I don’t like Star Wars The Last Jedi. But more than that, I don’t like the people who don’t like Star Wars The Last Jedi. The backlash to that movie was something I’d never seen before. Hate campaigns spread like wildfire attacking and threatening principal actors from the film as well as the production crew. That’s obscene and terrible. You don’t treat people the way the internet treated Kelly Marie Tran. Anyone who engaged in that abhorrent behavior should be ashamed of themselves.

There are problems with the Last Jedi, but from what I’ve read and from what I’ve ignored from the most annoying of YouTube pop culture pundits, what we dislike doesn’t align.

I don’t care about the prank phone call Poe makes at the beginning of the movie.

I don’t care how ridiculously slow the bombers are in the beginning of the movie.

I don’t care that Luke got green milk from that Loch Ness looking thing and then pole vaulted to a cliff side.

I don’t care about Porgs.

I don’t care that Laura Dern didn’t tell everyone about her plan to save the Rebel Fleet.

I don’t care that Laura Dern had purple hair.

I don’t care about Kylo Ren being shirtless.

I don’t care about the second act detour to Canto Bight.

I don’t care that we will probably never find out who Snoke is.

I don’t care about the gaff when Rey is fighting the Praetorian Guard.

I don’t care what ramming the First Order capital ship means for the entire history of intergalactic warfare.

I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care.

Me neither, Tommy.

Please stop crying about those things because they’re not worth getting upset about. Anyone who thinks that The Last Jedi is a bad movie has never seen a bad movie. If Attack of the Clones didn’t kill anyone, you’ll survive this. It’s not the worst movie. It’s not even the third worst Star Wars movie.

I actually like most of the things listed above that YouTubers seemed to shit on. I’ve realized that The Last Jedi is a well made movie I don’t particularly like. It’s well cast, it’s well-shot, and as I watch the Blu-ray while writing this, the effects are absolutely gorgeous. The new score with reverence to the original punctuates the right moments. The character design and general art direction are unparalleled. Snoke’s guard? incredibly sleek and intimidating. The casino world of Canto Bight? One of the coolest places since Cloud City or Jabba’s Palace. This movie does so much right that getting upset about those details I listed above is a waste of time, because for each detail most people complain about, there’re 10 others so good they’re chill-inducing.

There are three main things I don’t like about the movie and bring it down to about average for me. In no particular order, they’re as follows:

Luke phones in the final fight.

The scope is too small.

No one is special, not even the special ones.

Alright, champions, let’s break all these down. Also, it should’ve been obvious, but from here on out -

Spoilers n’ stuff to follow.

Luke phones in the final fight.

The end of The Force Awakens gave us our first glimpse of Luke Skywalker in over thirty years. There was a huge, sweeping shot of Rey and Luke locking eyes with Rey extends the lightsaber Luke had inherited from his father. It was incredibly dramatic and gave me goosebumps, even if it may have gone on a little too long.

The Luke we’re given two years later in The Last Jedi is a crotchety, retired hermit whose cut himself off from the Force completely because he sees the Jedi’s intentions and goals as foolhardy and unrealistic. That’s awesome. The Jedi may have saved the galaxy countless times but they’ve had to fail it just as many times to be heroes. That tension of the greatest Jedi we the audience have ever known not wanting to be a Jedi anymore was incredibly compelling. As he begrudgingly shows Rey the ways of the force according to his new belief system, we’re given details to his falling out with the Jedi philosophy and in flashbacks we see his failure. It was a moment of weakness where he feared Kylo-Ren, his nephew, and the power he had.

Given what we know about Kylo now, this is a pretty awesome metaphor for the fanboy who clings to the past but is forced to do something new and is punished for it yet still revels in it. But story-wise, Luke failed to uphold the Jedi ideals and teach his student. He wasn’t there for him in a way that needed to be, and his absence as a reliable mentor was the straw that broke the camel’s back, sending Kylo down a path of darkness that led him to find solace in the Sith. Thankfully though, when all hope seems lost, Luke shows up and shares an intimate acknowledgement of guilt with his sister, Leia.

The final confrontation on that kickass looking salt world (Crait) has the remaining First Order’s army stopped dead in their tracks and firing every possible laser they have at Luke just to have him brush non-existent dust off his shoulder with a pretty great old man scowl. Yeah, he showed up after saying in the beginning something like “what did you want me to do, show up and fight the whole First Order myself?”.

His next words were literally “I know what you mean”.

Reading the situation like it’s a fucking Dr. Seuss book, Kylo goes down and engages in a one-on-one lightsaber duel with his former master. It’s epic as hell. It’s the new generation, the one that came up so long after Star Wars engages in a fight with the one lived the goddamn Star War, yup - that metaphor reared its head again but what’re you gonna do, that’s good filmmaking.

This guy is the stand-in for every Star Wars fan complaining about Star Wars and I love it. Eat shit, internet.

The fight ends with Luke revealing that that he was never really there. He was a force projection coming from the same planet he’d been on all this time, manifesting himself so strongly and wholly that he was able to have a lightsaber fight with his goddamn mind.

One read of this scene praises Luke. Return of the King, baby - the most powerful Jedi does the most powerful thing and makes Kylo look both weak and dumb at the same time for not realizing he was never even there. My problem is that it shows Luke learned nothing from the first time he failed Kylo. His absence caused him to fall from grace and one more time he was absent. Kylo yells at him “Are you here to save my soul?” And Luke coldly responds “No”. Why not though? In a sense this is Luke’s fault. We know that because the next words Luke says are “I failed you, Ben, I’m sorry”. But then when Kylo realizes that Luke wasn’t there, he feels hoodwinked. The audience does too. And they should.

I would’ve been cool with it, but then in the next scene Luke’s corporeal form fades in with the double sunset reminding you of his simple childhood on Tatooine before blowing up the first Death Star and wait a second he died? But he wasn’t even there? How did he fucking die?

How did he fucking die indeed. There’s no real answer, and there isn’t even a hint based on his conversation with Leia or his parting words to Kylo (“See you around, kid”). I’m cool with Luke dying, but if the dude was going to die anyway, why didn’t he show up? Luke was the most idealistic person by the end of Return of the Jedi, he believed in Darth fucking Vader of all people, but Kylo was too much? Not only did he not show up for Kylo, rehashing his original sin, but he didn’t even show up for Leia. Sure he passed the Turing Test, but if he knew he was going to die anyway, he should’ve died there. It would’ve meant more, and it would’ve been nice to see Luke believe not only in the good of people, but to believe in anything before we had to say goodbye to him forever.

It didn’t feel as earned as when Obi-Wan died. Or Qui-Gon. Hell, it didn’t feel as earned as when Solo died.

Or Yoda.

Or Qui-Gon.

Or even Han.

The only worse death in Star Wars canon has got to be Padme.

What the actual fuck was this. HOW DID SHE DIE? “She’s losing the will to live”? She isn’t a cautionary tale in a telefuckingnovela, she’s a sitting senator pregnant with twins, do something, Padme.

The scope is too small.

Star Wars operated on a scale few other franchises have ever dared. An intergalactic civil war between a group of ragtag rebels and a fascist government that, and this bears repeating, operates on an intergalactic level. Just when you thought the words were big, you see the ships. And it’s genius the way they introduce this - the opening shot is of a ship that’s already sizably impressive - a Corellian Corvette. We then see that big-ass ship get kangaroo-pouched by a Star Destroyer, something that dwarfs it to the point of complete irrelevance. Then later in the movie, we see a bunch of those impossibly large ships around the Death Star, something so completely massive, Han Solo sees it and thinks it’s a fucking moon.

Isn’t this terrifying? This would either be the coolest or the worst video game level.

And then in 2015, The Force Awakens comes out, and the ships are so big, you think it’s parody until you see what the ship looks like and you realize how badass it is. Throughout The Last Jedi, a dozen or so of these ridiculously oversized warships are in pursuit of a decimated Resistance Fleet, too tired from running to properly lick their wounds from the first skirmish of the movie, and too small to make a stand. The three Rebel cruisers soon become one after barely outrunning the First Order, but manages a daring attack that cuts the enemy fleet in a half. Side note, that’s still, and forever will be one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in a movie. But now the Resistance doesn’t even have a capital ship to call home, but that doesn’t matter because they have to stave off a frontal assault of souped up Imperial walkers, y’know, the super cool things from Empire Strikes Back. Eight of them are marching on the base when, thanks to Luke’s aforementioned intervention, the surviving Resistance members manage to sneak out the back of their base and escape comfortably on the Millennium Falcon and wait, what the shit?

Yeah. The bad guys went from having an incalculable amount ships to having a half dozen, and the entire Resistance went from being a threat to the First Order to fitting rather comfortably onto one passenger ship made for smuggling. One of the coolest things about Star Wars was reduced to barely noticeable over the course of 2 hours. The story was about the Resistance being rundown and against the ropes. There’s a message that dances on heroism vs martyrdom and Poe learns that some victories cost too much, and while it’s a nice arc for him, it shrinks the universe considerably and spits in the face of my next problem with the movie that I’ll touch on in a bit.

I’ve had this cover stuck in my head since 2007.

The entire time the Resistance is running from the First Order, they’re talking bout their allies in the Outer Rim, and it’s setting up this huge confrontation in the third act that never happens. Story-wise, this is a decision that didn’t amount to much and again, worked to make the universe smaller. It’s great that nobody came except for Luke, what a subversion of expectations, but you already know my feelings on that.

After the final confrontation, we see a child from the Canto Bight scene use the force and we’re given hope of a new generation of heroes and Jedi and people who see the system as broken and will want to fix it. But… the kid was 11 maybe? Inspiring as it was, we’re not gonna see a kid swinging his lightsaber at adults because Disney doesn’t want to, and shouldn’t, glorify child soldiers. So, at best we have to wait at least 4+ years before it becomes visually palatable. Not to mention the fact that Disney probably isn’t in a rush to have a kid protagonist following Episode I.

So now, in the entire galaxy there are two groups of people who aren’t large enough to either fight for the galaxy or to defend it. No one seems to care about this conflict except for the people in it and because of that it kind of feels like a group of parents watching their kids play wrestle in the backyard. The kids think what they’re doing is important when everyone else knows better. I don’t know if the director’s intention is for this to be the vocal minority on the Internet vs. the silent vast majority, but it’s a read I’ve played with and don’t entirely hate…. But man I miss the scale of things. The sheer awe of so many ships they drown out the field of view was something so singularly Star Wars that I don’t know any other franchise that could deliver that amount of spectacle. I’m not saying another can’t, but I am saying it was Star Wars’ beat and for whatever reason, The Last Jedi eschewed it. It doesn’t feel like the galaxy is at stake anymore. The reason Luke trying to save Vader worked was because it balanced the greater story of Rebels against the Empire, summing up that desperate struggle as a son trying to save his father.

Instead of focusing on a conflict of good vs evil, a ton of time is spent talking about the ambiguity of either side. Benicio Del Toro’s character DJ is hacker that Finn and Rose hire to disable a machine for the First Order and he shatters this vision they have of the universe. They were so taken aback by the wealth and lack of care from the elite on Canto Bight when they realized their fortunes were made from arms dealing, that they forgot the good guys buy arms too. There’s a great line DJ makes to Finn after he makes a deal with the First Order to save himself where he says something like “Don’t worry, kid. They blow you up today, you blow them up tomorrow.” Finn responds with “You’re wrong”, just to have DJ end the conversation with “Maybe”.

This little exchange is fascinating but when it became a major theme of the movie, it seems like Star Wars can’t go back to operating at the scale it used to, because all that grandeur will translate into a guilty audience. We want too see that spectacle, but knowing that all the ships are war profiteering and probably the result of child labor and shitty working conditions, it’s hard to think of anything else, because that shit’s, y’know, terrible.

No one is special, not even the special ones.

This last argument against the movie is admittedly my weakest, because the other two were about feelings. They made The Last Jedi not feel like a Star Wars story, but no one being special is a story decision so I can’t mount a proper critique of it because Star Wars isn’t my story to tell. But it’s Saturday evening, I just lost a little bit of money on the Cowboys/Rams game and I’m bored, so here we go.

It was pretty clear watching the movie that Rian Johnson likes Star Wars but doesn’t like the Skywalkers, and I can get behind that. The cosmic coincidence that this one single family are the ones steering the direction of the known universe is sort of ridiculous on paper. How the can one bloodline, or one person really, be so important in a galaxy of trillions?

For more than 35 years, what Jyn Erso and the crew of the Rogue One did was just a sentence in the opening crawl of A New Hope.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence when the movie came out. Populism was a political ideology that was sweeping the country in the lead up to the 2016 election. Bernie Sanders electrified a young electorate with his ideas and Donald Trump to some extent even ran on it. Jeb Bush was snubbed (his own doing; I still can’t believe when asked asked at a Republican Primary what female should appear on the $10 bill and he said Margaret fucking Thatcher), and Hilary Clinton was passed over for Trump. The message was pretty clear; we don’t want people who have been here before. We don’t want establishment. We want something different. We’re going to reject the status quo and vote for something radically different even if they lead us down a path that’s radically terrible. It’s not about you, it’s about us, and you haven’t done anything for us lately. Whatever, at least the people who got us here aren’t here anymore.

Some of the biggest draws of Star Wars after the Force Awakens were the mysteries put forth. Who the hell is Snoke? Why did Luke run away? What happened between Han and Kylo. Who the hell is Rey? Who are her parents? Why is she force sensitive? My personal theory was that she was a descendant of Obi-Wan Kenobi from an old flame he had on the Clone Wars cartoon, a badass Mandalorian leader, but it was up to the movies to answer that question.

Rian Johnson didn’t, and he took it a step further by having Kylo-Ren, the representation to the old films tell her a truth she’d contemplated but never wanted to seriously consider; that her parents were nobodies, junk traders who pawned her off for drinking money and left her to die on the sandy scrapyard of Jakku.

That’s probably the bravest thing Johnson did in the film. He rejected the idea that lineage matters and that to be great you have to come from a special house or have your parents be somebody so that you have a chance to be too. That’s courageous as hell in a series of movies that center completely around Anakin, Luke, and Leia as the people who can save or ruin the galaxy but that’s also what made them special. The fact that it didn’t matter how many Stormtroopers there were, that it didn’t matter how many Star Destroyers or Battle Droids or whatever - that there was always a Skywalker standing between the galaxy and oppression. Yes, Anakin fell, a Skywalker cost the galaxy everything, but two Skywalkers set it right and gave everyone a chance because they were destined to.

Rose become a major player because of fate - she saw Finn trying to escape to find Rey and she stopped him. That’s destiny. That’s someone rising to prominence, but it’s not different enough from Rey being related to someone we know from the old films to completely dismiss that idea, at least in my opinion.

This wouldn’t be a problem if there weren’t any Star Wars movies that didn’t contain the main story but there are. For my money, Star Wars Rogue One is the second or third best Star Wars movie of all time, depending on how sentimental I’m feeling (this scene elevates Return of the Jedi so much for me). There’s a new entire offshoot of movies meant to be about people, and not about the greater conflict. They have their own subtitle, “A Star Wars Story”, and everything.

If you don’t like the idea of a single family being so important, why not make one of those movies? Why not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that those movies can be just as important, if not more so than the main numbered entries? It felt like Johnson hated the chokehold the Skywalkers had on the galaxy, and while I can appreciate that, there are two ways to address it:

You can either elevate someone else, or some group, to show that they’re more important, or you can tear down the Skywalkers and tell us they’re not any more important than any other character. Johnson chose the latter, and it just feels like an unnecessarily negative way to accomplish the goal. You can cede the mantle without breaking what came before.

That said, it was definitely awesome watching a bunch of candy-ass fans start crying about The Last Jedi. After The Last Jedi’s release, Johnson was given approval for a new trilogy, taking place at a different time, moving the Star Wars mythos in a different direction.

I don’t like The Last Jedi. But you’re out of your goddamn mind if you think I’m not going to that opening day.

Oh, and one more thing…

That’s it. Those are the three main things I didn’t dig about the Last Jedi, and why I felt like it was an underwhelming Star Wars movie. The only last point I’ll add is one I’m scared makes me sound like one of those man-babies tearing the flick down, but hear me out.

I actually really liked Laura Dern’s character, Admiral Holdo. I liked her a lot. I wish she’d survived, but like I previously said, that lightspeed scene is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen and I am so glad it was in the movie, so the only way I can have my cake and eat it too is if one thing in the story had been different, and it involves my favorite character:

What I wish had happened was that Admiral Ackbar wasn’t killed off unceremoniously when the bridge was blown up (when Leia was blasted into space and then used galaxy magic to get back inside like some kind of fucking wizard). My favorite character in the whole series was killed essentially off-screen and left out in the cold of space as a pile of particles and debris (another example of not even the special ones being special).. But what if… what if he survived so he could die later? What if Ackbar were the one to lightspeed ram the imperial fleet and Holdo lived to fight another day?

I know why it had to be Holdo. She had to be the one to teach Poe the difference between sacrifice and suicide, I get it. But man, I liked Holdo a lot, and given that Carrie Fisher unfortunately passed away after filming (Rest in power, Princess), it would’ve been a great time for Leia’s heir apparent to take up the mantle of Resistance and Rebellion. Now, I have no idea what the story is for episode IX, so that could be a terrible idea, but at least where we stand now, I wish that had happened.

And I wish Ackbar got a more glorious sendoff than that. I love you, Ackbar. Always will. Thanks for keeping your head on a swivel and warning the rebels that —