nerd writes about star wars (again)

SPOILERS AHEAD: TREAD LIGHTLY

I'm gonna try to avoid spoilers wherever possible but to actually justify my rating there are going to be a few so if you haven't seen the movie yet you probably shouldn't even read this. I'm also not even close to a film critic so feel free to take everything I say with a grain of salt.

So I just saw The Last Jedi. Let's talk about it. I consider myself a pretty massive Star Wars dweeb so I think that gives me grounds to take a perfectly acceptable product with some noticeable, but forgivable flaws and just nitpick the shit out of the entire thing and say I hated it, when in reality it was actually okay.

I don't want to beat around the bush anymore so I'll get right to it and give the movie a 5.5 out of 10. There's a lot of things it does right but also a lot, like really a lot, of things it does wrong. We'll start with the good before the bad because I want to make one thing abundantly clear, which is that I like this movie, at least on principle, much more than The Force Awakens. Whereas The Force Awakens was a serviceable, but very safe and derivative product that didn't invoke in me much more than satisfied indifference, The Last Jedi tries to do something different, which I can respect. And beyond trying to do something different, a lot of the different things they try work well. There's a lot about this movie that revamps some of that Star Wars magic that the original trilogy had. Some of the highlights included the scene with Rey and Kylo in Snoke's chambers, Yoda's appearance, and a lot of the scenes with Luke. What these scenes, among others, did well was draw on these familiar characters and motifs and deviate from them enough to make the plot of the movie original but still make the audience recall the originals. The visuals and sound design were also top notch, though I'm not sure I would've expected anything less from a Star Wars movie, as even the prequel trilogy had great visual design. The special effects, while not put as much in the forefront as other Star Wars movies were excellent too. The practical effects and set design were also immaculate, and contributed really positively to the atmosphere of the movie. The soundtrack in particular was striking and went with what was happening in the movie well, and combined with the foley and other sound work, I fully expect an Oscar nomination for the efforts of the sound team.  The action scenes were good, but not great and pretty sparse compared to previous installments in the series. They were fun to watch though and mostly made sense, which is more than what most movies can say. The performances overall were pretty good; I actually didn't think Carrie Fisher was that great (just lynch me now), but Adam Driver and Mark Hamill were excellent and carry the movie and most of its best scenes. I really love what they did with both Luke and Kylo as characters and Driver and Hamill give really great, believable performances that make their inner turmoil clear to the audience. Daisy Ridley and John Boyega were pretty good too, but nothing to write home about. And now on to the bad.

I want to talk about the big problems I had with the layout of this movie before the plot because I feel that this was actually the biggest issue. Even with all the controversial plot points in the movie, this had the potential to be a great action flick, but a lot of that was taken away from by the overall pacing and editing of the movie. First of all, this movie is two and a half hours long. With remarkable exceptions (Pulp Fiction, Return of the King) I'd consider the perfect runtime of a movie to be about an hour and 50 minutes to two hours long, so a movie has to be truly special to hold my attention for two and a half hours. This movie did not hold my attention for two and a half hours. The biggest offender in this is the around half an hour total worth of scenes of Finn and Rose on the casino planet, that ultimately had a minimal impact on the plot and was actually detrimental to the rebel cause in the long run. I also kind of dislike Rose on principle; she was fine as a character but felt unnecessary and kind of thrown in to give Finn a sidekick and love interest while Rey was away the whole movie. I personally would have liked to see more character development from Finn, who I believe was one of the more interesting characters from The Force Awakens, but he receives almost none throughout this movie and remains the guy that knows the inside plans of all the Imperial ships and not much more. The entire casino planet, while visually excellent, dragged on for far too long and featured a heavy handed and unnecessary subtheme about war profiteering being bad that didn't add much to the feel of the movie, except to inflate the run time. Again, I'm not a film critic, but the editing as a whole seemed pretty choppy, with excessive cuts especially during the hour or so lull in the second quarter of the movie. It detracted from the immersion and also muddled the timescale so what was happening in each of the three major locations at what time was slightly unclear. The biggest problem I had with the pacing was the large blocks of contrasting scenes not spaced out well enough. Almost the entire first eighth or so of the movie is action, then the next three eighths contain little to no action. This is followed by the second half of the movie being basically non-stop action, but delivered in such a way that it felt there were multiple places where the movie should have ended before it actually did. If I hadn't known the runtime of the movie beforehand, I would've assumed the scene in Snoke's chambers was the end of the movie. There were also a lot of other timeline problems, like how it is established the main rebel ship has 18 hours before it runs out of fuel but it seems like Rey is on the island with Luke for at least a couple days, or how Finn manages to drag Rose's body really really far before the imperial walkers are even close to the mine. Overall, the idea to make a huge portion of the movie essentially a really long chase scene is good in theory because it gives tangible urgency to what is going on, but could have been executed much better.

And now, my hot takes on what actually happens in the movie. First of all, almost all of the conflict could have been avoided if purple hair Vice Admiral lady just told Po her plan, which she didn't just to spite him and ended up killing most of the rebels. This is honestly just stupid and I don't have much to say other than there must have been a better way to write this. Secondly, I like the scene in Snoke's chamber with the imperial guards a lot, but his unceremonious death before that kind of just sucked. One of the things I wanted to know going in to the movie was what they were going to do with Snoke, who he was and what made him a compelling villain. Instead we learn absolutely nothing about him or his backstory and he dies in a really dumb way. There was another death scene which I feel was handled really poorly, which was when the bridge of the rebel ship gets destroyed. I honestly think Leia should have just died in this scene because at this point she doesn't mean much to the plot. The part where Kylo is hesitant to shoot her and doesn't, only for the pilots behind him to blow up the bridge anyway was actually really poetic and would have been a good way to kill Leia and a good twist to start the movie with, but instead she just survives open space somehow and flies back to the ship with the force powers she never bothers using (which is one of my few issues with the original trilogy). Also they just kill Admiral Ackbar and no one even cares which is sad :(. I've already been over my dislike of the subtheme on the casino planet, but it does bring up one of my problems with the new trilogy. For all the things the prequels did wrong, there was some awesome world building there and each movie introduces at least 2 or 3 cool new planets with new races. There has been very little of that in the new trilogy and I feel like it hurts the movie overall as we are less aware of the galaxy that everything is happening in. We don't really even really learn how the First Order initially rose to power, which seems like it would be pretty important to know. The hacker guy ended up being a pretty shit character, which sucks because he had a lot of potential as this super chaotic neutral character that is a dick but teaches the main characters some life lessons and ultimately joins the good guys kinda like Han Solo in the originals. I kinda like how he filled the role as someone who shows Finn how idealistic he is and that there is no absolute good and evil, which is a theme in Rey and Luke's scenes that I liked overall, but you just knew from the moment you met him he was gonna double cross the rebels. Obviously he does, and you kinda keep waiting for him to come back and redeem himself, but nope, you don't even see him or have any idea what happens to him in the last quarter of the movie. He might next movie but I wouldn't hold my breath. This also just contributes to how pointless the entire subplot on the casino planet was as absolutely nothing comes of it. Also the way he "hacks" the security system, like he doesn't even do anything he just hooks up these 1960s adding machines to some mechanism in the ship and that somehow takes down the security, so why did they even need him they couldn't have just found the adding machines somewhere and done it themselves? That's more of a nitpick than anything but I enjoy making fun of how media depicts hackers because it's usually pretty funny. They also completely ruin Captain Phasma again and do nothing with her, which sucks because there has never been an in depth stormtrooper character, and they unceremoniously kill her off. The dialogue in the movie is fine in most parts but there were some lines that were so cheesy even Mark Hamill couldn't play them off and they sound super forced and just bad. There was one particular part where Rose wants Finn to get onto a walker to save him or something and I swear to God I said to myself "Please don't say 'Need a lift?'" and then she said "Need a lift" and it was very aggravating. Most of the humor in the movie falls pretty flat, and ironically the funniest character was actually General Hux and his interactions with Kylo. The only time I even chuckled to myself in the whole movie was when the other imperial officer really quickly agrees to do what Kylo says after he throws Hux against a wall. Also Yoda's scene was pretty funny and probably the best scene in the movie, but other than that most of the attempts at humor were, and I hate this word with a passion, pretty cringey. Last of all, and probably most importantly, was that Chewbacca actually appears like twice in the entire movie. He's thrown in as a joke with the bird things on the island a couple times, but he actually impacts the plot a total of one time when he shoots some tie fighters down that were about to kill Finn. It is baffling to me how they could this criminally underuse one of the most universally beloved characters in the whole franchise.

Anyway, those are my honest opinions on the movie. I'd still definitely recommend seeing it, especially to Star Wars fans, and it was an enjoyable experience overall. I might actually see it again so I can enjoy it without nitpicking through the whole thing to find everything I didn't like about it. This was pretty fun to write and I'm considering doing it for most of the movies I see in the future, so if you have any feedback other than "star wars is the best you gay loser," I'd appreciate it.