If there is anything more disheartening about a franchise lasting for so long, it’s the eventual heel turn that will come from the fanbase. When a movie series, book series or video game series keeps producing products one after the other, there is going to be a time when the fan base does not agree with what they do and immediately denounce it forever. Star Wars is one of the prime examples of this; with the fan base slowly losing faith in the franchise after each passing trilogy, to the point where you notice the responses being more negative than positive overall. The prequels put fans through several cases of denial before accepting the awfulness and The Force Awakens was an improvement but still hit too many familiar beats which left most fans either unsatisfied or even a little underwhelmed. So, Lucasfilm and Disney were hoping the next instalment released in 2017, The Last Jedi, would be the one to finally win people over, and its safe to say that didn’t really pan out. Continuing on from The Force Awakens, Rey (played again by Daisy Ridley) discovers famous Jedi master Luke Skywalker (played again by Mark Hamill) has given up on the Jedi and refuses to help train her, after previously failing to keep his nephew, Kylo Ren (played again by Adam Driver) from the dark side. While they slowly start to bond on the other side of the galaxy, the resistance is still fleeing from the First Order and are caught in a stalemate with no real plan to get out of this situation. They send former Storm trooper-turned-rebel, Finn (played again by John Boyega) and mechanic Rose (played by Kelly Marie Tran) to find a code breaker, finding one in DJ (played by Benicio del Toro) to put a stop to their assault and allow them to escape, while resistance pilot Poe (played again by Oscar Isaac) argues with the Vice-Admiral Holdo (played by Laura Dern) about how they should go about dealing with this problem in the moment . While this is coming together, Rey and Kylo discover they have a force connection that is slowly bringing them together, unknowingly falling into the hands of Supreme Leader Snoke (played again by Andy Serkis), who is greatly intrigued by Rey’s power. The reception for this movie was baffling; with audiences, especially die-hard Star Wars fans deeming it the worst in the franchise. Though it did well from a critical standpoint and is at the point the second highest-grossing Star Wars film, the fans were distraught with this instalment, even creating a petition in order to have it remade and removed from the canon of the franchise. In its own merits, this film was one of the first Star Wars movies that tried to evolve the formula in a new direction which does lead to some very good scenes, but the reception just proves that this wasn’t what people wanted to see.

The film’s biggest problem which caused many of the fan outrage was how it broke down the original trilogy’s conclusion. Instead of continuing the fairy-tale style happy ending that Return of the Jedi produced, this movie, and even the previous film, showed that it didn’t continue to be so black and white after ”happily ever after” and this destroyed the image that several fans had created in their heads for these characters. You can feel that this movie is following the basic lay-out of Empire Strikes Back, but moreso in the tone and manner of narrative upheaval than in plot direction. It thankfully doesn’t feel like just a copy of Empire when watching and it does, to its credit, try to update the formula of Star Wars in a way that no other mainstream film had done since Empire Strikes Back (Return of the Jedi also had its fair share of retreads). The themes and ideas introduced in this film are pretty interesting and opens up the possibility of reinventing the status quo in a meaningful way, as concepts like destroying the Sith and Jedi order would be a drastically different and fresh way to close off the franchise. However, the film is evidently conflicted on what to change as its clear that the trilogy did not have a clear direction from the start. While this can be fine in instances, it starts to become clear how its purpose was just to reuse a franchise to make more money, and a lack of any idea in the direction of this film resulted in a lot of pointless plot threads that would get thrown out and effectively disliked by the fan base, resulting in things later being ret-coned in the follow-up and penultimate film for this trilogy, The Rise of Skywalker. You can feel this the most in the switch in director, with J. J. Abrams (director of The Force Awakens) only acting as executive producer on this film and being replaced by Rian Johnson, who also acted as the writer for the film. Johnson clearly wanted to bring his own ideas and thoughts to the franchise, which may have resulted in some cool ideas and a fresher direction, but his blatant dismal of previous plot points leaves this entire film with an unfinished and unsatisfactory hole in its centre. The film also prides itself on revealing information that is not what people expect, but forgets to replace it with something stronger, relying more on the surprise rather than the reveal and that aspect does not work in the long run especially for a series like Star Wars. This mixed with a half of the film that is horribly less interesting than the other and a climax that goes on too long, leaves the film with many fantastic moments in a pretty messy overall product.

The way the film is structured leaves it feeling oddly segmented in terms of overall quality, with great steps forwards in some parts and big steps back in the other. For instance, any scene with Rey, Kylo Ren and Luke is fantastic and takes great strides in holding the audience with great acting and writing. It feels like a classic Star Wars tale again with strong emotions, engaging philosophy, solid pacing and abstract visuals that are open to interpret, but can still represent a lot of fun ideas. The interactions between the three allow for some of the best moments in the entire trilogy, the relationship built between Rey and Kylo through the force is a wonderful concept and both actors do fantastic jobs throughout. Luke’s direction from hopeful hero to down-trodden loner was a huge hit for fans (even being a disappointment for Mark Hamill himself), but not only is the direction for him more interesting than other options would have been, but Hamill’s performance is probably the best he’s had in the entire franchise, it’s wonderful to see him physically act again and he’s great back as the character, bringing his own flair while still being a nice mixture of familiar roles throughout the franchise. The true failing in terms of character work comes from the other half of the movie, as anything with Finn and Rose and the resistance ranges from mediocre to just plain dumb. Finn and Rose are fine characters on their own and are still acted pretty well but their story just feels like a side mission in every sense of the word, with an uninteresting goal, dumb commentary, and no further development for either (with whatever development that is included just feeling weird, pointless and even a little degrading). The stuff with Poe  and Leia (played by Carrie Fisher in a posthumous performance) is needlessly long and dumb in execution, and the manner in which it tricks the audience is infuriatingly dumb.  Everybody’s  acting in this film is pretty good overall but the split in quality really drags the film down. Its downright mournful to not only see a complete half of the film wasted to essentially filler, but that it took away from even more development on the actual interesting stuff of the movie.

This is one of the best-looking Star Wars film not necessarily in effects but rather in presentation and scale. While most of the designs for the film are surprisingly not that good with the creatures looking either ugly or dull and an entire section that’s dedicated to a casino just looks very bland and even feels in the realms of the prequels, but the way the film is shot, composed, edited and framed makes it far more epic than it would normal would be. The team behind the film took heavy inspiration from various war and samurai films when constructing a lot of these shots and scenaries and you can tell from how grand a lot of these shots are handled by cinematographer Steve Yedlin. They have a beautiful simplicity to their framing that capture massive scale without being overly dramatic and full of motion. Despite the casino hiccup, most of the locations in the film are rich with mysticism and full of detail, working both on an epic scale but also on a threatening scale for the bad guys. Its easily one of the best-looking Star Wars films. The film surprisingly does not have that much action in the film but the ones that are included are filmed very well and choreographed nicely, but never quite hits the level of importance that the original trilogy does.

This film is both a huge tragedy and a huge missed opportunity. While The Force Awakens was criticized for being too similar, this one was criticized for being too different and this mindset from viewers and the paranoia and confusion from the team behind the screens meant that a lot of this film’s good will wasn’t followed up on. If the film removed its side plot and focused specifically on the three main leads, this could have been as strong as the original trilogy, allowing the film to break off into new territories and reinvent itself fresh. However due to the backlash, the trilogy was forced to end as predictably as possible and that is a major letdown. For what it’s worth, this is the best movie of the new trilogy, offering up some great new concepts, a lot of fantastic scenes involving Rey, Kylo and Luke, having amazing visuals, capturing an amazingly epic scale and feeling like pure Star Wars in some of its better scenes. However, with the subplot being boring, featuring confusing commentary, and having pointless direction as well as not delivering on several created ideas from the last film, this film is nowhere near flawless and considering how many fans of this franchise were not into it, clearly something was amiss during the writing stages of this flick. A very mixed bag, but one that is home to some incredible highs along with its lows, check it out and decide for yourself if this deserves the hate.

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