The Last Jedi... 'The Last Straw', more like. · 1:51pm Dec 15th, 2017
So, not going to waste time with a movie horrendously overrated by clearly paid Disney hack critics (and it seems a huge number of fans agree with me this time, given the viewer reviews I've read) and just say the movie throws out absolutely EVERYTHING built up in the entire franchise, takes a big dump all over the mythos and lore, and renders every character utterly pointless save for Super Feminist Hero Rey.
All those hints and build up in TFA? Looking for a deeper mythos that ties all the loose ends together? Forget it! There's nothing to ANY of it! It's all just... random! The destiny aspect which practically BUILT the entire lore.. GONE! Ancient leaders with mysterious powers being puppetmasters of fate? GONE! Now angsty emo people run everything! Great! We have a movie mythos with both factions now run by millennials!
And those stupid-looking animals are indeed stupid and annoying. They're so transparently there for an animal rights agenda, it's nauseating. It gets as idiotic as the Smurf Cat People in "Avatar". My god, Ewoks come across looking better... hell JAR-JAR is starting to look better by comparison!
Screw "Star Wars" now. It's been thoroughly ruined. I thought "The Force Awakens" was pretty much a copy of "A New Hope", but at least it was a huge improvement over the prequels... now I'd rather have the prequels back with George directing after THIS awful mess! It's like "Ghostbusters 2016" all over again, but with Disney clearly buying off critics because there is no way such a shoddy script and sloppy world-building could ever win legitimate critical acclaim... oh wait, the critics praised that POS "Boyhood" too... never mind. They're total shills for certain butt buddies. No credibility at all.
So, is it just a re-hash of Empire or does it just fail to tell any kind of story?
I wasn't going to see this until a few weeks passed and the hype died down.
4749604 No, it's basically what "Empire" would be if you stripped EVERYTHING interesting out of it and turned every twist into absolutely a dead-end. Then threw in stupid animal characters.
Oh.
I want to feel sad or mad about this.
Bothing is happening.
4749641 Luke's development... goes nowhere. Snoke... goes nowhere... Kylo... just rages even more petulantly than in the first movie... Rey's heritage... nothing.
It's all one big nothing. Like a movie where everything is a red herring and there is no reveal at all. Just a big shrug of "Nothing meant anything!
It's one thing to know that 'real life' isn't driven by fate and can be utterly random... but for God's sake, this is an old space fantasy movie franchise with a strongly established mythos that fate and destiny are very real things in this universe. Trying to dump all of that and make it 'real' is about the most ludicrous thing anyone could do. It'd be like having a Doctor Who episode that suddenly decides the Time Lords aren't important anymore and retcons all of their significance in one fell swoop. Now anyone can become a Time Lord, because why not? Everyone is 'special' if they want to be!
Don't we have enough "Kung Fu Panda" clones out there already?
4749655
all of that's actually worse than what i thought you meant before
4749663 You should read the fan reviews. Most of them are SCATHING. The overwhelming majority of higher viewer ratings (ratings over 6/10) are coming from overseas, like by an 8-1 margin. That tends to skew things because foreign audiences tend to be very forgiving of awful big budget films for some reason (just look at the Transformers franchise).
The critics CLEARLY are kissing Disney's rump, and they should be ashamed.
Youtubers are the most pathetic bunch of all, desperate to stay on Disney's good side just to keep getting invited to movie premiers. Redlettermedia NAILED that in their latest 'Nerd Crew' mockery of Youtuber faux-critics.
Is this a rant party?
It's a rant party, isn't it? 
The supposed theme was about letting go of the past and yada yada. Trouble was that it didn't seem to offer anything particularly interesting to look forward to instead. I honestly don't know what they're trying to build towards at this point, except that maybe this whole trilogy is about fighting for Kylo Ren's soul or something.
Who or what is the overall threat? Can't be the First Order, they're a joke. Snoke? He's dead, unless he's coming back as a ghost or spouting some excuse about dead 'Snoke' being a clone/decoy all along. Kylo Ren? He doesn't look like arch-villain material.
The movie didn't feel like it had raised the stakes all that much, which is what the second movie in a planned trilogy is generally supposed to do. Sure, the Resistance is severely whittled down, but they've been trading blows really well considering what they're up against. Their KD ratio must be absolutely insane.
I'd almost feel sorry for the First Order, but it's hard to when their leadership constantly makes moronic decisions and gets decimated by a severely outnumbered and outgunned force. 
Also, forget lasers. Everybody should just start investing in armoured ships for FTL suicide runs, since they're clearly the superior option for clearing an enemy fleet.
It was a cool moment and all, but it invited some fridge logic that this fictional universe really doesn't feel designed to address.
4751729 Not to mention, letting go of the past is an excellent way to ensure you make the same mistakes as those in the past did.
The WISE know to LEARN from the past. You let go of the EMOTIONS in the past, not the lessons. There are very good reasons we have historians and archaeologists, as well as astronomers reaching back to the very instant of creation itself.
Letting go of the past means you forget where you came from, and thus it's easier to lead such ignorant people in the wrong direction, because they no longer have a foundation.
Again, it's shallow, vapid Hollywood attempting to sound profound and screwing up royally.
But of course the braindead Star Wars fanboys are already preaching this as if its religious dogma. I've already handed two such idiots their asses on Furaffinity.
It would also have been nice to explain how the First Order managed to get this big in the first place. How did they all come together after the complete breakdown of the Empire? This would be akin to after the Soviet Union collapsing, it then somehow miraculously reformed under a new name, developed a nuclear weapon 100x more powerful than the Tsar Bomba without anything noticing, and inexplicably took over half the world.
This all just feels thrown together, without any rhyme or reason. If we think back to "Empire", this was the point where we started to get some information. We met Yoda, we learned of Vader, we got some surprises. This... was basically the movie production staff going, "Trololol! Everything up to now was a red herring!"
That's just bad writing. It's as simple as that.
At any rate, it seems many fans are PO'd, given the rather low audience rating.
So for the half of the audience (that visits Rotten Tomatoes) that actually like this movie, and the other fans who defend it, what are we exactly? Because I haven't seen a dime of Disney money.
4893219 Mindless drones, obviously!
Also, "Soylo" has proven the fan backlash is real, and LARGE. Despite every SJW desperately making accounts just to give in 10/10 on IMDB and 5 stars on RT, it's a titanic flop.
Globally, it's one of the poorest-performing major studio releases in recent years. EVERYONE around the world rejected it.
With the prequels despite people hating them their legacy is nothing to scoff at. They had a very rich lore build around them with very strong characters. During the prequel era the EU thrived and characters like general Grievious, count Dooku and Assaaj Ventress became extremely popular.
I actually prefer the prequel era of star wars as it is much more connected and also make a lot more sense. They are also usually less drab and a lot more fun. Or at other times extremely dark and gripping. Because the force and the jedi are much more defined there is a lot more writers can do with them without contradicting each other.
Despite what you may think of how the prequels were executed George Lucas did a pretty good job managing Star Wars. It had been kept a powerhouse of pop culture for almost 40 years and I think you do have to give him some credit for that.
I actually really like the Ewoks. I never understood what problems people had with them. That scene of one of the ewoks dying really touched me.
I don't mind Jar-Jar and he does have a few funny moments. I especially like when he tries to eat that apple and Qui-Gon catches him. Also the Gungans themselves are really interesting and really cool.
4927292 Uhm... no. Redlettermedia has already vivisected them so completely, I won't even bother going over all the points of how weak the storytelling was, how silly and contrived so much of it was, and how Palpatine having to manipulate everything happening everywhere simultaneously for any of it to take place is just plain preposterous, because it makes him a GOD, and thus he should never have failed since he could see and shape the future so perfectly and predict absolutely everything with absolute clarity. The single biggest flaw was that the entire goal was just to turn Anakin into Darth Vader, and nothing else mattered. So the story became very engineered and pushed everything along with a very heavy writer's hand, instead of presenting a genuine fall of a flawed character brought low by his own perceived weaknesses.
As RLM points to as a contrast, the gradual descent of Charles Foster Kane from optimistic idealist to corrupt bastard is a perfect character study, and they manage it in one movie.
And "Attack of the Clones" was ludicrous. Nothing made any damned sense in that movie at all.
The only thing I can really say positive is that they were, at least, in service of the original trilogy. Only the silly concept of midiclorians being responsible for the Force really ruined anything. RLM points out that since those things existed, they could have found out who the Sith Lord was with a blood test in the very first movie once they suspected someone in the Senate might be involved.
The prequels were bad, but at least not insulting. TLJ was a direct slap in the face to EVERYTHING, both old and new. It was either people who didn't care about the lore or actively hated it taking a crap on everything that came before solely to 'subvert expectations'. That is the dumbest motivation for doing anything ever. It's what you do in a FARCE or SATIRE of a product, like "Space Balls" or the Doctor Who parody "Curse of Fatal Death", not what you do with the canon material itself.