• PresterJohnBrown [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Yeah you're right that it wasn't "Star Trek" as we've come to know it before, it was much more of a popcorn blockbuster action movie, but one with a reasonable plot, good action, some thrills, spills, and chills that were all nicely balanced creating a very entertaining summer movie. As much as those movies are like cinematic fast food, actually getting a good one seems incredibly rare these days. The last entertaining Hollywood action movie I saw (that wasn't a comic book movie) was Mad Max and god dammit that was 5 years ago. I just want a fun spectacle that isn't insulting to my intelligence. It doesn't need to be smart, or even not stupid, just not insulting, like how the new Star Wars movies were insulting.

      Hmm the Last Jedi was uneven but was actually trying something other than lowest common denominator so props.

      This is the only reason why I give it any props. It was a terrible movie, but I could see Rian Johnson was essentially handed a wet sack of shit and told to make it into Michelangelo's David and then had constant interference from Bob Iger, apparently trying to make the movie more appetizing to Chinese audiences since the first installment of the new trilogy, which was apparently so forgettable that I don't remember its name, bombed at the Chinese box office because Star Wars doesn't have the cultural cache in China that it does in the west.

      I liked what seemed to be Rian Johnson's idea for the movie, that the binary thinking of the jedi vs sith is what was causing all this chaos, not simply the existence of the sith, because they were always tied to the jedi. I saw the future he was building towards and thought the, "Let the past die. Kill it if you have to." direction was great and I was excited to see where that was leading, until like 2 sentences later when Kylo Ren is like, "let's start with obliterating refugee ships" and that whole new direction got squashed and the rest of the movie was backtracking on everything it was building in the first half. So pointless and bad.

      The Last Jedi was what we deserved. For the people who realized the new trilogy was a big budget Fyre Fest of a film, it was the hilarious trainwreck they had been hoping it would be, for the people who still believed this was all part of some grand plan they couldn't yet perceive, they realized they were basically tricked by marketing. I see that film as a great moment of cosmic justice for everyone involved, in a way.