The Last Jedi – Review

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THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS DO NOT READ BEYOND THIS POINT IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW! BUT THERE IS NOTHING TO SPOIL ANYWAY

The last Jedi Review

Cinema ticket TLJ
The Last Jedi

I love Star Wars and I love film in general so it feels a bit like heresy to say I disliked ‘The Last Jedi’.

There are some good things about the film but they are few and far between. The truth is, ‘The Last Jedi’ is utter banal rubbish (I would use stronger language but for the sake of our younger readers I am self censoring.)

THE GOOD

There is so much wrong with this film but let’s start with good. The film is beautiful and epic looking as you would expect and ……   .. erm that is about it!

THE BAD

I can’t be sure but I think that halfway through post-production, when Carrie Fisher died, someone decided that Leia’s part needed to be extended. In order to do that they decided that her original intended death would be reversed and a resurrection scene was developed. Subsequent additional scenes were created using ‘cutting room floor clipping’ This may not be the case but if it is not, it seems like this is what happened.  As a result there is a very strange sequence of Leia who suddenly has becomes super-human. Subsequent footage of her has no relevance to the story, although, to be fare, no-one has much relevance to the non-story, but I will get to that later. This is not only strange resurrection in the Movie.  I saw Fin’s new girlfriend die. Minutes later she is injured  but alive (in what looked like Lister’s bed from Red Dwarf).

Talking of comedy sci-fi ‘Red Dwarf’ is funny, ‘Guardian’s of the Galaxy’ will make you smile and laugh, and ‘Third rock from the sun’ is a great comedy soap, but Star War’s apart from heavy doses of irony from Han Solo, is not supposed to be ‘side splitting funny’ (unless you are Snoke). Of course there was Jar-Jar, but I thought we had learned that lesson.  Everywhere there are jokes form the opening scenes with Po and Hux.  Hux ,an Evil General is made to look buffoon. How could such an idiot be a general let alone the third/ fourth most powerful person in the Galaxy.  The jokes are rarely funny there are too many of them, and they are in the wrong places. At times I thought I was watching ‘Airplane’. Especially not funny’’ were the beakless penguins. That brings me to cute and Disneyfication.

Ok so you have a film franchise and you want to sell some merchandise and some cuddly toys. Why not introduce a cute creature? Here’s how you can do this:

  • Steal the concept of a rival (Star Trek Tribbles).
  • Develop the size and structure from another franchise (Penguins of Madagascar).
  • Steal the cute from a better film (Gremlins)
  • Ignore previous failures (Ewoks).
  • Overuse – to reinforce the image so younger viewers become fascinated.
  • Give them their own cartoon series.
  • Become a cynical SOB.

 

Only item 6 left to do then!

Now we come to the script. What exactly happened in this movie.?

At the beginning of this movie:  Luke was elsewhere in the galaxy; Rey was a potential Jedi master;  Kylo Ren was a Sith; The resistance were on the run.

At the end of this movie:  Luke is elsewhere in the universe; Rey is a potential Jedi master; Kylo Ren is a Sith Lord; The resistance is on the run.

 

There were a lot of explosions in between, and there are fewer old character are left, although I expect some could be resurrected at any time. So the answer to what exactly happened in this movie? Is…. nothing much! Now that is OK providing you get something from the journey, but with increasing numbers of character becoming immortal (on this plane or the next), there was,and is no sense of peril. Rey’s story it turns out is one of irrelevant abandonment (although I expect that to be corrected in the next movie). So that mystery has gone. Luke ran away because he failed or something? So that mystery has gone, but makes no sense.
 
Oh! I don’t care about any of it! It is all full of holes. Not the best thought to have after 2.5 hours of movie and 48 hours to think about it.

 

THE UGLY

I loved   ‘The Force Awakens’ and  ‘Rouge One’ so it gives me much pain to declare that:

I hated ‘The last Jedi’ 

 

At best it is  badly edited, badly directed, with a poor script. At worst it is cynical, exploitative, formulaic tat.

 

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