I went to see The Last Jedi with my wife this afternoon while a friend watched The Pup. The report we got afterward was that he was very good. Apparently he filled a diaper to the extent that he astonished the sitter, and she wondered where it had all been.
The first sign that this was going to be a rough movie was when, after the opening crawl, my wife turned to me and said "that was kind of cheesy." It should be noted that to this point she had been a big fan of Star Wars. I'm mostly ambivalent about it. There are parts I like, and others I don't. But she had purchased the movies and watched them multiple times. She even enjoyed the prequels.
Anyway, we get going and it is apparent that the efforts of the resistance in The Force Awakens were useless. How could the First Wave have sufficient resources to lose the Star Killer, or whatever it was called, and still be able to prosecute a war to the point of putting the resistance on the verge of failure? Then, the battle scene starts. There was a cool character moment for Poe, being a lone light fighter pilot going up against a dreadnaught. But when the bombers come out, and the squad leader orders them to keep a tight formation. I lost suspension of disbelief in that moment. And the less said about the destruction of the resistance bombers and how the last bomber delivered its payload the better.
We do get back to Rey handing the lightsaber to Luke eventually. And his reaction to it could have led to something cool. Instead we get a lot of wasted screen time showing that Luke isn't doing anything worthwhile on the island on wherever he is. And he asks something like "Why do you think I came to the least findable planet in existence?" I couldn't help but think back to the previous movie in which he had literally left a map to his location.
Moving on, there was a moment when Luke realizes the potential strength Rey has with the Force, and reacts in a cool way, but delivers so poorly on that. He has to be convinced by R2 to do anything. And what he does is promise three lessons, of which he gives two. Those two are 1) this is what the Force is, and it doesn't belong to the Jedi, and 2) the Jedi were failures at everything they tried. No mention is ever made of the third lesson ever again.
Somewhere in all of this there's the Leia in space scene. I forget where, and I don't particularly care. It sucked. The Force has never worked this way before, and I suspect that it won't ever work this way again. At this point, I literally removed my glasses, held my head in my hands and said "Please do something that isn't stupid." Up to this point in the movie I had yet to see even one moment of competent storytelling.
Finn's storyline was pointless. Instead of succeeding against long odds. They fail. Almost at every turn. Then there's Rose, who is a part of this storyline. Why was she introduced as a character? She doesn't do anything. They could have at least let her start work on deactivating the tracking. Let her actually demonstrate competence at something. This whole plot line is pointless though. And it was prompted by poor leadership by the resistance.
Speaking of which, Poe's storyline. The whole conflict here could have been resolved if the resistance leadership had said "We're going to fake our own destruction, and evacuate almost everyone on transports to an old rebel base on a nearby planet." Instead they keep that a secret, give platitude filled speeches, and cause Poe and Finn to engage in stupid plans because they think there's no other option.
Finally, Luke facing Kylo was awesome. Until they revealed Luke was a Force projection from that stupid Jedi island planet. That undercut the whole thing, and made it suck instead.
At some point, I went to make some snide comment to my wife, but instead bit my tongue and remained quiet the rest of the movie. I wanted to give her a chance to decide if she enjoyed the movie or not. At the end, she was the first to say it wasn't any good. We spent the drive to pick up The Pup talking about some of the problems we had with the movie. I was surprised at the fervor of her distaste for the movie. I ultimately concluded that I was upset at the people who decided this was a good story to make. There is no where for the story to go. At least no where interesting.
And if you want to read what someone who was a Star Wars fan had to say about it, go read Ben Shapiro's review at The Daily Wire.
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