“No one’s ever really gone.”

I genuinely hate rating this film so low and putting out a review for it. The discourse surrounding it ever since its release has been nothing but toxic, to the point where the entire Star Wars fandom has itself become nothing but divided. You have one side of people who will say that “If you like The Last Jedi, then you aren’t a real Star Wars fan,” and another side that will say something along the lines of “Growing up is realizing that The Last Jedi is a masterpiece.” It’s quite ridiculous, really, and I honestly hate the existence of this movie just for that, even if I loved the film itself. I remember being quite fond of The Last Jedi when I was younger. It wasn’t my favorite Star Wars movie, but it also wasn’t one that bothered me in any particular way. Unfortunately, as I’ve gotten older and the more I’ve both watched it and thought about it, the less I like it. However, each time I revisit it, I go into it with an open mind, quite literally trying as hard as I can to see what fans of it see. I have to say that after this most recent rewatch, I have never been as frustrated with it as I am now.

That being said, I do want to start off with some positives that I have, because there definitely are some. First off, everything between Rey and Kylo is pretty great. There is an aspect that has to do with the force that is introduced to further their development, both as separate characters and together, and I honestly think that it was the best idea Rian Johnson had for this particular story. Daisy Ridley is also excellent with her performance, but it’s honestly Adam Driver that steals the show for me. The way he delivers his lines and the raw emotion that you can see within him is so well done, to the point where it is probably one of the best performances in any Star Wars movie. Kylo Ren/Ben Solo’s development is also remarkable, and is one of the aspects of the story that includes misdirection and surprises that actually work quite well.

A lot of people say that The Last Jedi is the best-looking Star Wars film, and while I still think I would have to say that would be The Empire Strikes Back for me, The Last Jedi is a pretty close second. The colors of the different sets and stages are breathtakingly beautiful to look at, especially the usage of red, and the visual effects continue to thoroughly impress, just like how they did in The Force Awakens. Besides a few spotty green screen moments, this is pretty much a visually flawless movie. There are also some pretty incredible action scenes, especially from a visual standpoint, and I think that they still hold up, even though if you look at them in-depth, there are a lot of problems with the choreography (but none that really stick out if you aren’t nitpicking).

I would also say that the score that John Williams composed here is pretty easily the best work he did in the sequel trilogy. It’s incredibly atmospheric, especially during the scenes on Ahch-To, and also pretty powerful in some moments. I still don’t think that any of the scores of the sequels really hold a candle to anything in the original six-movie saga, but this easily comes the closest.

I really hate it, but I have to be honest and say that that is where my positives end with The Last Jedi, unfortunately. The thing that bothered me and drove me nuts the most this rewatch was the writing. This is most definitely a hot take, but I find Rian Johnson to be a very talented director, but a pretty poor and oftentimes pretentious writer, and this movie is certainly no exception. The main story starts with a subversion of expectations that is easily the most controversial moment in the entire movie, and that’s what The Last Jedi continues to do for the remainder of its runtime - misdirect and throw you off just for the sake of it. There are several things paid off, introduced in both The Force Awakens and here, and almost every answer feels completely out of left field solely so that it will surprise you, but none of it feels smart, but instead illogical. For instance, and I’m not going to make a whole paragraph on this because I could easily spoil it by accident, Rey was introduced as this character with a mysterious background in the last movie, but one criticism that I did have was that her development was pretty rushed there. There was almost kind of an asterisk on that, however, because if what we found out about her explained all of that, I would have been okay with it. Again, I’m not going into specifics, but The Last Jedi makes that aspect of The Force Awakens worse in hindsight.

Then there is the biggest controversy with this film entirely, and that is Luke Skywalker. The Force Awakens clearly sets him up in an optimistic way to do some pretty exciting things, but instead, we get this absolutely bastardized version of the character we all know and love, and I do not use that word lightly. I love The Force Awakens, but one of the complaints I have with it is that it does a lot of major character progression, or rather, regression, off-screen, so that a lot of it feels unnatural. The Last Jedi takes that “unnatural” feeling and applies it tenfold to Luke. He is practically unrecognizable from where we last saw him, and because we never got to see how he got to where he did, sure, it makes for a nice mystery at first, but it also feels entirely unearned and frustrating. It gets to the point where even the way he says things, a lot of it being unfunny jokes, feels ridiculous.

There are also a tremendous number of pacing problems. There are three main storylines going on throughout most of the runtime: everything with Luke, Rey, and Kylo, everything with the Resistance and First Order in space, and everything with Finn and Rose’s side adventure. The only one out of the three of these that I find interesting at all, even though it’s still frustrating because of Luke, is the first one that I mentioned, while the other two lack momentum and urgency and just feel boring, to be honest. I’ll talk about the First Order and Resistance space stuff here first, because frankly, there really isn’t much to talk about until further on, where I move onto a different criticism that has to do with a new character, and yet again, an intentional misdirection and subversion of expectations. Basically, the First Order is hunting down what is left of the Resistance, while the Resistance is dealing with running out of fuel. This lasts for the entire middle chunk of the movie, and not once did I buy that the First Order couldn’t have just easily taken all of them out.

Oh boy, now I’ve got to talk about the Rose and Finn sideplot. So basically Finn meets this new character named Rose (by doing something that feels completely out of character for him, but that’s the least of this movie’s problems), whose sister was killed in the fleet’s last battle, and they both come up with this idea to get into one of the star destroyers and disable a part of it so that the fleet can finally get away. Now that’s interesting. What is not interesting is how they go about doing it. In order to get in and pass security, they need to find a master thief that Maz Kanata recommends to them, and then proceed to go to this planet called Canto Bight. Here, with the whole fate of the Resistance, you know, the only people providing people with hope to save the galaxy, the film decides to randomly shift to throw in messages of animal cruelty, which is fine and all of that, but narratively makes no sense and has no place in this movie whatsoever. Thankfully, it doesn’t last a ridiculous amount of time, but still enough to be an extremely questionable writing choice. The whole thing about finding the master thief, referred to as the code breaker in this movie, resolves in the most random possible way, too.

We got two major new characters introduced in The Last Jedi (probably more, but I just want to talk about these two), and they both happen to be some of the worst characters in the entire Star Wars franchise, in my opinion. I’ll get Rose out of the way first, and before I do, I want to make it abundantly clear that my criticisms of the character are specifically towards the character and the character only, because I know the actress who played her (Kelly Marie Tran) got a ridiculous amount of unwarranted hate thrown at her. Anyways, Rose was, and still is, my least favorite character in the entire Star Wars franchise. She is the whole driver for this message of animal cruelty, and also happens to make some of the most selfish decisions in the entire film. On top of that, she prevents Finn from having one of the best moments in the trilogy, and turns it into one of the worst and by far most disappointing ones instead (I’m trying to be very careful with my words, but if you’ve seen The Last Jedi, you’ll know what I’m talking about). Afterwards, she delivers the most ridiculous line of dialogue out of all of the movies (yes, even worse than anything in The Rise of Skywalker and Attack of the Clones) that gives the most backwards message of potentially the whole saga. I see what Rian Johnson was going for here, but man, did it not work and actually frustrate me a lot.

The other terrible character introduced is the Resistance’s Vice-Admiral Holdo, unfortunately played by the great Laura Dern, who deserved a way better place in this franchise. To be honest, she is the driver of perhaps the most baffling “subversion of expectations” moment of the movie, even if it might not be one of the ones that bothers me the most (it bothers me a lot, though, which is practically a testament to how annoying this movie’s writing is). Straight from the get-go, she is immediately unlikable as she treats Poe, a character that we actually like, like a child, and then goes on to make completely ludicrous decisions that, you guessed it, eventually turn out not to be what the viewers initially thought. I mean, at this point, I literally can’t even take this movie seriously anymore.

Thankfully, I only have one more criticism, and it is pretty easily the least of your worries compared to the rest (which, in any movie, this criticism should be far more prominent than it is in The Last Jedi). One thing I didn’t mention in my review of The Force Awakens, because it was already one of, if not my longest review I’ve ever done, was how well that movie balanced its tone. It did a pitch-perfect job at knowing when to be serious, funny, emotional, and all of the above. The Last Jedi does not know how to do that. We get plenty of serious moments undermined by MCU-level humor, as well as the First Order feeling completely different and extremely less competent than they did in The Force Awakens, which, to remind you, was a movie that took place immediately before the events of this one. They aren’t intimidating or scary anymore, but instead run by a bunch of morons, where General Hux is literally the crutch of a joke in the very opening scene.

I really wish I liked this movie, but I really, really don’t. It feels like Disney and Lucasfilm took The Force Awakens and gave all of the creative decisions for the sequel to literally one person who clearly doesn’t understand Star Wars (even the fundamentals, like how hyperspace works), because that is quite literally exactly what they did. To be honest, my giving it a four out of ten is me being very generous, because I was extremely frustrated for pretty much the entire runtime.