Man ... that was a thoroughly underwhelming film. I probably didn't hate as much of it as poodle did, but I sure found a lot of it dull, a heap of it unnecessary, some of it more repeated bullshit, and a few parts having a completely retconning effect on the whole saga thus far. The writing was pretty terrible - the plot just didn't flow at all.
One thing is clear ... after 4 films of being 'The Rebellion', they have learned absolutely nothing in terms of military or tactical knowledge. The
WIRED article on the subject does better justice than I can (given it's written by a Military Writers Guild member), but yeah ... I was scratching my head a lot at the choices these folk made, especially Poe who seemed to be getting set up as a badass fighter pilot in The Farce Awakens, only to become a bit of a dumbarse throughout most of this film.
Bits I didn't like:
- In The Farce Awakens, I really liked Kylo Ren ... right up until he took his helmet off and became a whiny emo sooky la-la. He whinged, killed someone important in his life (Han), chased down the Jedi antagonising him (Rey) and fought angry, and got thoroughly schooled. In The Last Jedi, he briefly donned the helmet again (hiding his stupid sooky la-la face), then took it off, killed someone important in his life (Snoke), chased down the Jedi antagonising him (Luke), fought angry, and got thoroughly schooled.
- Boba Phasma - again, the Boba Fett of this trilogy (cool suit, helmet, don't see the face, sells lots of action figures) goes out like a complete chump.
- Slowest. Space Chase. Ever. How many hours did The First Order have to jump ahead and take them out?
- to save time, I can sum up the bits I didn't like as "Pretty much everything up to Hyperspace Kamikaze was utter crap, especially the totally unnecessary casino planet"
Leia's space-swim? Ya know what .... that didn't grate on me as much as pretty much everyone I know who also disliked the film. Other than only a few small moments mentioned previously here we've never seen her force ability. To have her wield a saber or shoot lightning would've been ridiculous. But given she's about to be written out of the franchise (which they never knew when filming this), I found this scene to be a somewhat majestic way of showing there's more to her than just some military figurehead. So yeah ... compared to other parts, this was OK by me.
As for the aforementioned Hyperspace Kamikaze - wow! What an amazingly awesome scene. But ... Why didn't she do that about 2 minutes and a dozen destroyed transports earlier? Why didn't she do that as soon as the transports left? Why didn't they just abandon one of the other vessels as soon as they realise they were fucked hours earlier, and auto-pilot hyperspace jump it at Snokes ship? Why didn't they hyperspace jump one of their ships at the Death Star in Ep IV, or EP VI? Or down the gullet of Starstupid Base in Ep VII? And don't give me that "Oh but the Death Stars are so big, it woudn't work!" Pfft ... look at how big Snoke's ship was ... cut through it like butter. Send a couple at the weapon crater of a Death Star and it's toast or out of action for enough time to hijack a few more ships and do it again. Seriously ... it looked cool, but I always just assumed hyperspace was not regular space, and never shall the actions in the former affect the latter. It's nitty-gritty tech nerd-dome, but other than Han's hyperspace plotting comment in the YT vid posted earlier, which makes sense because he's talking about super-massive objects and how they warp spacetime, there's no indication hyperspace is just regular space. I mean ... when they look out the window in hyperspace it looks like some tunnel. A tunnel through space. But now we can hyperspace at anything and cause catastrophic damage it seems.
New Rebellion Strategy: Hijack ships, kamikaze them into the enemy strongholds at hyperspeed.
Bits I liked:
- Luke's force projection. So well done. And the all-too-brief sabre fight with Ren had many aspects of Seven Samurai about it (the shifting feet positions - fantastic). But overall I thought it was the best way to write that whole conflict - the ultimate fuck you to Ren: "Look what I can do you fucking muppet! And you never saw it coming, and now you failed to wipe out the others."
- Rey's rockshift right as Luke mentions he's not the last Jedi ... spine tingling.
... that's it. 2 aspects of the movie were good. The rest was pretty fucking woeful.
I'll sign off with why the lightsabre battles in Phantom Menace are so lame: