Entertaining Star Wars movie like no other.

Rating: 7/10 (18 December 2017)

I'm old enough to have watched the very first Star Wars in a movie theater, back when the opening crawl lacked the "Episode IV, A New Hope" crap. Indeed, when I saw it in 1977, the first text that appeared in the crawl was, "It was a period of civil war." So, yeah, I'm old.
And I was one of those guys who came out of The Phantom Menace as though I'd been punched in the gut. So yeah, I've felt the disappointment that 20 years of nostalgia brings.
The Last Jedi was completely unexpected. Daisy Ridley said it best: "It's different." It featured highs, it featured lows. There were plot twists I liked, there were moments in which I felt uncomfortable. There were scenes that were quite possibly the best moments in all of Star Wars, and there were other moments I felt shouldn't have been in the movie at all. A lot of the humor worked, some of it didn't --and there were about 10% too many jokes throughout the film.
But, I really enjoyed this Star Wars movie, as did the packed audience I sat with. It's flawed, to be sure, but it has enough moments of magic that really make it one of the top five best Star Wars films of all time.