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[NRDL]

Like... I don't get when people "just enjoy it for what it is", would you just enjoy an undercooked steak or raw eggs for what they are? How about wet concrete? A bed with no mattress?

That's actually a really good metaphor. Yes, this movie has a bunch of flaws, very firmly embedded and which I've spent a lot of time noting and reviewing here and on Reddit in particular. It just also happens to have some of the coolest moments in the entire Star Wars franchise, a sense of humour that works perfectly for me, and tickles all of my fancies in all the right places.

It is, I suppose, an undercooked steak. That also happens to be coated in drugs that activate all the pleasure sensations in my body the second I bite into it.

I'm just rehashing what Mephansteras and what a bunch of other people have said in saying this, but the fact that this film is an inherently flawed product is not what I care about. What I end up caring about is the enjoyment I derive from this inherently flawed product.

[hector13]

Yeah, there’s a lot I disliked about this movie. The first character I see is Ade Edmondson, the whole “get your ass back here Poe we’re leaving” and suddenly bombing run with stupidly designed ships that explode in a stiff breeze, until the last one after which suddenly all the TIE fighters disappear, then the person kicks the ladder ‘til the thing falls, and magically catches it before it falls out of her reach after which he bombs fall and the stupidly designed bomber explodes from its own attack... and that’s literally the first 10 minutes after the crawl.

I fucking loved it, though.

[ChairmanPoo]

I think that the reveal that Supreme Leader Smoke is actually a Kryptonian marks a new highpoint in the saga, and even surpases "I am your father".  Really, merging SW with Marvel was a smart and logical move from Disney

 

In all honesty, after Flying Space Leia and the reveal that Snoke was

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

NOONE MEANINGFUL WHATSOEVER

... can you really say my SW version with SuperSmoke the Kryptonian would have been worse? :p

SPOILER: JAR JAR PINK WAS A KRYPTONIAN AS WELL. AND A LORD OF THE SHIT!

[Mephansteras]

My point was that Krypton is DC, not Marvel.

[Kot]

For what it's worth, I liked it last than the last two, think the Marvalization argument is ridiculous on its face (last I checked there was no shiny bullshit at the end to cater to a sequel, people actually died, and the good guys didn't win), and find that this thread isn't going to convince anyone to change their minds so much as it's going to spiral into some nonsensical argument that inevitably gets so personal that the thread is locked.

I like Marvel movies. I dislike new Star Wars.

It's not that the new movies don't have good parts or even invoke ideas that could have been interesting. The fight in Snoke room was amazing really, the idea of space B-17s had a lot of promise when I saw the first shoot with them spewing fire from turrets with fighters zipping around, invoking all the good "DO IT AGAIN BOMBER HARRIS" feelings, but ultimately they were quickly crushed in ocean of stupidity and being lackluster, with what faults they have and a lot of people mentioned already.

Hyperdrive suicide: Ships are expensive to produce.  What you really want would be a coil gun that then sends the projectile into hyperspace.  Bonus, you can shell a planet from star systems away giving your enemies no warning.

Yeah, basically. Hyperspace torpedoes. Get an X-Wing, replace the cockpit with remote control or something and hyperspace that thing into enemy ships weak points.

Lack of Political Entity: I seem to the New Republic was the only other power, and they had disbanded their military.  That's the reason why the 'Resistance' was needed.

Did literally 100% of Empire remnants joined up with First Order? Where the fuck are Hutt Cartels gone? Historically Republic didin't have military for a lot of their existence, but they had Judicial Forces, they had fleet, they had ships, who the fuck in their sane mind signed the complete disarmament of Republic when First Order was a thing? Like, what the complete and utter incompetence that comes from the "good guys" all the goddamn time?

It's just... eh.

[Mephansteras]

I thought the fleet got blasted by the Starkiller attack in ep 7?

[LoSboccacc]

not saying that people should all hate it, I found the snoke play interesting myself, but there are objectively bad things in how the movie was made.
 
lot cgi looks like a preproduction draft, for example.

plot can be subjective, I hated how they used fourty minutes to hammer how everyone rich is bad, but hey that's me and ymmv. actors too: I liked Ray acting this time around.

[Kot]

I thought the fleet got blasted by the Starkiller attack in ep 7?

So their entire fleet, their entire army police force, their entire everything was at the point in single star system? They control like half of galaxy at worst, and all their stuff was in one system?
I N C O M P E T E N C E.

Most of actors did okay, I think, it's the writing that drags it down.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

I thought the fleet got blasted by the Starkiller attack in ep 7?

Nope, that was the capital system, that for some reason is constantly moved across the galaxy causing huge monetary and bureaucratic waste as everything needed to run the government is constantly shifted around.  The actual fleet itself did not exist, because the Republic, simply put, did not have any military at all.

[inteuniso]

I thought the fleet got blasted by the Starkiller attack in ep 7?

Nope, that was the capital system, that for some reason is constantly moved across the galaxy causing huge monetary and bureaucratic waste as everything needed to run the government is constantly shifted around.  The actual fleet itself did not exist, because the Republic, simply put, did not have any military at all.

So are they all fighting because they're frustrated or i n c o m p e t e n t ?

[Reelya]

Holy crap what a shit movie that was ... it felt like the level of writing you see in really low budget 80's sci fi movies. For comparision, consider the original Battle Star Galactica telemovies. Or Battle Beyond The Stars, or even Space Raiders (an unrelated movie patched together with footage from Battle Beyond The Stars). All of them are kind of crappy already, but they still work far better as movies than The Last Jedi. Also, the old Battlestar Galactica has a very similar plot to The Last Jedi - the last human battleship fleeing from an alien aggressor, except Battlestar Galactica was much better written because it managed to humanize that story.

I though The Force Awakens was kinda bad, but it's fucking Shakespeare next to The Last Jedi. I kind of feel good that they've killed off almost all the original characters, because at least that way it puts them out of their misery.

The Last Jedi had a couple of good scenes here and there (Kylo Ren + Rei vs the imperial guard was pretty much the only 'wow' scene), however the central narrative of the rebel fleet being chased by the imperial fleet was the goddamn most boring thing I've seen in any movie in a long time: the fleet fleeing the imperial fleet basically became a major drag on the plot structure. e.g. consider pretty much any other Star Wars movie, and you'll see that they're made up of 2-3 major plot sections set in different places. They're dynamic. This movie was not dynamic: the cental motif of the rebel fleet fleeing the imperial fleet took basically the entire running time. I count the scene at the end on the planet as just part of the same "running away" narrative. Two hours of the fleet being chased, the imperials can't catch up, and yet somehow people have time to go off on side quests to inhabited planets. It completely broke suspension of disbelief.

Also, a big problem is that there are many "useless" scenes, and they rip off the original trilogy so much. e.g. this movie was basically like a way shittier version of Empire Strikes Back:

- starts with rebel transports fleeing from a planet (similar to the Hoth evacuation)
- Has scenes with the falcon flying through canyons, turning sideways and tie fighters crashing
- ends with a crappier version of the Hoth Assault - except way crapper because the speeders don't actually do anything.

It's speeders vs AT-AT walkers again, except this time, there's no point to them being speeders or walkers. It could have been dune buggies vs battle tanks, and the scene would have played out identically. At least with George Lucas the details of the set piece battles mattered - the AT-AT walkers were vs speeders precisely so that the money-shot of the speeders crippling the walkers legs could be in there. George Lucas never featured another battle with AT-AT walkers for that very reason - the scene's been done. The reboots have had the AT-AT walkers, except now there's no actually reason to their existence, they're just tanks on legs for no reason.

I'm actually starting to like the prequels at lot more now because of the reboots. Lucas mentioned in an interview that he's not happy with the rehashing, because despite his flaws, each movie, he tried to do something that hadn't been done in the series before that. There's a serious lack of that in the new movies. Everything's been done by Star Wars before, and they don't even hold up when viewed as movies in isolation. If the new movies were an unknown new movie series, they'd be 100% panned as the biggest incoherent and overblown piles of shit since Water World. The only thing the new ones have going for them is name-dropping their own series, e.g. the scene where Luke is overjoyed to see R2D2 again ... it's not actually a good movie scene, it's just name-dropping nostalgia porn.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

tl;dr: 4/5, the public is Wrong about everything, #DeconstructGeorgeLucas

I did not believe in this movie, not even remotely. After the unnecessary everything about the prequels and the Mouse Council plastic playride of The Force Awakens, I was fully convinced that the sequel trilogy would be nothing but Extruded Culture Product which entire departments of marketing executives had approved every single syllable of. I thought it would be Empire Strikes Back's skinned corpse being worn by a sexually aggressive zombie of Walt Disney set to all top 20 Christmas songs played simultaneously, wailing the wail of the damned as the children stare into their Star Wars action figures and try not to cry even though mommy and daddy are drunk and exchanging death threats with the neighbors again. But I was wrong. Somehow, somehow against all possible odds and the Ghost of Capitalist Future, this movie managed to be its own creation, and an immensely necessary one for Star Wars.

I don't love this movie to death or anything (see my rating), but it sure as shit is the best piece of Star Wars media in over a decade. It's surreal to me looking at the non-critic reviews or the other posts in this thread. I guess The Last Jedi was just made for me. See, my background here is one of Star Wars heresy (and really, if you're gonna have an overzealous fandom in your life, you could do better than George Lucas' failure of a Buddhist Fantasy Romance), because my favorite piece of Star Wars storytelling is not any of the films. It's the two (and there are only two) Knights of the Old Republic games, which I loved above all else because the central thesis of their storylines is the deconstruction of Star Wars. KOTOR I does this by making the Jedi and the Republic kinda evil bastards, KOTOR II goes even further by making the greatest enemy the Force itself, as an omnipotent oppressor who cannot be overthrown.

This brings us to The Last Jedi. It has its faults, mostly in the beginning and a few stupid things like the bad CGI on Space Leia and the whole Yoda scene, and the continuous risk of having two climaxes instead of one (though some women like that, I've heard), but what it gives is so much more, because it is an honest to god deconstruction story in the main movies themselves. I thought it would never happen. I saw some hints back in TFA's marketing, but I figured from the movie proper that it was all squished and the same hints in TLJ's trailers was the same old bait without a meal. But here it is. Luke Skywalker hates the Jedi and explicitly calls them out for making themselves into "special people" power fantasies when the Force is a part of the universe that everyone has and shares, and he also totally might have been about to murder the "bad guy" in cold blood for the crime of being a scared teenager. Rey turns out to not be some dumb fucking chosen one of prophecy repeat, but is just a person who has taken charge of their own fate. Snoke is some shlub who got where he was by abusing the quick and easy of the dark side, and yet was raising Kylo Ren to be a synthesis of both light and darkness and also then gets fucking destroyed without so much as a fight. Poe being a reckless absolute individual Hard Man Making Hard Choices is a bad thing, because when you are operating as a group rebellion disruptive heroes who think they're invincible get everyone killed. The New Republic's "goodness" is functionally evil itself, because it plunges the galaxy straight back into a genocidal war after working so hard to get out of the last one.

And then there's Kylo Ren. Oh god, Kylo Ren. Back in TFA I thought his motive for killing Han was one of the best things about the film, because it was a villain motivation like that of Berserk's Griffith with weight and some scariness behind it. Kill the past is the theme of the whole film and what it intends to do for the franchise, and in this Kylo fucking embodies it. He gets it. He understands the endless cycle and wants now not just to sever his personal ties, but everyone's ties to the bloated past of the Star Wars galaxy. He transcended the inherent flaw in the philosophy of the Sith, the hypocrisy that embracing the dark side for your passion destroys that passion. Instead, he's embraced the dark side for...nothing. The void, the heady pure nihilism that can allow something new and unconnected to the bullshit of Empire and Republic to grow. And if the third movie in this trilogy in any way involves Kylo Ren using the First Order to crush the rest of the forces in the galaxy before turning it on itself and blowing up their dumb superweapon without a fight, I will endure any number of emo teen references in retaliation for my love of him as a villain.

Also, the FTL suicide jump was way cooler than the low-power DS shots or the destruction of the Death Stars. I got chills seeing the mountainous story roadblock of Star Destroyers just...disintegrate under the power of it, black space turned white in total silence.

They definitely should have killed Finn and otherwise rethought the whole of the Crait section. Luke's trick was a badass and appropriate way for him to go out (while also being, if you didn't catch it, so in tune with the force that he saw Tatooine's binary sunset on a planet with one sun which is neither of those colors). Letting Kylo just Obi-Wan him would have been dumb, but boosting his connection to the force until he joined it was the correct way to "kill" Luke.

I was fond of the "subtle" anticapitalism of rich people playing both the Republic and the First Order while living it up on a planet they stole.

But whether you all liked this movie or not, I hope you all see where its coming from. This movie is a purge of the curse of Star Wars upon itself. This deconstruction is necessary and should have begun a long time ago, and even if you hate this film, take some solace in the fact that it has opened up new ground for the third film and Star Wars media yet to come. Hopefully.

[NRDL]

He transcended the inherent flaw in the philosophy of the Sith, the hypocrisy that embracing the dark side for your passion destroys that passion. Instead, he's embraced the dark side for...nothing. The void, the heady pure nihilism that can allow something new and unconnected to the bullshit of Empire and Republic to grow.

That's a fascinating take on Kylo's motivation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he does still spout the whole "order and control" rhetoric that Vader used as a justification for his evil, but I'd love to see more of your idea implemented in the next movie. Embracing evil for evil's sake, as opposed to any sort of "greater good" or other excuses.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Why exactly do you think it is necessary to "deconstruct" what was already there? There is literally a whole body of work that successfully builds off of the original films without destroying them.

I fundamentally disagree with you on any sort of "Star Wars Curse". George Lucas certainly did not write himself into a corner and frankly the sequel trilogy could have gone in any direction. You yourself admit to being a KOTOR fan, a work which is decidedly NOT affected by this curse. Within its own laws and physics and literary rules, the Star Wars universe is pretty much a blank slate. And man, why exactly do you think this opens up a whole new universe? There is nowhere to go from here! Whatever they do, it will be a serious disconnect from the both the trilogy and the series as a whole.

If your whole reason for liking it is because it dismantles what Star Wars was well... I just can't even wrap my head around that. Do you have any idea how Star Wars-y KOTOR is? There is a very certain style and aesthetic to Star Wars, certain nuances and themes, and unique storytelling/worldbuilding rules that make up the thing that is the idea of Star Wars--every great story has these things, and without them... they're something else. This movie destroys those all-important things utterly.

I mean, my god, George Lucas catches so much flak. The man is a literal genius. I think you just don't like Star Wars. Which is fine, but don't talk  about how there's so much MORE open to storytellers wanting to tell a Star Wars story now. There isn't. In fact, I'd say Disney has pretty effectively destroyed and exploited an American Cultural Artifact.

Perhaps even worse than that, whatever comes NEXT is certainly not going to be any good. Disney truly is Marvelizing Star Wars. And while this is going to step on a lot of people's toes, on the whole, Marvel movies... are bad. Disney doesn't care about good stories. They're not good at making stories. What they do, on a corporate level, is sell you on a product. Seriously. Take a day to watch TLJ and Empire back to back and the difference in quality is immediately obvious. Like... it's not even a competition. These big-budget blockbusters have none of the heart or vision in them that the originals, and even the prequels are loved for. Even worse, while some of the original's choices for transitions have been questionable... the actually filmmaking itself is crazy better. The editing and cinematography are way off. The style of filmmaking is just so... ADHD. It's a bit of a problem endemic to modern American cinema as a whole, but it's plainly obvious when you can go back and watch a series that is widely considered to be exciting and dynamic and consider it slow and nuanced as compared to TLJ.

Also, here's the thing. A personal, non-theoretical opinion about Kylo. Kylo isn't a good villain--in fact, he just plain isn't a villain. He's a tragic character for sure, but he's not really a villain per say. He's not evil, he's not uncaring, rarely does he meaningful impede our heroes' progress. One of the biggest weaknesses of the sequels is the lack of a good villain. The original trilogy had two: Vader, and the Emperor and they were both scary in different ways and changed the course of events significantly for the heroes. In the sequels the plot feels so railroaded on. Things happen to these characters, but they never truly have to change course or learn from their mistakes to progress, they lose almost nothing, and every time they're about to fail, chance or stupidity puts them back on the right course. Snoke could have been a good villain, except... well, he's literally a bit fucking part--which totally counteracts the gravitas of Kylo slaying him. He's just "some guy" to us.

Also, while I do think it is a god awful, series ruining movie. TLJ had it's moments. Usually for the visuals, but Luke's death and the Hyperspace suicide run were both very beautiful. But things like that purple-haired woman being so unlikable, and Like's whole fight with Kyle being lame as all heck really undercut any emotional they have for me. There are a lot of moments like this. Every time I want to like the film, it sucker punches me with a bad filmmaking decision, plot armor, or just pure fan-fiction.

[LoSboccacc]

I mean, my god, George Lucas catches so much flak. The man is a literal genius.

at worldbuilding. that needs to be specified. he's good at that and the ot turned out right because he had plenty people correcting the film direction instead of pandering to his every whim. 

case in point: prequels