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Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Metacritic:
metascore 86/100
user score 5.0/10

Critic reviews: 51 positive, 3 mixed 0 negative
User reviews: 772 positive, 234 mixed 802 negative

Rotten Tomatoes:
tomatometer 93%
audience score 57%

Critic reviews: 274 fresh 20 rotten
average audience rating: 3.3/5 85,884 user ratings

Generally when there is a significant difference between critic and audience reviews, it tends to be an attempt by critics to over-hype something based on ideological/political reasons. Not in the same ballpark as Ghostbusters 60 metacritic vs 2.9 audience disparity, however, it is a concern than there is a significant variance and very few mixed critic reviews and no negative ones. This must mean it is a near flawless masterpiece in the eyes of critics who have seen thousands of movies?

From the one mixed critic review:

"Intentions and inspiration aside, “Last Jedi” doesn’t add up to an “Empire Strikes Back” for this trilogy. There’s no romance, little pathos and no real punch-in-the-gut moment. Its emotionally sterile tone was set with “The Force Awakens,” and that’s proven hard to shake, new innovations and plot twists aside.

“Last Jedi” is just another middling movie with a rabid fanbase, a Harry Potter-style placeholder picture for lump-in-the-throat moments to come. Or so we hope."
 
Just watched it.

My sentiment echoes others, some really good bits and some bad/weird bits.

Bad non spoiler bits:
- I don’t like what they did with the hux character, too marvel like.
- The Mary Poppins thing was beyond weird.
- The light speed thing with the fleet was a bit much with its effect and inconsistent with Star Wars lore.
- Too many one-liners
- Finn and rose, I found them boring and predictable.

Good non spoiler bits:
- Kylo and Rey were excellent.
- The royal guards were cool.
- The new imperial walkers and ships were cool, albeit wasted.
- I liked the snoke scenes.
 
Torn over this film. Rey and Kylo Ren are probably the two most interesting characters in the entire franchise (outside of the Luke/Leia/Han etc. original series crew) and both actors do a fantastic job. Mark Hamill was great as well, as was Carrie Fischer. Still, something about it just felt off. The entire main plot with the rebels and the First Order was weirdly... boring?? Like they spent close to 2 hours on something that, in previous films, would just be skipped over ie "oh, and then they got away". And all the pointless animals were clearly only included to sell toys, which pissed me off probably more than it should. Also, Po Dameron and Finn were kinda pointless in this movie, as was this new Rose character who just kinda came out of nowhere and did nothing.

Still, I think Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver do such a fantastic job playing complex, conflicted characters; and Mark Hamill and Carrie Fischer still capture so much of the essence of the originals that I can't hate it. Couldn't help being a little disappointed though, it just didn't feel right to me, and didn't capture me like The Force Awakens and the OG series did. At least there wasn't another ****ing Death Star!
 

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Kangaroos4eva said:
My sentiment echoes others, some really good bits and some bad/weird bits.
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This is how I felt after my first watching. Kinda like wtf was that.

The second watching made me feel a lot better about it.

Ultimately I really like where it's been left. It's practically impossible for them to remake Jedi from here in episode 9.

It's been built in such a way that 9 can have 2/3 pairs of people square off and have decent stakes in it.

Rey vs Ren and Poe vs Hux

Possible it'll be cluttered with Finn vs Del Toronto but that'd be filler.

Luke's Speech about the rebellion reborn and new Jedi I think will allow for some strong scene setting in 9.

They say the line about spark of hope to burn the First Order down, that is what 9 should be. A resistance movement that has swelled in support to be a significant force.

The movie was flawed (they all are) however this one pushes the saga where it's not been before.

At the end of 9 I want the Skywalker linage to have died. End it. And then explore elsewhere in the universe. In any future movies.

Also Rey comes from no one and if she ends the Sith makes me think 'a prophecy misread, it could be'.
 
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I wasn't joking....
 
Twinkletoes said:
Like last time, I'll be taking the kids to see it NYE and hence have no option but to insert spoiler tags galore if necessary around here prior. Getting the gist of people's overall opinions but do not want to know of characters dying etc during the movie, and I imagine I'm not alone there.

I'm far from a devotee though so seeing this is something the kids love, and I love seeing them as excited as I was back in the late 70's wandering into Russel Cinemas for the first release.
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As a huge sci-fi fan, I have a very low bar of expectation when it comes to sci-fi in general. I go in expecting the worst and if it doesn't suck complete balls then I am pleasantly surprised. I'll go see this eventually, just not hyped to see if when I read the negative reviews which touch on issues which the positive ones ignore or gloss over. I normally don't see conflicting reports, you just find the positive reviews are light on for real in-depth review.

If Lucas didn't kill my general optimism of Star Wars, the Rey archetype of a shallow character with no human flaws who can instantly vanquish any foe, even though she has had no training, is the kind of masturbatory superhuman dreams of the pre-pubescent. What made classical sci-fi good was the depth of characters and story. I just don't really get it from modern versions. I didn't mind Rogue One (or whatever it was called), but if you take the star wars out of all the modern star wars movies, you wouldn't have the same positives if it was a generic genre. A lot of people eyes glaze over when that writing scrolls up the screen.
 
Tas said:
As a huge sci-fi fan, I have a very low bar of expectation when it comes to sci-fi in general. I go in expecting the worst and if it doesn't suck complete balls then I am pleasantly surprised. I'll go see this eventually, just not hyped to see if when I ready the negative reviews which touch on issues which the positive ones ignore or gloss over. I normally don't see conflicting reports, you just find the positive reviews are light on for real in-depth review.

If Lucas didn't kill my general optimism of Star Wars, the Rey archetype of a shallow character with no human flaws who can instantly vanquish any foe, even though she has had no training, is the kind of masturbatory superhuman dreams of the pre-pubescent. What made classical sci-fi good was the depth of characters and story. I just don't really get it from modern versions. I didn't mind Rogue One (or whatever it was called), but if you take the star wars out of all the modern star wars movies, you wouldn't have the same positives if it was a generic genre. A lot of people eyes glaze over when that writing scrolls up the screen.
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Good writing and direction has made way for gimmickry and product placement.

The best sci fi movies these days have little or no special effects.
 
Snake_Baker said:
Good writing and direction has made way for gimmickry and product placement.
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I couldn't even begin to put my finger on the problems in the genre in general, however, I think the current political climate in the US film and media industry has seen the kind of flawed vision where they want to take the older franchises that were memorable and inject them with a dose of identity politics. They didn't intend to write a good sequel to Ghostbusters that would make it shine compared to the original, they wanted to make and all female cast and build the movie around that desire. Not that an all female cast is necessarily a negative thing, but the focus should be on writing a fantastic story and if the author makes an all female cast and it is a great story than go with that.

Ghostbusters was contrived and the type of mindset that allowed them to ignore the story first approach denied them the ability to navigate the story telling, because it was never a focal from the beginning and it stood out like dogs-balls in the end despite a last bid attempt to re-patch it.

Similar with the new Star Trek reboot, thrusts a minority female lead, a gay couple as major characters and intentionally making the nationalistic Klingons more grotesque (even rapey) than the original, especially when compared to the globalist federation. The director made a comment that he modelled the Klingons based on Trump and his supporters and the medium is being abused for political manipulation to make nationalism seem abhorrent.

We then get Rey who is unbelievable even in a fantasy environment and we get the usual garbage about how we need strong female leads because the industry and genre hasn't had them in science fiction fantasy. However, there have always been numerous strong female and minority characters in sci-fi, there always has been, like Ripley in the Alien franchise or Sarah Connor from the Terminator franchise. What made these type of characters great was that they were complex and didn't lose their femininity, they weren't just male characters with boobs.

I think Hollywood is trying to push a narrative and it doesn't make for great characters with identifiable human qualities which people can relate to. I am 100% all for them to go with female and minority characters but for the love of god, get some decent writers.

I really want to see good movies produced which have LGBT in them, use minorities, females, etc as leads but I just don't want them to be tokens that are used to promote the movie. They should get the best actors for movies, they should write the best stories and if it isn't PC then go with it anyway. Not everything has to be PC.

They are killing classic franchises by attempting to use them as political tools and I think it has the opposite of the desired effect as a section of the community becomes irritated that classic franchises are being ruined. The sad part is it didn't have to go down that route, they could have achieved the messages they desired without making bad movies or gutting a franchise, if only the writing was better.
 
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Snake_Baker said:
Good writing and direction has made way for gimmickry and product placement.

The best sci fi movies these days have little or no special effects.
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Or to use footy parlance, no more one on one contests or marking forwards - just watch the excitement of 18 blokes trying to do fast breaks from halfback every week.
 
Moti said:
73
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Take any bits of two previous star wars movies, throw in some long winded sword fights and spaceship battle scenes, a master/pupil relationship, an opposition forces that are unknown relatives relationship, a nature is the underdogs friend theme, some generic Disney type characters to hook the kids, and churn out plastic figurines in the happy meals, and you will have at least 73 cliches.

It's rubbish. I could write a better script and I have the artistic talent of a bar of soap.
 
Snake_Baker said:
Take any bits of two previous star wars movies, throw in some long winded sword fights and spaceship battle scenes, a master/pupil relationship, an opposition forces that are unknown relatives relationship, a nature is the underdogs friend theme, some generic Disney type characters to hook the kids, and churn out plastic figurines in the happy meals, and you will have at least 73 cliches.

It's rubbish. I could write a better script and I have the artistic talent of a bar of soap.
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Good luck with that.
 
Moti said:
Good luck with that.
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Hey mate............you're not one of ........"them".........are you?

iu
 
Snake_Baker said:
Take any bits of two previous star wars movies, throw in some long winded sword fights and spaceship battle scenes, a master/pupil relationship, an opposition forces that are unknown relatives relationship, a nature is the underdogs friend theme, some generic Disney type characters to hook the kids, and churn out plastic figurines in the happy meals, and you will have at least 73 cliches.

It's rubbish. I could write a better script and I have the artistic talent of a bar of soap.
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Beg to differ. This one takes a lot of the tropes from Star Wars (and the western/war/adventure genre generally) and deliberately turns them on their head while still having the same arc structure of the original trilogy. You can and no doubt will argue that it's unsuccessful, but at least it was a turn away from the obvious safe fan-service of Ep VII

Light side v dark side and rebels vs empire are constants of the SW universe. Complaining about them is "Yo dawg you put too much star wars in my star wars".

We're used to the rebels taking heavy losses but it's usually justified, in the service of a momentous and climactic victory. This time they go back to the well of nimble-fighters-under-the-shields but it ends up a pointless and Pyrrhic victory. Yeah they take down a dreadnought but so what? The first order have got more of them and the rebels have just sacrificed all their offensive power. No option now but to run, so the escape will be the central thread of the story. OK.

The opening battle also set up the Poe as great pilot but not a great commander, which flows into his conflict with Laura Dern's character. Again, the usual trope of cocky flyboy vs stodgy officer comes in, but Johnson turns that around as well; the one that's supposed to be the hero turns out to be wrong. Again, for mine a welcome development on the one-dimensional peripheral character that Poe was in VII.

Then they go back to the infiltrate-the-big-ship device and introduce the lovable rogue trope in Benicio Del Toro. Only this time the ruse doesn't save the day and the rogue turns out to be, well, just a rogue and not a Han Solo type. The way they do take down that ship turns out to be good old-fashioned brute force.

And there's Luke. Luke/Rey mirrors Yoda/Luke, but this time the master is reluctant and frankly not as smart as Yoda. Rey has to go it alone more than Luke did and him being stuck on the island set up what was for me the best few minutes of the movie on the salt planet. The apparently immortal Luke turning out to be a projection (the effort of which killed him) was an excellent bit of writing.

Snoke/Ren as Palpatine/Vader also needed changing up to avoid a mindless reboot of ROTJ in Ep IX. Vader was cold, clinical and efficient; Ren is a wild out of control loose cannon. The emperor continuing to be evil was necessary for Vader's redemption but now Ren is alone with his flaws at the top of the First Order. Hux is a sniveling buffoon in the place of the ruthless Tarkin.

I agree, the Finn/Rose thread doesn't add much. It sort of has to be there but it's not particularly successful. And I have misgivings about the reliance on force levitation of things as a deus ex machina for every sticky situation, though it does serve up a couple of satisfying moments. And it's over-long; when they got to the abandoned base and I could see there was another half hour to go I wondered how many false endings they'd thrown in. Ended up earning its keep though.

On the whole, far from perfect but thumbs up from me.
 
I liked it. About twenty minutes too long though.

Plus I've not really seen anybody anywhere mention the clue they are likely to ship Rey and Poe.

Rey: I'm Rey.
Poe: I know.
 
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