The Last Jedi Review

Long time No blog.  It's been slow but I haven't had much to pontificate on so I haven't typed anything.  Now felt like a fun thing to try and it'll be a short movie review.

Spoiler Free... Well I won't talk about direct plot twists and such.  Mostly vague stuff.

If you want to avoid even vague stuff stop here.  If you keep reading its your own fault if I ruin your Last Jedi experience.

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A long time a... you know the rest.

I'm writing this roughly 30 minuets after watching SWTLJ so you're getting a gut reaction to it.
The movie drops you in pretty quickly like star wars tends to do. Lots of pew pew pew and stuff blowing up. In fact the whole thing is another mirror of Empire.  It didn't follow the same plot but there are so many parallels you almost knew what was coming next.

It didn't stop with with Empire references either.  It also included much of Return of the Jedi.  I'm not talking about it was kind of like but different. Rian Johnson plagiarized huge chunks of dialog from the original trilogy and especially ROTJ.  I really felt like I was re-watching the old stuff again like episode 7.

There was some really good special effects but there was a part early in the movie where the CG was poorly done and unnecessary to the plot and really had me scratching my head.  Its really in how it compared to how it worked in the past episodes and even in the EU.  Read Heir to the Jedi and you'll quickly see a major discontinuity with how the force works and in other books to know that it doesn't fit.

I am also disappointed in the treatment of other characters and am left to wonder why they took the direction they did with the creation of some characters.  Luke Skywalker got it right in the movie trailer when he said, "This is not going to go the way you think."

The whole saga feels rushed now.  Character development in episodes 1-6 was nicely paced you watched the characters grow from a-z while seeing them go through b,c,d,e,f,g and so on to z.  Episodes 7 and especially 8 have taken the most of the alphabet out of story.  That leaves you feeling cheated.

Overall on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being epic I'd give the movie a 6. Good action but lacking in good character development.  Hopefully they can find a better balance in episode 9.