Opening Crawl:"The First Order reigns".
How. How the fuck does blowing up the "rotating" capitals of the REPUBLIC OF SYSTEMS give the first order power? How many systems are in star wars, total? Ten?
What's even happening, were they conquered? Pretty fast conquering tbh, they don't look nearly tough enough to do it. The movie itself doesn't do anything with this info. The people in Las Vegas are just Lando helmeted police, not First Order people. For all the stakes the movie claims to have, all we see is about five ships chasing five ships.
Opening Battle:The opening battle was ridiculous. The bomber design wasn't as strange or alien as AT-ATs, so it's not even close to as believable how shit they're designed. There's no excuse at that point. One of them is blown up because it was shot in the permanently open bomb hatch. They're that easy to get rid of. The equivalent of Videogame Boss Glowing Part. Then the design decisions. They're space bombers who drop about five thousand bombs on their target. Inches apart. Those bombs aren't combining together to become a bigger explosion, they're literally just blowing each other up at that point. There's no manual release on the bombs. The bomb doors are permanently open and there's a remote control button to detach them. This is definitely a good design decision. They leave an engineer down there to tell the bombs bedtime stories, not like her job would be to help release the bombs or shut the door in case the pilot can't or anything.
The scene ends with Poe Dameron learning that using more than half their bombers to destroy a dreadnought while they're supposed to be running away is moronic. Jk the movie doesn't give a shit, we should let flyboy waste as many planes as he wants because he's the hero damnit.
Then Leia's ship explodes, and something magical happens.
Luke's planetI have mostly no complaints about Luke himself, Mark Hammil is awesome. I loved that he calls it a Laser Sword instead of a lightsaber. But god is the new trilogy's prequelness obvious here. Random distracting background critters, (DID YOU NOTICE THE GIANT FISH THING IN THE WATER? THAT DEFINITELY NEEDED TO BE THERE) random cutesy critters that provide comic relief, multiple species of aliens that don't do anything. An alien race whose job is to be janitors, that no one even acknowledges.
Force SkypeForce Skype, to be fair, existed in the original trilogy. That's as far as I'm willing to go, honestly, it was already ridiculous then. But I could ignore it because force skype didn't give anyone any information they didn't already have. It was just a way to showcase Luke slowly relating to Vader more and their relationship being explored in an interesting, magical manner.
But Last Jedi's Force Skype is literally just Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver sexting each other for half the movie. It's also the main medium in which exposition happened. This was the only substantial part of the movie, and it was lazy and involved two people talking on the phone, sometimes interrupted by an old man.
Daisy Ridley polished her Blaster until it went off at Adam Driver, then he took her to show off his new girlfriend to his dad, then his dad had this awesome scene where he explained that the Skywalkers are worthless and no son of his is going to marry a Skywalker, then Adam Driver says "NO DAD, I LOVE HER" and there's a fight.
The Rebels are great at strategy:The empire has hyperspace tracking capabilities, holy shit, they followed us here. We'll never survive. We can't hyperspace jump again, they'll track us again. It's not like we can drop our stealthed transports like we eventually do and then hyperspace jump... or release the stealthed transports during the hyperspace jump... or use the bombers we established can be lethal to dreadnoughts as really costly distractions... or release the stealthed transports into an easily escapable area like the upper atmosphere of a known and neutral spaceport where people can spread out and hide and cost the first order precious time to find them in... Or space jump into an asteroid field where the empire's sweeping is neutralized by the danger from the asteroid field.
No. The correct answer is to
move away from the bullets.perfect.
And after doing this for eighteen hours, they finally come to a base that doesn't have a single serviceable ship in it. That's double perfect.
By the way, when faced with the incredibly difficult challenge of how to track a ship through hyperspace, something so impossible the rebels have literally no plan to handle it.
Darth Vader wrote:Alert all commands. Calculate every possible destination along their last known trajectory.
So really, they had enough fuel for three jumps and the movie only showed us one instead of two...
Or they could've used both jumps and THEN jumpscared us by showing the first order landing.
Kylo's DadSnoke was more disappointing than Attack of the Clones. He was some mysterious teacher, responsible for Kylo's fall to the dark side, who wanted Kylo to train to harness his anger and dispassionately (lol dispassionate dark side, good job at writing a new consistent canon disney) assassinate his own mum and dad. How cool, what an interesting character.
Oh. He's an emperor cosplayer. That's it. That's the entirety of his character. His motivation, he really likes the Sith. His costume, emperor clothes. Throne Room. Staff-wielding red guards. Special custom dreadnought. Once more the Sith will rule the Galaxy.
I mean fucking hell, Return of the Jedi was amazing with the emperor scenes. He doesn't use a lightsaber, spends the entire scene just using his power over Vader to get them to fight while he watches. He doesn't do ANYTHING except talk to both of them until Vader is down and Luke gives up on fighting. That's badass.
Finn and Obvious Love Interest and their Las Vegas adventureI mean, I'm sure she's fine, but she's so shoehorned in just to get Kylo-Rey to be canon. I also love how the chinese person gets the yin-yang necklace, because racism. She's /finally/ an indicator of what the first order's doing wrong. But like, this just brings up more questions, what the fuck is the first order? Is it the imperial remnant? That'd make so much sense, but then what the fuck is the New Galactic Republic doing without using their fleets to attack the imperial remnant and liberate more systems? Leia's resistance is the only group that was fighting the first order in TFA. Apparently the galactic republic that leia was a founding member of... decided to sit down and take a rest for a while.
But back to Rose. I liked her character. Her obvious finn-ship is distracting (Look I know engineer words too, let's bond over how nerdy we are). There's a ridiculous scene in the end where she stops Finn from being an hero and they have a cutesy scene where they finally kiss.
It's like if this happened
because this was about to happen
but then Randy Quaid's son just realized how much he loves his dad and rams his plane out of the way.
Much like Finn, someone who joined the resistance because she was involved in the origin story of the First Order is an amazing backstory, but she really doesn't do much with it.
Well more than Finn atleast, with the whole orphan scene.
Overall I give her an 8/10, compared to Finn's 7/10 (TFA) -> 5/10 (TLJ), Rey's 6/10(TFA)->7/10(TLJ), Poe's Wedge Antilles level side character/10 (TFA) -> More lethal to resistance ships than the first order/10 (TLJ), and Kylo's consistent 9/10.
So it's a good start for her.
Yoda:Yoda was distracting as fuck. Here's a fun fact. Yoda doesn't speak like an alien who always uses the wrong sentence structure in the original trilogy. That's a result of 30 years of memeing that was finally canonized in the prequels.
Yoda originally just spoke like an ESL chinese person. You know, the archetype he's a blatant nod to.
So when they make yoda a hunchbacked old man who chuckles and cracks jokes and accepts his mistakes like in the original trilogy but keep the really distracting sentence structure, I can't enjoy my yoda porn.
Writing I don't have any complaints with yoda.
The finale:Oh god the finale.
Let's have a history lesson, kids. The reason we don't use battering rams on things that aren't doors any more is that we invented something better. It's called artillery.
But wait, you say.
Maybe that's just what star wars siege weaponry looks like.
Well, it's not like we had a bit where the empire was trying to level a rebel base, with pretty much the same defences as this one fifty years ago. What did they use again?
Hmm, large armoured troop carriers with giant cannons mounted on their heads that they used to bombard the base from long range, you say?
But why would you use those?
This is fine though, new tech, bigger guns, yay, we can't always stick to AT-ATs and AT-STs and things we recognize.
So let's put the necessity of the giant avatar drill aside for a bit.
Let's get to the rebel strategy for this fight. It's to... ride at the enemy. That's it. We can tell how precious life is to the rebels, unlike those horrible first order people who throw away lives all the time for no reason.
Then the first order's response to this is to throw tie fighters at them and NOT USE THEIR AT-AT GUNS. This is emphasized by them showing off the shiny new AT-ATs and their shiny new guns while those tie fighters are basically doing nothing interesting.
Finn finally has a great idea to kill the drill with, but we already dealt with how that was derailed.
Rest of it's pretty damn good. Kylo shooting at the jedi with his entire army was fucking glorious and I was daring them to do it. I love it. Also New force power, Luke dying from overexertion, Leia being happy she finally got to see him again, Rey saving everyone using her power to lift rocks, no complaints at all. This would be excellent if every bit before it wasn't filled with distracting nonsense.
MVP:I think the MVP of this film is, once again,