I saw this movie when it first came out, but I really didn't feel like I had anything interesting to say about it. But I was discussing the movie with a friend recently when my thoughts about it finally coalesced in my brain.
Overall, I did enjoy the movie in the theater a moderate amount, however, I was uncomfortable in the theater the entire time, and the reason was because I had to literally turn my brain off during the movie. The movie is full of individual scenes that are fun to watch in thirty second increments, but are completely nonsensical when taken as a whole.
That made the movie far less enjoyable than it could have or should have been. I don't entirely like The Last Jedi, but I've come to really hate Rian Johnson.
For me, the entire movie seemed to be Rian Johnson trying to prove that nothing tells him what to do, not the canon of the series he's making a movie in, not even the plot of the previous movie in the series, not logic or common sense, not any sense of plot or story, nothing. And quite frankly I found it annoying whenever I allowed it to leak into my perceptions of the movie.
The opening of the movie sets the tone for the rest of the film. Luke Skywalker's reaction to Rey handing him his old light saber is practically a middle finger to the audience. That's Rian Johnson saying "I know you care about this, but I don't care about this, so screw this."
Its hard to describe all the problems in the movie without spoilers. Finn and Rose's mission to planet Vegas is completely ridiculous: it make the entire point of the resistance chase practically meaningless. That awesome tactic Admiral Holdo pulls near the end? That's awesome for the four seconds it takes to wonder why they didn't do that when they had more ships. And when you think about what her plan actually was, if I was Poe I would have shot her in the head, because that plan could not possibly work if the First Order had one single person anywhere in their fleet with a brain.
It seemed like every single scene in TFA was a page torn from a giant set of a thousand different scripts for a thousand different movies, shuffled into random order. The scenes do not make sense to exist in the same movie. They might have worked in a different movie, but not in this one. When Rose saves Finn near the end of the movie, I actually wished the entire rest of the resistance was killed right at that moment so she had to live with that eventuality, because she is dumber than spackle. Maybe the love conquerors all theme could have worked in a different movie, but again, not in this one.
I cannot think of one thing that happens in this movie that isn't completely undercut or contradicted by another thing that happens in this movie. The movie itself indicts the rest of the movie. Leonard Shelby could enjoy this movie. I could only enjoy it by forgetting that there was a rest of the movie, for every scene in the movie.
I don't think I've ever had a reaction like that to a movie, and I've watched thousands of movies.
