Review of Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Full of spectacle, but otherwise weak

As a long time Star Wars fan, I was very much looking forward to this film, so I’m sad to say that it did not live up to my expectations. While it may look great, the film has many unfortunate flaws.

My single biggest gripe with this movie is that its overarching story seems almost irrelevant when considering the big picture. The first film of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, The Force Awakens, had an unoriginal but still solid plot that was clearly important to the story of these three movies.

Without getting into spoilers, the plot of this film was quite different. In fact, I would venture to say that very little changes from the beginning to the end of the film, which is a huge disappointment because Star Wars movies tend to be action packed adventures with exciting endings.

I also believe that many of the choices made were simply an attempt to subvert fans expectations- expectations for characters, plot lines, and more that had been built up by the previous film. Instead of continuing to build on these established story and character threads, The Last Jedi chose to throw most of them away in favor of surprising audiences. There are times when subverting expectations can be a good thing, but I believe this film did it excessively and at the expense of quality.

I also believe there are also many wasted character opportunities. Rose Tico, a new character with a lot of potential, was not given a good story or character arc. Her most defining personality trait is that she’s in love with Finn- a romance that seems shoehorned into the movie with little substance- and beyond this she has minimal characterization.

I was also very disappointed with the way this film handled the character of Snoke, who had been established as a mysterious and important figure that we expected to learn more about. This film chose to take the easy way out and avoided giving the character any further character development or even a backstory.

For all its flaws, I must admit that the movie does look gorgeous. The combination of visual effects and sound effects in several scenes is absolutely breathtaking, and I recall several times where the audience in my theater started clapping at especially beautiful moments. Still, this is not enough to make up for the many areas where the movie fails.

Ultimately I would rate this film 6/10. It isn’t terrible, but for a Star Wars movie I found it very disappointing.

Watch the trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0CbN8sfihY