Updated April 28, 2022 32.8K votes 3.5K voters 36.5K views
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Let's face it, there's been a fair amount of criticism of The Last Jedi. While critics are giving it very positive reviews, fans haven't been won over so easily. There are a lot of things people don't like about Star War: The Last Jedi, even more so than those who hated on The Force Awakens. Some of these critiques can be chalked up to fans being fanatical, but there really are some legitimate flaws in The Last Jedi.
Would things have been different with JJ Abrams at the helm? Perhaps. But a lot of problems with Star Wars: The Last Jedi came directly from the script, with a plot that was at once too contained and too outlandish. Of course, it wasn't all bad. In fact, it wasn't bad at all, but that won't stop fans from finding chinks in the armor.
Right or wrong, here are some of people's biggest issues with The Last Jedi. There are galactic-size spoilers for The Last Jedi within, so see the movie before reading this.
The third subplot of The Last Jedi was Finn (John Boyega) and Rose's (Kelly Marie Tran) secret mission to travel to Canto Bight, a casino planet full of arms dealers, where they have to find a hacker whose identity they don't know, get thrown in jail for parking on the beach, and then end up finding a different but perhaps more capable hacker, DJ (Benicio del Toro), in their jail cell. They of course all escape together and DJ gets them onto the First Order's star destroyer - where he then sells them out. Fortunately, when Laura Dern flies her cruiser through the destroyer, Rose and Finn are two of the few that survive. From start to finish, their side plot is one contrivance after another, that ends with the audience apparently having to accept some sort of budding romance between them. None of it seems to work.
Of course when they were making this film, no one knew that the late Carrie Fisher would tragically pass after filming, so it's no surprise they wanted her to survive until the last installment of the trilogy. But the moment she was sucked out into space when things really started to look bleak for the Resistance truly should have been her departure from the story. It was devastating and so visceral to see her pulled out into the cold vacuum and slowly freeze - then she opened her eyes and flew back to the ship and it went from being one of the most powerful scenes in the entire saga to being one of the more groan-worthy ones.
The very crux the entire movie balances on is the Resistance cruiser staying just out of range of the First Order's weapons because both ships apparently travel at the exact same speed. Considering the vast array of ships in the Star Wars universe, it seems unlikely that two such different vessels have the exact same cruising speed, or at least that the destroyer lacked any other means of blowing up the cruiser, forcing the two into a high speed (but apparently low speed) chase. Then there's Rose and Finn's outlandish suicide mission to infiltrate the destroyer, which ultimately proved pointless as the Resistance came upon an abandoned base before the end, or maybe it was all contrived to get Finn face to face with Phasma (Gwendoline Christie), who once again didn't get enough screen time.
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The Subversion Of Big Reveals Worked Wonderfully And Still Disappointed
There were hundreds of theories about who Snoke might be and who Rey's parents were, maybe even Snoke himself, so fans were ripe for being turned on their heads when it turned out Snoke was pretty easily killed and Rey's parents were nobodies. While the second half of that equation is actually refreshing, it still felt like somewhat of a letdown, albeit an acceptable one. Ren's simple dispatching of Snoke was less poignant, however. Sure, the Sith have the Rule of Two, and Ren betraying his master was inevitable, but having Snoke only appear via hologram in The Force Awakens made it feel like he was overcompensating; yet, upon meeting him in The Last Jedi, it's clear that he truly is a dangerous Sith Lord... who was killed by skullduggery. It just felt a bit too easy, and Snoke's lack of backstory makes him a hollow villain.
Domhnall Gleeson's General Hux is the butt of a lot of jokes in The Last Jedi. While the character is indeed detestable, it's really hard to take him seriously as a mean, scary villain when everyone is punking him. The movie kicks off with this when Poe plays him for a fool over the intercom, and from there on out it's Hux getting slammed around with Force chokes so often and so comically that one might expect the Three Stooges to show up and bop him on the head with a hammer. While Sith treated their generals this way in the original trilogy, back then it was done to convey real terror - now it just feels like a running gag.
In the first movie there was a dynamic established between the mysterious Captain Phasma and Finn, but it was unclear what that dynamic was. It seemed that they kept Phasma in reserve in The Force Awakens to build anticipation for the moment when she would burst into the heart of the conflict, and yet that didn't happen in The Last Jedi. Once again, Phasma had little screen time culminating in a too-short showdown with Finn. Now, it's likely that she's still alive, but there's only one installment left - if they're still trying to hold her in reserve to give the fans a treat, it now feels forced.
