[FireGilbert]

I enjoyed The Last Jedi. It was an entertaining film with fun action and a good mix of humour with serious themes. The Yoda appearance, the throne room scene, and Luke facing the First Order were all great and rank on the list of greatest Star Wars moments. Unfortunately it was far from perfect suffering from issues with pacing, tone and being 20 minutes too long.

I really liked the main story line with Rey, Luke, Kylo, and Snoke. I loved seeing bitter old Luke and thought the direction they were taking the Force was cool. The Kylo/Rey relation ship was interesting and I enjoyed the throne scene and killing of Snoke. It would have been nice to get background on Snoke and some training of Kylo but these are minor issues.

I thought the chase story was okay. I liked the running out of fuel angle as something different and liked the development of Poe but thought the mutiny stuff was silly and overall it was a bad copy of the chase from Empire. The new captain was poorly written and seemed really stupid and unlikable. I did not care at all when she died.

The part of the movie I absolutely hated was the casino trip. It was a jarring change in tone while serving very little purpose for the story or character development. It even managed to make Finn, my favourite character in TFA, one of my least favourite in this one. Things did improve however once they got on the First Order ship. I also was not a fan of Rose. She was cliche, her saving Finn was so lame and predictable, and it looks like we are now going to get some annoying Finn/Rey/Rose love triangle in Episode IX.

I think better editing would have really helped this one and they could have ended up with a 2 hour movie with a more concise story and consistent tone. Add more to the training of Rey and Kylo while providing background on Rey and Snoke at the expense of the casino and mutiny. I also feel they could have improved the ending by shortening the time between the deaths of Snoke and Luke. These were awesome but I have no idea which one was the climax and it created a situation where the main protagonist had very little to do for the last 20 minutes.

Something else I was thinking about is how this one didn't feel like a part 2 in a trilogy. It clearly was a sequel to TFA however ignored so much of its' predecessor. We are told Kylo is going to be trained by Snoke yet this never happens, it is hinted at that Rey has an interesting and complicated history with a connection to the light sabre yet she turns out to be a nobody, Luke leaves a map yet is upset when someone finds him, and Finn goes through an arc where he decides to do the right thing and not run away yet in this one the first thing he does is try to run away. It also doensn't set much up for Episode IX as there are no cliff hangers or mysteries to get intrigued about. It will be interesting to see where they go in IX but seems odd there doesn't currently seem to be an over arcing trilogy story.

Overall I had fun at the cinema and TLJ is a solid entry in the Star Wars universe. This has too many problems to be a classic however and was not one of the top 5 movies I saw in 2017. 8/10

Also, my wife provided a much shorter review: "I enjoyed it but it seems like they are just milking the originals at this point. I'm starting to be over Star Wars."