Jeremy Jahns who I consider a balanced critic, and I generally agree with, gave the film a scathing (spoiler free) review:
Nice thanks! Yeah he mentioned a few things I dislike about JJ’s style and new-SW in general like too much exposition. One of the things about the TLJ is that it doesn’t build on the previous two film’s work, it’s meant to be the concluding chapter of a trilogy but it starts off with a retcon to “raise the stakes”. I don’t like retcons, no one likes them - yes literally no one, sometimes you have to have them out of necessity. For example Better Call Saul had to ignore some of the finely-crafted details of Breaking Bad - but they must be earned. They’re usually used out of necessity, not so you can just do ridiculous things like undo the ending of a previous movie so you can shift its ending to the present one.
Anyway Jeremy Jahns has some really great insights. For example:
Finn has no character-arc. I debated in my previous post whether or not to have a stormtroopers removing his helmet and turning good as one of the original ideas brought to expand the SW mythology in TFA. The reason I didn’t bother is because there’s no character-arc in it. What about other stormtroopers in his situation? What about his training could be useful to the good guys? What ideas can he bring from his unique perspective? None of that has been explored, and Jeremy Jahns has confirmed that isn’t in TLJ either.
Rey has had no character-arc either. She starts out so strong already, with so many abilities that litterally the only place to go, according to the Jeremy Jahns review is:
to make her superhuman. But the Jedi were not superhumans, that’s the problem with this arc - they were still human with human failings, all of them (well human or alien failings of course).
Luke gave up all hope and was living as a cynical old hermit in the last movie, something Mark Hamill is on the record saying he was “appalled” by. Rian Johnson wanted to introduce him in the same way as Yoda. Yoda in Empire Strikes Back is, introduced, as a cynical old hermit as well. It’s Obi-Wan who was the last hopeful Jedi, who’s Jedi ghost pushes Yoda to accept Luke for training. If you think about Yoda as introduced in The Phantom Menace, his character-arc makes no sense, something I’ve always been dissatisfied with. George Lucas didn’t justify his self-imposed exile at all. This wise old Jedi, capable of training new Jedis, just give up the fight? That character arc in the prequels was a betrayal, it wasn’t earned at all. Even the fact that Obi-Wan doesn’t train new Jedis, when he is in fact a hopeful and optimistic character, doesn’t make sense with the prequels. Sure he couldn’t train Luke because his uncle wouldn’t allow it - but he literally trains no one? This is probably why I don’t like Revenge of the Sith, but I do like Phantom Menace a lot - Phantom Menace doesn’t betray all our beloved characters from the original trilogy, and no Anakin at his point of innocence is not a betrayal, plus Phantom Menace has a really great villain. In my opinion, ROTS should have been “Rise of Vader”, and we should have had much less Hayden - probably by the end of the first act have Vader, fully caped, for the rest of the film. Exactly as we knew him from the Original Trilogy, but younger. In fact I think the transition should have happened at the end of Attack of the Clones. One full prequel movie with a powerful, and victorious Darth Vader, would have been exactly what everyone could have loved. Lucas drew that character-arc over two films: AOTC and ROTS, I just think it should have been reduced to one film AOTC. He has already been fully trained by Obi-Wan at the start of AOTC, there was no reason it had to be drawn out. Padme didn’t have to die in childbirth either, that was just really lazy writing, just have her find out she’s pregnant and leave Darth Vader of her own agency: simple. Just think up a creative reason for her to let Luke’s uncle and aunt adopt him. Yes it leaves a loose end because no one knows how she eventually dies, but honestly that didn’t need to be explained any further than it already was in ROTJ. And if you think it does, just insert a scene into the next Special Edition of ROTJ, that would have been better than a mangled ending for her character, that frankly betrays Padme and certainty didn’t fit her character-arc at all.
Jeremy Jahns’ comment that it doesn’t “feel like Star Wars” - I reckon that’s probably because as I criticised above that they haven’t been expanding the Star Wars mythos/the Star Wars universe with each new movie.
So the leaks have been confirmed – screenshots, multiple accounts from people who have been verified to have seen the film, etc. There have even been reports of Disney cracking down on leakers. JJ even alluded to it on Kimmel. So we know the leaks were indeed from a legitimate source in the first place, not just fakes or speculation based on trailers and such.
Of course! I always knew the leaks were real, I read the whole script outline of The Force Awakens at least 6 months before the film’s premiere, and it may have even been in 2014 I honestly don’t remember. I’d forgotten it by the time I saw the movie, but I remembered later because of things in the actual movie that jogged my memory like Luke’s lightsaber calling to Rey.
Star Wars, or at least new Star Wars, is dead to me now. The special editions couldn’t do it, the prequels couldn’t do it, none of the other Disney films could do it. But this? This has done it. Almost certainly. Unless the whole thing is somehow a giant hoax or plays out WAY better when seen than it sounds. But that’s unlikely to say the least. No point in lingering in the denial stage too long.
The first two Disney films did it for me.
TFA because of the unbearable style, shaky-cam, mostly. Most of everything else I can forgive but the style doesn’t fit Star Wars, it was just too radically different, and in a direction that I personally don’t enjoy. And Rogue One for Grand Moff Tarkin. The droid in Rogue One was great, lots of other things about that film that I loved, but bring back a dead actor in such a horrible way was just atrocious. It was disrespectful in the extreme. #NotMyTarkin #NotPeterCushing. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he was just a minor character, but they made him pretty much the main antagonist, they used extreme close-ups, if I remember correctly (I’ve only seen the movie once!) I never want to see that movie again, because I felt it destroyed the character of Grand Moff Tarkin, and I never want to have to feel that way when watching the original Star Wars. What I remember, clearly, is that he looked like a video game character. So I was also really worried about what they did with Carrie Fisher in this new movie, given how much disrespect they’ve shown to dead Star Wars actors I have absolutely no trust in Lucasfilm/Disney to be respectful to her, and frankly she died a whole year before The Last Jedi and I originally hated that she had lived at the end because there are three obvious points in the film where she could have easily been killed off (the last one after her interaction with Luke, with some minor reshoots would have been ideal), and I wrongly attributed that decision to Rian Johnson, but of course we now know it was because:
JJ wanted to have her train Rey in Rise of Skywalker.
You can’t get more cynical than that. A completely unneeded character arc that could have been replaced, creatively, in literally so many other ways. But oh no to keep it they had to keep Leia alive at the end of TLJ.
All I care about now is the OUT. I’m going to pretend everything else is non-canon, same as I do for horrible sequels in other good franchises – e.g. Crystal Skull.
Which means if Disney can’t even give me the OUT, I will legitimately wish George never sold to Disney. What difference would it make? Not getting it either way, and at least that way there would only be three terrible films instead of six. I doubt George would ever have actually gotten around to making his own sequels, and even then I doubt they could have ruined Star Wars as badly as this is about to do – the prequels didn’t.
Yep that’s true, he sold up because he didn’t want to make any more movies. Although the curmudgeonly old codger didn’t acknowledge that he could simply be co-writer and producer and let others direct this time around. In fairness to him though I do not think he anticipated the betrayal he was dealt. He created Star Wars, and with the new trilogy (The Force Awakens in particular) they didn’t want to create anything at all, they just wanted to use the existing cinematic universe. To shame!