I think you make a lot of excellent points. I wanted to touch on two.
- Re: 6 things you can do. I think this is spot on. Star Wars is an epic story about the rebels battling with the empire. That's what we've come to know it as and that's what we want and, like you said, what more can you do? They opened their show with their big hits and saved nothing for the encore.
- Having said that, it was still a weak movie even once you take that into consideration. Rose was a terrible, and pointless character. Yoda was almost as annoying as Jar Jar Binks. WTF was up with the Mary Poppins move from Leia? And truth be told, they never should have brought Fisher back. Her character has become unlikable. The falling apart salt mining ships that they used to attack the AT-ATs were needlessly goofy. And the entire casino planet side story was dumb and pointless.
I did actually still enjoy the movie, but barely.
"Don't get me wrong, $455 million to date is a good haul, but relative to The Force Awakens -- the first of the Star Wars movies in the Disney-fired reboot universe -- it's doing about $200 million less than TFA did at this point.
Also, in the first week of its release, The Last Jedi saw a 77% drop in ticket sales, the worst ever performance for any Star Wars movie, including those three Lucas prequels.
There's also been a lot of fan backlash published on YouTube. It appears TLJ is Disney's own "Justice League," which I thought was one big mess of a flick. So maybe Disney now has its own version of a DC Extended Universe problem.
Some thoughts:
1. There has to be an element of Star Wars fatigue in all this. I think folks realized that The Force Awakens was really a weak rehash/reboot, and they're also on to the fact that there are only about six things that can happen in the Star Wars universe, which is supposedly a huge canvas, at least in the many books, but which in the films has been surprisingly limited. Rogue One experienced this same effect shortly after its release, and The Last Jedi seems to be undergoing this phenomenon at an even faster pace.
2. These Star Wars movies, and the associated Universe flicks (Rogue One, now a Young Han Solo treatment in May 2018) count, are just coming out too quickly. That makes the release of one of them not so special anymore. They're just not "events" these days. They're more like obligations, or obeisances, that Star Wars fans have and make.
3. Another
problem may be that the Disney-led treatments are getting a bit too heavy-handed in the
SJW/End the Patriarchy (in terms of leading characters) department. Various geek review sites are making note of this, too. (ed. Plus, those bastards killed off Admiral "It's a trap!" Akbar very early in this one. How rude! ;-)
4. Lots of fans are also expressing displeasure at Luke Skywalker's (Mark Hamill) treatment in the film. I admit I wasn't too thrilled with his story arc, either. Hamill himself
doesn't seem as if he was too thrilled by his character's storyline, either. Skywalker/Hamill links the old with the new, so to speak, and there's a way to do a hand off the baton when it comes to a character's arc in decades-later reboots. Plenty of fans don't think that was handled very elegantly in TLJ.
In the end, it may not matter. The Last Jedi's probably going to do at least $600 million, minimum (I have no idea what it cost to make and distribute and promote, which was probably a significant amount), a good payday by any measure. Plus, there are streaming videos, Blu-Ray, merchandising and other revenue streams that'll prop it up.
Still, while I thought it was an entertaining diversion for a few hours, I didn't think it was earthshaking or groundbreaking in terms of advancing the Star Wars story and Universe. It just was there and it was the holidays and someone had to go watch it, right? "
-----------------------------Baron Von Speedypants
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