it, which probably wasn't the intent.
Oh, and the physics that now are portrayed in the franchise completely break the logic of the franchise. So there are so many ships flying around that are capable of Hyperspace that it's accepted that basically it's cheap and common in the SW universe. Given what we know of physics, it makes sense that this is a kind of wormhole tech that puts the ship into a dimension not overly affected by ordinary matter. It has to be a whole heck of a lot faster than lightspeed, or traveling around a galaxy would be interminably impossible without dozens to thousands of years to get anywhere. Taking that at face value, you HAVE to assume that you can't simply point a ship at a target and send it into hyperspace to destroy it. Right? Because if so, it would make things like Starkiller base or the Death Stars totally needless wastes of engineering and manpower. After all, at 99% of light speed, a ball of lead a couple of meters wide could destroy planet earth. The X-Wings have hyperspace capability, so simply launching one of those, unmanned (unless you have a Kamikaze desire) into the death star or enemy planet would destroy it with ease. No need for space wizards and secret plans or really any of the history of the series to even happen.
Yet in TLJ, a character that we've only just been introduced to, who is deliberately kept in doubt, hyperspaces into an enemy ship to damage it. Even at 99% of light speed it would have resulted in absolute obliteration of both vessels, but never mind that. Simply showing that hyperspace causes direct impact LITERALLY breaks the logic of everything that has happened in the series if you follow common sense. It's asinine, it's stupid, and it's sadly emblematic of how Rian Johnson ruthlessly butchered the series with this idiotic film.
I can't even begin to express how carelessly he mistreated Luke's character. Mark Hamill explained as much as he could how he disagreed with it, before the suits put enough pressure on him to back down a bit, lest he get permanently blacklisted from the industry and the projects he really cares about.
In closing, this was not only a waste of a film, but the active off-the-rails nature of the entire plot (laughable to even call it such) destroys the franchise in such a way that it is unlikely that it can be recovered from. The Prequels suffered from some poor CG and some terrible acting, but the overall lore and storyline were serviceable for sure. THIS dreck? Catastropic. I saw it opening day, and have been contemplating it from time to time since then, and instead of softening my initial response of 'meh?', it's grown to outright hatred. A deep, seething loathing for this garbage and the director that is responsible. I wouldn't hire him to direct an ad for a toilet bowl cleaner.