Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Empire Makes Another Trip to the Bank

Rating: 1/10 (17 February 2018)

Ok, I've said before that my one expectation going into The Force Awakens was that it would at least be better than the prequels--which were horrible--and it was worse. Well, my one expectation of The Last Jedi--if the abomination of The Force Awakens hadn't left me completely indifferent to future Disney Star Wars movies--was that it couldn't possibly be worse than that. Wrong. Again. J.J. Abrams killed Star Wars, then Rian Johnson violated the corpse.
I'm proud to say that I watched this train wreck--purely out of morbid curiosity--not in a theater, but on a Chinese bootleg downloaded from the internet. We vote with our dollars after all, and handing Disney your sixteen bucks is like telling them, "Yes! Make more of this garbage!" Never again. I know it's a drop in the bucket, and this one's already grossed over a billion dollars by this time, but any new Star Wars movie ought to be the highest grossing movie of all time, and the fact that it isn't should tell them they've done something really wrong.
I also want to say that I'm not generally the kind of guy who writes movie reviews online. TFA was the first time I put my opinion of a movie "out there" in any cogent way, and this is the second. And the reason is Disney needs to be called out on their bull****. Again, drop in the bucket and all that, but...
And I ALSO want to say... A lot of the vitriol against the new Star Wars movies has gotten conflated with a bunch of trumper MAGA nonsense, which has denounced them for their focus on strong female characters and non-white characters. If this is your beef, then hang up the phone now. You've missed the point of Star Wars entirely. Princess Leia was always a take-charge woman who got her hands dirty, and she was always central to the story. Your favorite episode, The Empire Strikes Back, was co-written by Leigh Brackett, a woman. Even if the cast of previous Star Wars movies wasn't always that diverse, the message of Star Wars has always been one of universality and inclusion. In fact, the only positive outcome of this new movie may be that it's alienated some trumpers.
Putting all that aside, whether you're a lifelong fan or a newcomer to this series--or if you just like movies--there's plenty of legitimate reasons not to like this one. I guess now with Disney excreting a new Star Wars film every year it's just like throwing spaghetti at the wall, because it's clear there was never any plan here. Abrams laid a very shaky foundation, and Johnson, rather than build off of it, just plowed it up and virtually started over. In the middle of a trilogy. Effectively rebooting Abrams' reboot. The result, as you can imagine, is a mess, which leaves nowhere for the story to go from here.
There's a theme of "letting the past die" running through this movie, which manifests itself in a meta kind of way in terminated characters, abandoned storylines, and trashed Darth Vader helmets. Many critics have speculated that this was done to placate fans who rightly pointed out that The Force Awakens was derivative of Episode 4. Yet this movie is derivative of Episodes 5 and 6.
On the other hand, everything new that Rian Johnson tries to bring to Star Wars is horribly out of character for the saga: force-connections, force-projections, pyromaniac ghost-yada, flying Leia. When fans called bull****, Johnson cited the Star Wars Expanded Universe books as precedence to defend his choices. But buddy, the movies were the basis for the books and not the other way around--the latter are just merchandise created to mentally masturbate Star Wars nerds while picking their pockets. So, overruled! He may have read all the apocryphal literature, but it doesn't seem like he's ever seen a Star Wars movie.
Right off the bat, with Poe's oh-so contemporary "can you here me now?" phone prank on General Hux--and Hux's cartoonishly foppish, apoplectic reaction--it becomes painfully apparent that the tone of this movie is completely off. These tone-deaf attempts at humor continue almost to the end, like sour notes deflating the drama of every scene. You get the sense that the Disney execs floated a memo: "Let's keep it light, people! We don't want to make the same mistake as Batman vs. Superman!" The original Star Wars movies defined "blockbuster", but this is just 'B movie' material, tarted up with the best special effects, cinematography, and production design money can buy.
But this is all neither here nor there, because there's simply no 'there' there. This isn't the labored-over, lifelong vision of a singular imagination, like the originals. It's certainly not a continuation of the saga. This isn't Star Wars: Episode anything. It's not even a three-act structure in and of itself. It's a jerky lurch over a cliff coming off the false start of The Force Awakens. It's the slapped-together homework assignment of a kid in over his head as he cracked under pressure the night before it was due. I'm not just referring to Johnson--or even Abrams--but the whole Lucasfilm organization under Disney. The irony of the trumpers' criticism is that The Last Jedi is NOT an example of the kind of progress that Trump wants to turn America back from; rather, it's another product of the same corporatocracy that has dumbed America down to the point that it would accept Donald Trump as president and this as a Star Wars movie. It's a crying shame that now, when John Williams' majestic fanfare plays, it heralds something with about as much craft and resonance as a half-hour episode of DuckTales--nothing akin to the heady cinematic milestones that stuck with us decades after we first saw them.