A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, nothing of interest is happening.

Rating: 4/10 (27 December 2017)

It's not a good sign when you spend the last 1/2 of a Star Wars movie constantly trying to rationalize a reason not to walk out of the theater. You say to yourself, "This is Star Wars, it has to get better soon." But, it just gets worse and worse.
'The Last Jedi' may be the last Star Wars film for me. I don't know if I am willing to suffer through such a disappointment again. A painful, plot-less mess that meanders from scene to scene in a fruitless search for a story or characters that viewers might care about. A story so bad that they actually devoted 1/2 of the film on the ridiculous notion that the bad guys are chasing the good guys, waiting for them to run out of gas so they can destroy their fleet of ships.
A side plot has John Boyega's character Finn, race off to find the one guy in the galaxy (convenient) that can save the Rebel fleet. The whole excursion turns out to be for naught, and the only possible reason the filmmakers inserted this diversion into the film was to give John Boyega something to do ... that, and to arrange unnecessary appearances for Maz Kanata and Captain Phasma. Their inclusion didn't add an ounce to this pictures razor thin story line. They were only included in a sad attempt to appease fans of those characters, and to sell a few more toys to the kiddies.
The one thing we learned from this film is that the Resistance (and the franchise) would have been in much better shape had they never, ever bothered to look for Luke Skywalker in the first place. Filmmakers milked Luke's return in 'Force Awakens'. The big payoff was 4 seconds of screen time. In 'Last Jedi', we learn that he's become a useless has-been. There was no reason, or need for Luke Skywalker to appear in either of these films. Same with Carrie Fisher. In her final screen performance she proves once again that she can't act her way out of a photo booth. I actually fist-pumped when I thought we were seeing Leia Organa's on-screen death, but sadly, she wriggled her way out of the characters demise. It was a huge mistake to build this trilogy around guest stars. Luke, Leia, and Han were better left in the past, where their legacies could have remained unsullied, and we might have gotten a new trilogy based upon new characters with their own motivations and stories.
'The Last Jedi' is a long sequence of scenes, that individually might have looked good on paper, but when strung together do not a story make. It is a film of visual sound bites, completely lacking a compelling narrative. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, nothing of interest is happening.