This guy’s comment/review is a fair summary of my own thoughts. Here’s his whole review:
Henry Gorman said:
This is a frustrating movie.
It has an impressive and noble ambition: to expose the fundamental hollowness of the Star Wars franchise’s heroes and their conflicts, and then, to give them some kind of substance. The Luke Skywalker who appears here is shockingly caustic and cynical, but the selfishness he displays has long been part of his character. He’s always been pulled into heroism by his hungers for recognition, fame, and family. Even though he’s a hero of the Rebellion, he has no organic connection to it, and never shows much interest in its overarching goals (which have almost always been irrelevant to the movie). If he had gone to the Academy a few years ago, as he had wanted to, he likely would have become a TIE fighter pilot. The younger heroes of The Force Awakens are not so different. Rey, a total social outcast, is fueled by a hunger for any sort of connection and purpose; Finn, the cowardly former stormtrooper whose behavior and background never quite gel, is much the same; Poe Dameron is valorous but, in this film, also a vainglorious death seeker whose choices undermine the cause. The Last Jedi confronts its protagonists with the limits of this selfish type of heroism and forces them to transcend it. It also tries to contextualize their struggle within the broader social and metaphysical realities. For the first time in the main saga, the Force is presented as something other than a vague abstraction, and the Resistance/Rebellion has a clear cause to fight for.
However, until the last 45 minutes or so of the film’s two and a half hours, Rian Johnson really struggles to dramatize all of this. He lacks JJ Abrams’s easy knack for creating character relationships out of thin air, which is a major problem in a film which separates its protagonists from their established friends for most of its runtime. He’s similarly clumsy with tone; the film’s opening sequence begins with Spaceballs-like farce, but pivots to Battlestar Galactica-like grim desperation without much consideration for how its comedy and tragedy interact. He also draws on a variety of stylistic influences (the aforementioned Spaceballs and Battlestar Galactica, Kurosawa’s oeuvre, Baz Luhrman’s Great Gatsby, Avatar: The Last Airbender) without constructively synthesizing them into a coherent whole, as Tarantino, Edgar Wright, or even George Lucas would have. The movie’s finale, which brings its main characters together and unifies its aesthetics, is far more effective and engaging (and beautiful! it includes both the most visually striking spaceship destruction and the most visually magnificent land battle in the whole franchise), but it’s undermined by what came before it. It also teases, then chickens out of making a few especially exciting choices.
So, The Last Jedi is more interesting than it is effective. It’s more thematically rich than The Force Awakens, but far less functional from moment to moment. I think it will produce some great fanfiction. I’d love to hear a rebuttal from one of the people who think that it’s the best Star Wars since The Empire Strikes Back.