Awful on first viewing, worse on subsequent watches

Rating: 1/10 (3 September 2019)

By this point, everybody has already torn this film to pieces and said how bad it is, so I don't need to do that. I watched this film in the cinema at midnight on opening day. It was a special showing back-to-back with The Force Awakens. Personally, I loved Force Awakens - yes, it was practically a remake of the first Star Wars movie with another hero who doesn't know who their real parents are escaping from a desolate dustbowl planet to go on an adventure across the universe and blow up a planet-killing spherical weapon. But it was a GOOD homage that introduced more new things than it relied on old. Last Jedi takes all that was good about the preceding movie and flushes it down the toilet. The tone is all wrong. Nothing that happens makes any sense. Watching it back-to-back with The Force Awakens was really, really jarring - the change in tone was so stark it just doesn't feel like a Star Wars movie. Not even one-third of the way into it and I was thinking "this is terrible". But, I did think that perhaps, like some films, it would improve on second viewing. This is why I am writing this review almost 2 years after that horrific night - because I just watched it again in anticipation of the final installment of this trilogy and it is STILL as bad as I remember, if not worse. It annoys me that, even if they manage to "fix" the storyline and deliver a good film to conclude this trilogy, this painful-to-watch installment will remain part of it.