Star Wars: The Last Jedi. My thoughts

Spoiler alert: spoilers abound. So many spoilers. Spoilers spoilers spoilers.

Don’t read this if you haven’t seen the movie, you dope.

My thoughts:

To quote the person I saw it with: I didn’t love it. I liked it. There were good moments. But I didn’t love it.

My overall problem with it: it didn’t really further the story. The longest of all the Star Wars movies is something I could sum up in five sentences:

the Resistance is down to just a handful of people,
Kylo / Ben kills Snoke and tries to get Rey to team up with him, but she doesn’t,
Rey’s parents were nobodies, she has no familial connection with Skywalkers or Kenobis,
Luke lets himself die and become one with the Force / Universe / whatever because he is just done with it all,
there is no Last Jedi. There will always be Jedis because there will always be people who believe in the Force.

That’s it! No need to see the movie, because that’s all you need to know to watch Episode IX in 2019. Those are the only things that forwarded the plot or the character development.

Well, you need to know that those dice are totally canon. It’s an obscure reference that only deep fans will get.

Sure, there’s some great action scenes, some beautiful scenery and screen compositions, and they don’t overdo the Porgs, something I was quite worried about. And I teared up a few times regarding Carrie Fisher – her scenes are heart-breaking and weirdly, unintentionally, foreshadowing of her death. There are also a lot of jokes – too many, in fact.

But two hours and 32 minutes – plus FOUR HOURS round trip on a train and bus with TOo many scary tweekers and I almost missed the bus back to Forest Grove and would have been stuck at the Hillsboro transit center for an hour, until after 1 a.m., if I had missed it – for this movie, a movie I could summarize in five bullet points?

We deserved so much more:

Who is Snoke? Where did he come from? How is he such a master of the Force? Why does he look like that? Why do all these people follow him?
Where did the First Order come from? Why do people join them? The Imperial Forces were the government of the galaxy, and they seemed to evolve from the Old Republic’s formal military, with a lot of support from the citizens of the galaxy. But where did these guys come from so quickly and suddenly?
Why is Rey such a master of the Force without any training at all?
Where did the other Jedis go that mutinied with Kylo?
What the hell was Captain Phasma’s purpose EVER in these two films? Was she really necessary at all?
You really can’t think of more to do with C3P0 and R2D2?
What the hell with the “Godspeed” comments? There has never been a “God” in the Star Wars films – you wish someone well by saying, “May the Force Be With You.” But this time, we get at least two “Godspeed” comments? Okay, since you’ve introduced the concept of God after eight movies without such, we have to ask: Who is this God? Is it a He or a She? Is there just one? Do all the planets believe in the same one? What is this God’s relationship with the Force?
Really, the First Order ships can’t move up just a little bit quicker so their cannon ammunitions can’t hit tiny ships just out of reach?
The tracking-through-Hyperspace thing: who came up with that? It seemed to come out of nowhere – Kylo? He thought of that? He’s an engineering whiz? And, some nobody mechanic can figure it out as soon as she hears about it whereas everyone else has no idea?
How come, when faced with an entire group of Imperial / First Order ships, there hasn’t always been someone saying, “Hey, let me save everyone by doing a suicide mission and jumping to light speed right into one of the ships!”? There have always been plenty of people willing to go on fruitless suicide missions because something might work – by contrast, this strategy seems to be pretty damn foolproof!