Haters gonna hate, the rest of us have the Force

Rating: 9/10 (11 March 2018)

I feel a moral responsibility to at least say that this movie is great and that the *thousands~ of people crying grand conspiracies rigging IMDb in The Last Jedi's favour are severely paranoid narcissists so terribly threatened by the idea that they have no meaningful ownership over the multibillion dollar corporate slam dunk we call Star Wars.
This movie is an act of revisionism, a tradition even more Star Wars than the original Star Wars. There were (surprisingly good) animated shows. There were CGI-filled special editions. There were three hokey but wonderfully imaginative prequels. Now there are the anthology movies. All of them remade, in different ways, what Star Wars is and pushed a trilogy of campy furry-filled space operas into a huge, still-relevant contribution to science fiction and popular culture.
The Last Jedi just happens to be the most boldly revisionist of anything since The Empire Strikes Back. It remakes the force. It remakes destiny. It remakes the idea of a binary struggle between the light and the dark. It refocuses what it means to be a hero and to win. It tosses aside just about all the questions we had after The Force Awakens in very surprising ways, which is most likely why it is so bitterly attacked by "true fans". It doesn't luxuriate in Star Wars mythology, it whittles the lore down to what is essential and throws in light sprinkling of nostalgia to reinject the galaxy far far away with the old school camp that made the originals fun to watch.
All the while you're watching Star Wars morph into something new, you have a classic John Williams score, you have some of the most stunning red-tinged imagery in *any movie ever~. You have new characters rising to be just as interesting as the classics. You have Adam Driver! He's a badass! You have relentless failure on every front. This movie is more Empire Strikes Back than Empire Strikes Back. If the people who feel so personally wounded by this movie, after tying their identities to the world of Star Wars and feeling betrayed that it took off in a direction that wasn't sufficiently triumphant or terminally nostalgic, if these people would just cast aside their enormous egos for two and a half hours and let themselves be entertained, they'd have a great time. There's a wonderful movie here. Miss it at your own expense.