Somewhere Between Revenge of the Sith and Empire Strikes Back

Rating: 7/10 (25 January 2018)

It is unfortunate that The Last Jedi isn't quite up to par with Empire Strikes Back. However, it's just as good as Revenge of the Sith, which in my opinion is the best of the prequels.
The Last Jedi features a lot of prime acting from Mark Hamill. He's doing his best work here, and it should be considering he has had more than 30 years to prepare his reprisal. I can certainly understand his frustrations on Luke's progression and why he would question the director's choices. Luke is not the same character from Return of the Jedi. His feeling of the Jedi to end is an odd one and feels completely out of character. 30 years ago, he was stone in the manipulation that Palpatine attempted to turn him but now suddenly Luke doesn't believe in the Jedi anymore.
The subplots of Rey turning evil and Kylo turning good and the backstory of Snoke all fall to the way side and the supposed epic encounter of Snoke and Rey was actually mild and predictable. It's a disappointment to build up Snoke for one and a half movies and throw him away (so easily despite showing his immense power) without telling anything about him. Where did he come from? How did he seduce Kylo? It feels like he had no purpose other than bringing Rey and Kylo close together.
Rey's reveal of her parents being nobodies was not what any Star Wars fan wanted. I think I speak for many in saying that we expected some kind of link to the previous films in relation to her story. Instead her backstory is uninteresting.
The ending of the film is an underwhelming, predictable mess. Luke creates a force hologram of himself and confronts Kylo and asks him to kill him. After Kylo successfully does so, it is revealed that Luke is still on the island alive for the moment. So the encounter was fake. Luke passes on with the force from exhaustion but it leaves a burning question of why Luke only ever performed this feat. Yoda could have hologram fought the Emperor in Revenge of the Sith and then if he failed, he could have attempted to do it for real. I feel like the hologram is such a cheat for the writers and feels very lazy as well.
I can still look forward to the next (final?) episode of Star Wars (in the Skywalker story saga) with the knowledge that this film along with The Force Awakens were both letdowns. Especially considering we waited 10 years after the prequels and nearly 40 after the original trilogy, this is subpar, to say the least.