I've never come close to leaving a Star Wars film in the cinema before, but today I found myself, thirty minutes in, shaking my head, facepalming over and over at this film. To some extent this is a film of two halves. A bad half and a terrible half. The first half is, without doubt, the worst half of any Star Wars film ever made. The pacing is horrendous. It's all happening too fast, the scenes, the dialogue, the action. It's too much. None of it makes any sense. Everything just seems to happen to enable the characters to go on an aimless adventure from planet to planet before the finale. It's absolutely atrocious and aimless.
I was actually angry at what I was seeing. From cheesy cringeworthy laboured dialogue, to utterly ludicrous plot contrivances, to stupid action scenes and camera angles. Everything is wrong. This is fan fiction on steroids with an unlimited budged.
The second half of the film is better, but it's still terrible.
I guess you get the gist of what I think of this film, but I'm going to list a few little things that made me facepalm in this film to give you a sense of the awfulness:
- Kylo and Rey are basically constantly connected and talking nonsense to each other and even fighting through their meta connection. Of all the things to bring from the Last Jedi, it shouldn't have been this.
- Teleporting items through the force is a thing now. This is used as a critical plot enabler/contrivance *TWICE*. I kid you not.
- A kiss between Kylo and Rey at the end. I was literally screaming internally "DONT KISS, DONT KISS, DONT KISS!" They kiss. Of course they do.
- Using the force to drag back a space ship rocketing off into space.
- Stupid robot overload. C3P0 and R2D2, and to an extent BB8, used to work because there was balance. They were used sparingly, with care. Now it's just relentless and irritating.
- Lightspeed is now, apparently, something you can just use to bounce around, like changing gears, to escape the baddies. This is used in the opening scene, and it's god awful. I was facepalming.
- Bringing dead people back to life with the power of the force is now something that everyone can just do. Happens twice in this film. Apparently it's pretty easy, so the prequels shouldn't really have happened as Anakin was clearly no biggy if he couldn't do the old "lay on hands" on Padme. Kylo and Rey can both do it!
- Force lightning now blows up and/or disables entire space ships and space fleets.
- Star Destroyers are now mini Death Stars and can take out planets!
- The baddies appear literally everywhere the goodies go, almost like clockwork. It's dumb.
- Apparently Rey is important after all.
- If you're wondering how the hell Palpatine managed to survive ROTJ, don't worry your little mind. Just know that he did!
- Luke's parts are again sparse and badly written. I love Mark Hamill so much but it pained me to see him used badly... yet again.
That's all I can remember at the minute.
Despite all this, the absolute last scene made me emotional, because I've come to like Rey. However, I'm not letting that quite nicely done final scene divert me from the rest of the film, which was shoddy, rushed, incoherent, hot garbage.
Every Star Wars fan will want to see it. Some might like it. I was quite surprised to hear some people clap and say "that was awesome" at the end of the showing I just attended. Fine, everyone is entitled to an opinion. It's my opinion however that everyone involved in this film, shouldn't not be allowed anywhere near Star Wars ever again.
This felt more like a bad Marvel film than the finale to a nine stage era-defining epic, that some of us grew up loving, and still hold dear. See it. You have to. But don't expect to be anything other than disappointed at the end except for the fact we might have closure now, before we move on to something well planned, well written and competent. Here's hoping.
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