After seeing the film and reading this article, I’ve got to respond.  I’m angry, too, so feel free to ignore this.  My (spoilery) thoughts on The Last Jedi are below the cut).

Here’s where this goes wrong. TFA gave us EXPECTATIONS as to who Rey was. They gave us EXPECTATIONS as to Snoke’s importance.  Expectations, in storytelling, must lead somewhere.  TLJ FAILS spectacularly BECAUSE (director/writer) Rian Johnson subverted those expectations. It didn’t succeed at all.  We EXPECT Rey will be a Skywalker because we are given enormous hints that her identity is important, that she was a secret child, hidden away (like Luke and Leia, and in keeping with the heroic mythos George Lucas liked to play with).  Her first words, spoken to BB-8, invoke (teasingly) this idea: since BB-8 is keeping the secret of who he is, so is Rey, ‘Me too, big secret.’   We see flashbacks of her childhood, being left behind, crying out for whoever it was left her behind.  And left her behind with WHO?  Who took care of Rey as a child on Jakku?  

This is important storytelling. It sets us up for something.  We are introduced to Max Von Sydow for all of a hot minute in TFA, as someone who knew Leia, had some significance, but we never learn just what. Was he looking after Rey, did he know her? What a coincidence this ‘important’ person from Leia’s past is on Jakku, hiding information, and, wow, Rey, a FORCE SENSITIVE, something rather rare, is also on this planet.  We’ve been setup to believe there is more going on.  For Rian Johnson to ‘subvert’ this idea instead of following up on it in TLJ (the expectation), is just crass and lazy storytelling.  There is more ongoing destruction and backing the rebels against an invisible wall (most of the film is literally about one big ship chasing another ship and never quite catching up for some reason) than there is actual storytelling.  None of the questions asked by the first film are in anyway given any sort of answer or even a technical response on this one. Why waste all of this potential by saying none of it matters? It’s baffling.  If you ask a question, you must answer it.  There were no answers in TLJ, only misdirections.  

Further expectations from TFA: when Rey meets Luke, Luke will train her in the ways of the Force.  Mark Hamill has given testimony that he didn’t agree with Johnson’s take on Luke here or what he did with him. I was worried about that, but thought – how wrong could it get?  It got pretty wrong.  Not that it isn’t bad that Luke hid after the trauma of losing his students, it’s that it’s such a small thing compared to his past.  He lost it over THAT? After he’d blown up the Death Star, trained with Yoda, defeated Darth Vader, he’s now just going to hide away? I don’t follow. The Luke I knew would have done all he could to prevent Ben Solo from losing himself.  Which brings us to another expectation problem.

Snoke.  

In TFA, Snoke is given pride of place as a Bad Guy. He’s the Emperor this time around, seen via hologram, but we know nothing of him.  We’ve never heard of him before.  Where did he come from?  How did he meet Ben Solo?  The EXPECTATION for TLJ, is that we learn this information. We find out how Ben Solo went bad. THAT flashback would have been welcome. Ben Solo became Kylo Ren, an IMPORTANT ANTAGONIST – but we don’t get to know how we met the person who, we are told, brought him to the Dark Side?  Luke just saw badness in him and – what? THAT is what set Ben off?  Being doubted?  I don’t know. I would have preferred, and I expected to see SOMETHING that really explained this, gave the story a wholeness to it.  But, no. Instead, we spend time on the island not really learning ANYTHING except Luke has a point of view about the Jedi that seems a little nihilistic for him, and Rey, instead of spending time needling Luke to train her, instead of being a pain in his arse, instead of pulling stories about Han and Leia and the days of the rebellion out of him, we get – Snoke SOMEHOW bridging her and Ren in order to manipulate them both with scenes that set up her ‘betrayal?’  

Pardon me for saying What?  

I felt lost in the film at this point. I felt like it was just going nowhere.  The last of the resistance is being battered, in slow motion, really, just dragging out all this hopelessness to where it felt ridiculous. Nothing made sense. Either overtake those ships, First Order, or piss off. I don’t know who you are (note: if you’re going to take Kylo Ren seriously as a villain, make sure his associates, like Hux, aren’t just a big joke).  Poe, nice job getting lots of people killed, you deserved that slap, but at what point will you trust those around you? He’s wrong so many times, it’s not really funny. Finn and Rose, two inexperienced rebels go off on what really feels like the most ridiculous mission anyone could ever devise. We’re being chased by big ships that can’t seem to overtake us, good thing, and we’re running out of fuel, but let’s get a hold of Maz, who must have magic cameras floating around her head to get those great shots of her fighting whilst she’s communicating with Poe, how random she just happens to know a bloke who can defeat the ‘tracker’ (as if this was even NECESSARY to the story, just a diversion to give Finn something to do with a character we just met) and they’ve got to travel to some random place to find this random person, only to find him, total coincidence, in a prison cell. And, of course, he’s totally not trustworthy and leads them to yet ANOTHER dead end.  

I felt like the writer of this story only had a vague idea what happened in TFA and just decided to write something out of his arse to get it done.

If you want to subvert expectations, have Leia move the mountain out of the way, not Rey.  Have Leia pick up a light sabre and duel her son, or, at least, pull some Force moves on him.  

Expectations help build a story. It helps us to see a narrative thread from one end to the other, helps it to make sense.  So completely destroying those expectations in TLJ means for a less coherent story, one that leaves us in doubt about the characters we have met and where they are going.  This might be fine on one level when you’re trying to surprise your audience, but this is Star Wars. There aren’t too many surprises to be had anymore. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, stick to telling a good story that follows through with previous narrative threads, don’t just snip them off because you want to decimate the audience’s expectations (or, as this reviewer implies, to mock and put down every fan theory out there – fan theories that exist because expectations were given).  

Star Wars, as has been pointed out before, is the story of a family.  The first three films were about Luke and Leia finding themselves and coming together to defeat their father.  The prequels were about Anakin and Padme meeting and how their relationship would affect the future.  Expectation for the latest batch of Star Wars films, that it would still be about the Skywalker family. Luke and Leia are back.  Leia has a son who is the primary antagonist.  The new ‘hero’ – Rey – follows in the footsteps of Anakin and Luke – the special child stuck on a desert planet who escapes and finds a new destiny involving the Force. Could expectations for her be any higher?

So why mess with us?  

If the third film turns around and Rey is, in fact, a Skywalker, how do we get there now without it being a joke?  In TLJ, Luke doesn’t know who she is. Doesn’t ‘relate’ to her, even though he learns she lived on a desert planet like himself and has Force sensitivity.  Their potential relationship, not of the ‘expected’ mentor/student, is blighted by interference from Kylo (she spends more time with him, giving the film a subtle erotic and highly unwanted charge), and goes nowhere. It’s frustrating to watch. Then Kylo drops what might be a terrible bombshell: after teasing us for much of the film, Ren simply announces that she’s a nobody, the daughter of dead scavengers, she has no part in this story.  It smells like a manipulative lie and it better be, but it’s still a bad one: why mess with us on this?  We EXPECT her to be a Skywalker.  Why keep telling us she isn’t, why push us away from her like that?  Why does this film almost insist she is not and is not even worthy of that story?  We know she is.  She has a connection to it. It’s wrong to mess with her over it.  It’s wrong to toy with fan expectations, only to later turn it around and say, psych! At this point, I hope they stick with what they’ve done, because if she turns out to be a Skywalker in episode 9, it will just be irritating.  Oh, we knew that, but you wanted to mess with us, so, whatever.  

And it’s an ugly point that only Snoke and Kylo Ren could ‘see’ Rey’s parentage and not her. We’ll never know what Snoke would have told her, but Ren’s explanation has the air of manipulation: he hates his family. He’s killed his father, couldn’t kill his mother – did he want to maintain an emotional detachment by not telling Rey they were related because he wanted her at his side? It’s muddy, and implies some uncomfortable attraction that, yes, is terribly ‘eww’ at this point.  

Luke.  I agree, Mark Hamill, I don’t know what the thinking was here.  He didn’t have to turn into Yoda or Obi Wan, he was going to be different, but did he have to be so different?  Did he have to abandon his whole world over what happened?  Did he have to turn to such a nihilistic attitude?  Did we need Yoda’s ghost to show up and offer him more platitudes?  Luke should be well beyond that.  Did Yoda really have to tell Luke that ‘we must not lose Rey?’ As soon as Luke saw how powerful she could be, he should have known that she’d be a terrible weapon in the wrong hands and done all he could to train or, at least, protect her. But he doesn’t. He does nothing. He complains. He’s bitter. He’s a little petty.  He makes no sense to me.

Leia. They had a year to edit this film in a fashion to give Carrie Fisher a final send off.  They had a death scene.  It was early on, it was awful, but it could have been either worked in later, or left as it was so we don’t have the baggage of how to explain her being missing or dead in Episode 9 without really ‘seeing’ it. It makes me wonder if they added in the bit about Rey’s parentage because they knew Fisher wouldn’t be around to play those scenes with Rey in episode 9. Did they write out Rey’s potential Skywalker heritage for this? I don’t know.  None of it feels right or good. I expected to be tearful at seeing Carrie on screen again, but she’s barely a character here (save for slapping and demoting Finn). It’s awful we’ll never get a proper Leia story with her now, but I feel they could have edited her ‘death’ in (instead of being sucked out into space with the explosion on her ship, could they have edited it to make her the one to fly the ship into the First Order at lightspeed? A heroic, emotional end like that would have had greater resonance than being done by a character we barely knew).  

I know people would want to see the scene where Luke and Leia reunite (even though he isn’t actually there), but Han died far from Leia (and she felt it) and so, too, we could have seen Luke responding to Leia’s death. It would have galvanised him, perhaps, to return. It would have made sense if he sacrificed himself afterward (instead of dying from all it took for him to astral project there and make himself a little solid or something, I don’t know, it was just – flat). The film had a tonne of money behind it, I think they could have come up with so much better.  What if Luke returned and took his sister’s place as leader of the resistance, let him carry over into episode 9? It seems to wasteful. 

Too much of this film is just backing the resistance in a corner, over and over again while Hux smirks and looks like the lucky incompetent he is. He’s so over-the-top.  I’ve no problem with seeing a Nazi stand-in as a total idiot, but how did he get to be a leader? We’re asked to engage deeply with Kylo Ren, even though we never see how he turned bad or why or what role Snoke played in that or who Snoke was (yes, he was important, SyFy, he changed the course of a young Jedi’s path and helped destroy billions of lives, setting up the conditions for these films, don’t ever tell me he should be so easily written off as a character), but those around him are just a laugh. Hux is easily made fun of. Phasma is barely present and just a joke who keeps getting beaten (and will probably be back around in Episode 9). She’s little more than a chrome-plated cameo here.  

This tone-shifting from the comically bad (Hux and Phasma) to the deformed villainy of Snoke and Kylo Ren wouldn’t be so terrible if these characters weren’t connected. Snoke, if we are to take him seriously (and this film, ultimately, tells us he was a pointless character and wastes his potential), would have had Hux long gone and Phasma with him. Ren would have killed him long ago (begs the question why he let him live – actor’s contract?). 

Rose. This was the character I was most looking forward to meeting, but I’m not sure what happened with her. She went along on a mission to do a particular job, and, as this film does so often, she is thwarted in the last minute from making her big contribution. We spent all that time with Finn and Rose just so Finn could kick Phasma’s arse. That’s the whole build up of their time together. Oh, wait. No, it wasn’t. It was to subvert Finn’s heroic self sacrifice so she could admit her love for him. Even though they’ve only known one another for a few days. It’s the only subverted expectation in the film I’m okay with (Finn lives! Rose, I hope you’re okay).  

Back to Luke’s deception and death.  

If you paid attention to some of the details on the Jedi island, Rey sees an submerged X-wing (likely how Luke arrived on the island). My ‘expectation’ was that either she or Luke would raise the thing out of the water (not unlike Luke attempting – and failing – to do so in TESB). It’s a reasonable expectation. It wouldn’t have been terribly original, no, but there was a way of doing it while subverting that expectation. Luke raising it himself (finally able to do it) in order to fly after Rey and help the resistance. Wouldn’t it have been thrilling to see that old X-wing suddenly swoop in behind the Millenium Falcon? Perhaps Luke kept his old flight gear and wore it. These films cater to a certain level of nostalgia and one last go round with Luke wouldn’t have hurt anyone, would it? Making all these teasing gestures then not allowing them to pay off feels a little mean, really. It forces us to drop all the parallels that TFA setup and restart our journey in mid-stream: frustrating to have to start all over when we really should be in the middle.  If you’re going to kill off LUKE SKYWALKER, you’d better make sure it flows from beginning to end: he went from bored brilliant teen in the desert to an enthusiastic rebel hero to a triumphant, hopeful Jedi. Meeting him again as an angry, fearful man broken by a mistake he didn’t really make felt wrong. They could have at least made him present for one last triumph.

The Last Jedi did not feel like the middle film of a trilogy, it felt like a piece of nihilistic fan fiction written to suit only one person or a tiny collective and leave everyone else out. It might all seem flashy and beautiful, but, to quote Rose, ‘look a little closer.’  

All the Star Wars: The Last Jedi fan theories that turned out to be wrong