No real story or answers the fans wanted.

Rating: 4/10 (15 December 2017)

I was rather hopeful this would be a great film. I wasn't really a fan of The Force Awakens (I liked elements of it) and though still not perfect I preferred Rogue One to both TFA and TLJ. The Last Jedi is a bit of a mess, is too long and has large swathes of it that should have been removed to keep up the pace.
At least this film isn't copying a original trilogy episode and has it's own story, the problem is a lot of the film is irrelevant. Finn's story arc may as well not have existed and purely served as a means for furthering Poe's character progression, this could have been done without wasting all that time. As someone who hated John Boyega's character in TFA because of only being present for a joke (e.g. why is someone in sanitation part of Kylo Rens landing party at the beginning). I still don't like that his character is underdeveloped and misused at every given opportunity. And the Jokes have become too much, the humor of the Avengers sold characters to people who wouldn't have normally seen those films but copying that template for Star Wars (and every Marvel film) is getting really old, really fast.
Luke's arc I didn't mind too much, but again, it was a bit overstuffed and ham-fisted. Mark Hamill does the best job of anyone involved in this film, selling their inner turmoil (closely followed by Adam Driver); however his script is pretty terrible.
I enjoyed the big set pieces, had a couple of genuine laughs but came away feeling that this film ultimately missed a trick. The final act is the best part and has a couple of really great action sequences. There was a moment however where I'm pretty certain that after seeing ice fox like creatures running around on what looked like snow, someone in a board room said "this looks a bit like Hoth" and to avoid any comparison with older films, a soldier was written in to tell us it was salt. All in all moment kind of sums up the film, what would look cool, what would sound cool, what will make us more money beyond the usual fans, put that on a cinema screen for us please and just forget that there is actually a story some people wanted to watch.