Just saw the Last Jedi. It was so bad. The humor, the dialog, and the acting was just so cringy. It had some surprise twists that I didn't see coming, but I also didn't care about them.
This is how I see almost every Star Wars movie. The only reason I cut the original slack is because of when it was made. And the only reason Empire Strikes Back is given so much credit is because the acting rose to the level of marginal. But utter dogshit acting is like a staple of the franchise. It's like in pre-production, they have a series of meetings to achieve fan expectations by methodically designing methods to ensure shitty acting and wretched dialogue.
I still catch one of the prequel trilogy films from time to time and they're so fucking cringeworthy. Were it not for the moviegoing Trump-voter equivalent who'll support something no matter how goddamn dumb it is, there wouldn't have been another Star Wars movie made after Phantom Menace.
And how fucking colossally stupid was the death star reboot in that one ... what's-it-called before Rogue One (which, okay, finally had decent acting). Anyway, what a hunk of shit that was. You build some thing to kill planets with, but first you have to suck up an entire sun to make it work so you can shoot the planet. It never occurred to anyone on the writing team to think, "how about they just suck up the fucking planet in the first place and cut out the sun that's obviously way too big to fit inside of it???"
Or better yet, how about something besides a goddamn death star?
What are there, two of these fifty fucking movies that don't revolve around a planet blower-upper thing? Apparently a new idea costs more than all the sales generated from these movies combined.
God, what a stupid franchise.
That was the most glaring error in ep VII - the original Death Star was a weapons platform that could destroy a planet. How? I don't know or care. Where does it get the energy required? I don't know or care. It's a mystery. It just works. Someone dramatically barks an order, there are some cool sound and visual effects, and the planet is reduced to rubble.
The new super weapon worked by doing a bunch of stupid impossible shit to stars that clearly made no sense on any level. That's just too stupid. FAR better if it just did planet killing the same way that the old one did - by whatever mechanism the viewer felt like imagining. But then it would be just the same as the old one, and the film would just be a remake of A New Hope. Which it really was anyway.
If you are going to put out a star, then that's a pretty good weapon all on its own. Extinguish a star, and the planets orbiting it die - there's no need to do anything else to kill the planet(s). If you want to destroy a planet, just accelerate a big rock at it. You have some kind of spaceship drive that can shift the Death Star, so just bolt one of those to a nearby moon, and let gravity do the hard yards - boom, no more planet (and more photogenic explosions than you get if you snuff out the parent star).
Whatever - the big bad in ep VII was pathetic, and it spoiled the movie. The big bad in Eps IV - VI was pathetic, but by not trying to explain it, the movies were able to survive.
As for the prequels, I saw The Phantom menace with some hope, which was totally dashed. I STILL haven't seen Ep II or III, as a result; As far as I am concerned, A New Hope was the first movie in the series, up until Rogue One, which was a decent prequel.
It's Star Wars - on some level, it's meant to be stupid, and is just a vehicle for showing off the latest SFX. But there's stupid, and then there's Phantom Menace stupid. The Last Jedi is, IMO, one of the better offerings from this very patchy franchise. It's stupid only in the ways that are forgivable in this genre.
