Star Wars: The Worst Said I

Rating: 1/10 (1 June 2019)

"What we've got here is, failure to continuate..."
Although highly derivative of earlier installments, and plot-wise largely a retread of George Lucas's original Star Wars (1977), now retconned to Episode IV: A New Hope in the official chronology, JJ Abrams' franchise-restarter The Force Awakens (2015) was at least a clean, unpretentiously juvenile action-adventure that played effectively on fans' expectations, and set up both a serviceable new cast of characters and a charted a direction for future installments that offended (nearly) no-one.
With this follow-up installment, however, writer-director Rian Johnson appears to have deliberately taken Abrams' fan-service blueprint and chucked it in the shredder, scotch-taped the strands back together in an impressionistic collage and embellished it with more new featured characters seemingly parachuted in from the the type of edgy, self-referential indie flicks with which he made his name.
To say that the plot is disjointed, dull, illogical, full of narrative blind alleys and almost mischievously nonsensical twists, or that it carelessly dumps most of the more interesting supporting roles and subplots from the previous installment in favour of cutesy-annoying ethnic stereotypes and campy guest-star turns by the likes of Benecio Del Toro, or to observe that Johnson seems not to possess any firm concept of space, time, distance, gravity or narrative consistency, would be to rake over territory covered in far greater detail elsewhere. Suffice to say that nothing that The Last Jedi introduces to the Star Wars universe has any value beyond momentary audience disorientation, and that the few effective sequences Johnson does pull off - the Hyperspace ramming sequence is undeniably impressive - are all immediately undercut by dramatic scenes which fall hopelessly flat, thanks largely to a strand of self-referential humour that is neither funny nor particularly clever, or by Johnson's borderline malicious determination not to deliver any of the really big moments longtime fans of this series might reasonably expect.
Among the casualties of this revisionist approach are Daisy Ridley's lead performance as Rey, carried over from the previous picture but here reduced to a shrill, one-dimensional "good-girl", whose abilities in force-control and light-sabre fighting are accomplished in ridiculously easy, low pressure fashion (mainly by swinging one around a rock for about a minute), thus robbing her journey of any drama or sense of fulfilment. Likewise Jon Boyega's Finn, relegated to secondary plot status and mostly a figure of comic-relief, Gwendoline Christie's Captain Phasma (killed off in a listless duel aboard a burning space cruiser, which strangly still manages to have functioning gravity), Bill Nighy's Lord Snoke (heavily set up in The Force Awakens as a final boss for the new trilogy, but likewise dispatched with irritating abruptness) and, perhaps most tragically for fans, Mark Hamill as an aging and embittered Luke Skywalker, diminished by both the size of his role and the pathetic emotional condition of the character to a whiny, cynical old recluse, beaten in a stick-duel by Rey and eventually force-ghosted with little explanation or impact.
Ultimately, this fails to be either a satisfactory follow-up to Abrams's fan-film homage, an interesting recalibration away from simple crowd-pleasing heroics or even a well-told escapist fantasy in its own right. Instead, it's a janky, badly plotted and annoyingly contrived mess, with pointless supporting characters, pointedly unexplained departures from the previous films (which feel crudely shoehorned in for plot convenience) and a dimly perceptable inbuilt contempt for the audience, one that colours the film's treatment of main series characters and the overriding themes of previous Star Wars pictures.
It's clear that what Johnson set out to create was essentially an anti-Star Wars picture; in that he has been successful, but this film is a disaster.