Is "The Last Jedi" worth talking about?

I don't mind if Luke plays the part of a whiny farm boy while he sounds Rey out, and I enjoy the meta-ness of having a little green troll burn the Star Wars canon while the old guard watches in anguish; but Yoda's lesson is hollow. In the theater it felt to me like an Ewok moment aimed at the youngest attendees. 

Lessons in Being Alive

Enemies homing in on a beacon you (needlessly?) lit for a lost friend, headstrong underlings haring off on their own, and under-informed lieutenants instigating a mutiny are all pretty standard story wrinkles. 

Trying to fit a whole story into the span of a single chase is unusual. It's also out of character for a Star Wars story to care about logistics like food or ammo or fuel; when the scenario was discussed on ye olde BattleTech forums (back around Revenge of the Sith, maybe) someone proposed instead that the rebel ships could be burning their engines out to stay ahead of more capable Imperial ships.

by Zak Boxall

The Bombing Run

Did an earlier draft put the scenes in a different order? The bombing sequence feels like it wants to be in the mid-late movie, after Poe and the command staff already have a disagreement behind them and the bombardier's been built up a little.

When I saw this in theaters, I thought the bombs were linked so that the ones at the top of the chute were pushing the ones at the bottom out; but watching it again, they aren't. Guess they shouldn't be falling in neat lines. Also, if the grenades on a single bomber are so effective, why weren't the smaller, faster craft dragging lines of them too? Get up to speed and "pitch" a line or a sheet of 'em forward from a safer distance.

Snoke's Ship

Holdo's lightspeed ram was a visually beautiful cinematic moment. Beautiful only on that visual level, for story and physics reasons other people have done to death; and to that cynical chorus, I would add that Snoke's ship should have survived. The ram is depicted as a high-speed bullet, not a cascade of relativistic particles; and the ship is so colossally wide that its systems must all be distributed and independent. Cutting it in two should result in two relatively intact pieces which maneuver independently.

The ship looks ridiculous when it first appears, as though the visual director were running out of ways to top the ships from previous movies; but Starkiller base was also ridiculous, and I liked it because it manages to be simultaneously bigger and smaller than the Death Star. More powerful, and it's a planet instead of a moon, yet the actual construction is just the trench and a drilled shaft. If the Imperials wanted to move it from one planet to another, making it spaceworthy would mean turning it into a ship of colossal size and uselessness - a charming fit for Snoke's giant.

[There was an image of the climactic throne room fight here, but it broke or otherwise de-linked.]

Snoke, Kylo and Rey

Snoke being a Force user is completely incidental to his appearances here and the previous movie. Would've been cleaner to make him a twelve-foot-tall district governor. 

The Kylo and Rey plot was the best. Rey's rain staying behind with Kylo, the thing Luke does - we're finally starting to see some of the teleportation that Vader thought Obi-Wan might have pulled off. And the way Kylo and Rey were manipulating each other, they were poised to trade light : dark when they confronted Snokes. Can almost see that happen in the fight with the red knights. If these guys in red were the Knights of Ren that would also give Light Kylo a nice parallel to how Luke lost his students.

Side Stories

The casino sidequest feels like a commentary on how unrealistic it is for those kinds of heroics to succeed. I don't remember any of the previous movies having those kinds of sidequests, though, which makes it feel weirdly out of place.

With the exception of the Jedi, who get the better plot here, the chase and sidestory everybody else is on could've been written as a Han Solo or Lando Calrissian movie. ...Hm. Actually, if we were to hollow The Last Jedi out like that, we could cram Rogue One in place of those B plots. I think that would improve both movies substantially.

I feel like the Solo movie was a retort to how Last Jedi was written. It employs a different kind of fuel centric plot; has enough clues to to guess at the bandit girl's relation to pseudo-Mal without the movie outright telling you; and it refrains from trollishly rubbing the audience's face in metacommentary. It might go too far in explaining every little thing... I wish the movie had ended with Solo silhouetted in the doorway for his rematch, and - supposing Rey is a clone of Mara Jade - I don't think Mara needs to be a child of Red Dawn.