The Last Jedi

In the words of Kylo Ren "it's time to let the old things die". And in that spirit I think The Last Jedi might well be the last Star Wars film that I bother to go to the cinema for. Any others will go on my DVD rental list.

Spin-offs might tempt me back - I really enjoyed Rogue One - but the main saga is now just too broken to fix. I was mug enough to stick with it through the prequels, and Force Awakens was kind of fun, but Last Jedi is a giant leap backwards.

On the way out of the showing I went to, I heard a young man say to his friend "it wasn't a bad film, but it wasn't a good Star Wars film."

Perhaps what he meant was that if you don't expect any consistency between this film and any others, then you can enjoy it as a stand-alone movie.

The problem I had, was that I do care about how the saga works overall. And this instalment makes no sense. I read that Mark Hamill was unhappy about how Luke was written in this film and I can see why. That wasn't Luke.

The whole film looks like someone made a big list of Star Wars memes and threw them together to keep all the "fans" happy... Millennium Falcon flying along a narrow passage, turning randomly and just making it as Tie Fighters chase but crash one by one... check... Yoda saying something philosophical... check... next?

The new characters introduced in Force Awakens either hardly get developed at all, or just go off in strange directions.

For example, Captain Phasma. Who the hell was she? Why did she swan around in that dumb shiny suit? And how did she get to be a senior soldier when she can't even fight off one guy? I guess we'll never know.

All of which is trivial compared to the questions around Snoke. Where did he come from, how did he get so powerful so quickly, how did he exert influence over Ben Solo? I was really hoping that the story would start to answer some of those questions and give us some clues about how he might be defeated. But instead we just get to meet him early on and he gets eliminated by a cheap trick. Really? He goes from super powerful to moron in 5 minutes. He can disable Rey at will, but Kylo Ren (who is weaker than Rey) toasts him? Shockingly weak plot mistake.

So now we are supposed to accept Kylo 'Cry Baby' Ren as the new major power in the galaxy? It's a good job that there are only about 9 rebels left, otherwise he would be in trouble.

I was actually bored by the end of this film. I never thought I would say that about a Star Wars film. And where can it go now? There is only Ren and Rey left... maybe they will train up an entire new army each by the next movie... would be as believable as this last effort.

One final thing. I kept expecting Leia to die too. But she didn't. So either Disney are going to have to get permission to CGI her for the next film (which they previously said they would not do) or she is going to have a nasty accident off camera... which would be a shameful way to end a great character.

I used to love Star Wars, but that was before The Last Jedi, before the dark times...