I sit here late at night trying to get through the Last Jedi again. I saw it in theaters and was excited since I really enjoyed the Force Awakens. I was disappointed the first time around but I can’t even bring myself to care about it the second time. I’ve seen a lot of people online complaining about certain aspects of it, most of them having to do with it not being Star Warsy enough for them or that Disney is far too concerned with its princesses and diversity and is ruining their childhoods. Neither of those things are my issues with this movie. My problem comes down to one thing alone, bad storytelling.

I’ll try to be as brief as possible but there’s quite a few things that make this movie awful.

1. The opening battle scene. Ok I get it you want to show us a war, that’s cool, but if the first order has been in control or at least a contender in this war why are they so incompetent? All the main ships were well within range and escaping but yet all your main guns fire on the deserted base on the planet? So all those guns and no one can target two different things? The answer is of course they can its just bad storytelling.
2. How do bombs fall out of a ship and onto another ship in space since theres no gravity? I’m sure you can come up with something but you didn’t you just expect us to buy it because it looks cool. Oh and the pretty sister who is laying in the bomb bay seems to have no problem breathing without a mask of any sort even though the bay doors are open. I’d say there’s a force field or something but the bombs seem to have no problem falling through so I guess there can’t be… anyway, bad storytelling.
3. The resistance bombers are made out of paper mache? They seem to be since the smallest tie fighters seem to chew right through them. good thing they had a fighter escort to do absolutely nothing to protect them.
4. An 18 hour low speed chase through space? It got old when I watched OJ do it but I paid money to see this one. So you can’t catch the smaller ships because they’re faster but yet you also say that they can’t outrun you? Huh? that makes absolutely no sense at all. Rian did you even read the screenplay you wrote? Oh and your fleet is composed of Snokes ship but also smaller ships. I don’t suppose any of them could catch it either huh? I’m hoping that some day in the far future you admit to us that you were just full of shit the whole time and knew that this was all ridiculous.
5. You recall all your smaller tie fighters because the cruiser is too far away and you can’t cover them… What? They blew up the fighter bays within 30 seconds so who did you need to protect them from? and since when does the bad guys care about their cannon fodder? Oh wait, they care when they need a convenient way to drag this crappy story out for another 2 hours.
6. Leia getting blown into space. Yup, got it, force powers, its fine I’ll buy it. What I won’t buy is how did you get her back inside the ship since the bridge was a vacuum and if you opened the door you’d have all been sucked out into space to die. How do you fix that you say? You show her at the door and cut to the next scene where shes in a coma in sick bay. So again you just don’t feel like explaining something impossible because you’re either fucking lazy or just not smart enough to figure out an answer. (By the way, it took me all of 20 seconds to come up with a plausible way to do it that you could have shown us. It involves Leia creating a force bubble just long enough to open the door and get through to safety.)
7. The only issue I have with the beginning of the Rey/Luke plot line is that you thought cutting the scene where Luke find out and mourns about Han was a good idea… You spent like 45 minutes on that stupid Canto bight sidequest that got us nothing but spending 3 minutes on Luke mourning Han was out of the question? what kind of idiot does that?
8. Somehow the incompetent first order has figured out how to track someone through hyperspace which is something no one else has ever been able to do. Once again calling bullshit on this. I guess targeting their hyper drives was beyond the first orders capability since they can’t target more than one thing at a time with hundreds of guns on dozens of ships. Idiot.
9. I won’t even go into how poorly written Finn is or his pudgey asian side kick except to say that she was so disgusted that other people jumped in escape pods to run away but yet somehow still thinks Finn is awesome after she catches him doing the same thing… umm yeah, sure.
10. The whole side quest of Canto bight. Yes please preach to us about how horrible war is and how it’s only run by rich white guys while we all watch a movie called Star WARS which is owned and run by a bunch of rich white guys. assholes.
11. oh and suddenly some lady you met once is your go to for advice on who to hire? and Maz kanata has been running a smugglers bar for like 900 years and she recommends the shadiest guy in the universe to help you out and has no idea that he could betray you? and she didn’t even give you a heads up that he might not be trustworthy? You’d think after 9 centuries she’d be a better judge of character like she seemed to be in the force awakens.
12. Oh and they had time to sneak away from the convoy that is under siege and hop off to a distant star system to go pick up this guy but no one thought to get on the smaller ships and run away even faster than your already faster cruiser? its hyperspeed not instantaneous teleportation.
13. Snoke goes from loving his star pupil to treating him like the stepchild he never wanted for some unknown reason. oh and he just happened to now dislike the stupid helmet he’s been wearing for years at this point. Wait let me guess, it was just another convenient way to get rid of something you didn’t like from the first movie. here’s an idea you idiot. Write what you want for the series of movies that they gave you to ruin on your own and give the rest of us a bit of continuity in the MIDDLE episode that you were paid to write you hack.
14. The hangar deck explodes while everyone is grouped together yet somehow they’re seemingly a quarter mile apart right afterward and it also happens that the good guys got blown in one direction and the bad guys in the complete opposite direction even though the good guys were surrounded by bad guys when it happened. yeah I’m getting tired of saying how stupid this all is.
15. Neither Finn nor Rose were injured in the horrendous crash to save Finns life and they both can manage to run back to safety, which is like half a mile away, without getting blasted by the still incompetent first order.
16. We still have no idea why Kylo hated his dad so much or why he loved vader so much because well I guess you probably didn’t feel like thinking about it for more than a minute or two.

I could easily go on but I’ve annoyed myself enough thinking about all of this so I’m just gonna wrap this up and try not to list anymore off in my head. Let me know if there’s a bunch you think I missed or if you disagree and think all of this equals great storytelling. Thanks for reading and hopefully episode 9 will be awesome!

Don