It took everything ‘The Force’ has to make me watch this movie. After sitting through 2 hours and 33 minutes of agony and a few entertaining trailers for movies which seemed like much more fun, the only thing I can say is, a literal fight between stars would have been more entertaining.
Okay, that’s perhaps a bit too harsh. There are some memorable space battle scenes in the movie. But, is there anything in this movie that makes it different from being a rehash of ‘The Empire Strikes Back?’ I really didn’t find anything. Here are 4 reasons why you just shouldn’t bother wasting your time or money watching ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’:
Character Growth
When you have a trilogy, you’d expect the main character(s) to grow as the series progresses, right? But, what do you see Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Kylo/Ben (Adam Driver) do throughout the movie? The same stuff they did in the Force Awakens.
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Okay, they do find different ways of doing it, but they’re still stuck in the same rut. Remember how they stretched out ‘The Hobbit’ into 3 movies? Looks like they’re doing the same thing here.
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But, to give credit where credit’s due, Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) and Finn (John Boyega) have pretty decent character growth in this movie.
Lightsabers
When you’re going to watch ‘Star Wars’, you want to see tons of lightsaber action, right? ‘Rogue One’ barely had any lightsabers but then they gave us an epic minute or so of Darth Vader slaughtering rebels and all was forgiven.
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If the same happened here, if Luke stood up to a battalion of First Order troops and ‘Forced’ the shit out of them, all would have been forgiven. Instead, we get some poorly choreographed battles that probably had George Lucas dreading his decision of selling to Disney.
Porgs
This is actually one of the few things that the movie has going for it. So, why is it one of the reasons not to watch ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi?’ Well, when one of the main reasons to watch a movie about space battles looks like this
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It’s not great news now is it?
(The next point contains spoilers so if you want to see the movie first, go and do that before reading any further.)
Skywalker
The original trilogy focused on Luke Skywalker. The prequels focused on Anakin Skywalker. This trilogy focuses on ‘Rey from nowhere’. While this would have been fine if Rey was a flawed character or a character who we could grow with. But, when you’re so deep into Star Wars, there are hardly any secrets left. We loved Luke even more when we learnt that Darth Vader was his father. We didn’t really care for Rey much when we learnt her parents were nobodies.
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The Skywalker name is synonymous with Star Wars. Where are they now? Thanking their lucky stars they don’t have anything to do with this new trilogy anymore. But, you don’t have to take our word for it.
Here’s Mark Hamill talking about how disappointed he is with the new Luke Skywalker:
I’m not necessarily saying that this is a bad movie. It’s a good movie. Critics seem to love it too. But, is it a Star Wars movie? Of course not! Just ask any hardcore Star Wars fanboy what they thought of the movie. In fact, they hated the movie so much someone actually started a petition to get it remade.
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The petition has since been removed but it had more than 45,000 signatures before that happened. As for Disney, they’ve already earned well over $500 million from the movie within a week so I don’t think they’re going to be phased by what I have to say anyway.