Everything Wrong With Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Dumbest Things About Star Wars: The Last Jedi

As a life-long Star Wars fan, I thoroughly enjoyed Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi. I was sat mouth agape as the story continued to take unexpected turns, I loved the marriage of nostalgia and new ideas when it came to handling an iconic character like Luke Skywalker, and I even managed to avoid eating my entire bag of Peanut M&Ms during the trailers like I normally do, meaning I had some to enjoy during the movie. It was a home run. But even while I was enraptured in what was essentially a two-and-a-half-hour chase movie in space, there were moments that left me thinking, “Hang on a minute…” There are questionable narrative choices, bizarre character moments, and plot holes in this movie big enough to fly a First Order dreadnought through.

So, for fun, let’s take a look at some of the silliest moments in The Last Jedi. It should go without saying, but this top five is going to be absolutely rife with spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet, you probably want to stop reading right now. Like, right now. There’s going to be spoilers right after this comical picture of Chewbacca. Right now. You’ve been warned.

I would pay good money to see a movie in which a teenage Chewbacca goes to high school in the ’80s.

5. C-C-C-C-C-Code Breaker!

Mid-way through the movie, Finn and Rose discover that they have a potential solution to the First Order being able to track their ships using magical space GPS, and they go to Poe Dameron with their plan. Princess Leia is conveniently in a coma after being sucked out into the cold void of space and magically flying to safety with force powers (erm, okay), meaning that she can’t tell anyone that they’ve already got it covered, and her replacement is an idiot, so Poe Dameron thinks that Finn and Rose’s plan is their only shot at stopping the First Order before the Rebellion is destroyed once and for all. Forever. And so our heroes put in a call to Maz Kanata, who tells them that their plan is so outrageously complicated that there’s only one man in the ENTIRE GALAXY who is good enough to crack First Order’s security code in order to get Rose where she needs to be to shut down the tracking.

And then they just find somebody else to do it. Wait — what? Yeah, so Finn and Rose travel to the Casino Night Zone — or whatever it was called in the movie — which is basically like a massive tax haven for the richest 1% in the galaxy. The goodies are looking for a master safecracker, but immediately after locating him they’re arrested by casino security and get thrown into a jail cell — a jail cell that they share with an inmate who just happens — no shit — to also be a master safe cracker who can do exactly the same thing that the one person in the galaxy who they were looking for could do. I was sure that at some point Benicio Del Toro’s character would be revealed to have been the guy they were looking for all along, but unless I slipped into a momentary force coma during the movie, that never happened, and the whole thing was actually just a massive, ridiculous coincidence.

4. Finn and Rose’s Wild Goose Chase

Of course, Finn and Rose would never have had to go after an intergalactic safe cracker at all if their commanding officers had actually told them what was going on. While on the run from First Order baddies, Princess Leia is put into a coma, and she’s replaced as the leader of the Rebellion by Laura Dern’s Admiral Holdo. Holdo immediately gets into a bit of a to-do with Poe Dameron, disliking his reckless, cavalier attitude, and rugged, bad-boy good looks, and she utterly dismisses him when he comes forward with ideas for how to solve their First Order problem, but doesn’t bother telling him that she’s already got a loads better plan of her own.

Her scheme involves secretly getting the entire Rebellion onto transport ships and abandoning the fleet, allowing the First Order to believe that they’ve destroyed the Rebellion while our heroes escape and hide out at a nearby base. I mean, it’s a solid plan, as long as nobody from the First Order looks out of a window. That aside, why is she keeping the plan a secret? Princess Leia says it’s because Holdo didn’t need to be a hero. Oh, okay. It’s good to be modest. But because she doesn’t tell anybody about her plot, Poe Dameron believes she’s a coward, and so he gets in league with Rose and Finn, actions that directly result in the First Order discovering what the Rebellion are up to (thanks to Benicio Del Toro’s treachery), which leads to the deaths of like half of the Rebellion. Even when Poe confronts her she doesn’t mention it. And loads of people die. So yeah, good job on not being a hero. Maybe, you know, actually tell people what’s going on, Holdo. That would probably help.

3. The Force Can Do What Now?

Man, how much easier things would have been in the previous Star Wars movies if only all of the characters had known that you can just magically talk to anyone in the galaxy using Force Skype. Rey and Kylo Ren spend half of the movie talking to each other while light-years apart, only for it to eventually be revealed that Snoke is the one who has given them this ability. How or why Snoke is so strong with the force I do not know, and we’re not likely to find out since he gets unceremoniously sliced in half in the middle of the movie, but Snoke’s power is absolutely nothing compared to what Luke can do by the end of it.

At the end of The Last Jedi, Luke telepathically projects an image of himself across the galaxy to engage in a pretend fight with Kylo Ren to distract First Order forces while the Rebels escape. How long has he been waiting to pull off that little trick? Since when was that possible? Up until The Last Jedi we’ve seen people trick their way into bars using the force, move things with the power of their mind with the force, and occasionally shoot lightning out of their fingers with the force, but now we’ve got force holograms? Imagine that. If only people had known sooner. Want to trick the enemy into believing you’re at the other end of the Death Star when you’re plotting to blow it up? Force hologram. Need a distraction so you can escape when the new leader of the Galactic Empire decides to murder all of the Jedi? Force hologram. Been invited to a party that you can’t be arsed to go to? Force hologram. It’s a shame nobody knew about it until now.

2. The First Order Are Complete And Utter Morons

Back in the first Star Wars movie, C3PO and R2D2 escape the clutches of the Empire on an escape pod and the baddies, apparently because of some sort of galactic recession resulting in uber-expensive laser charging fees, don’t bother shooting it down. “No life signs on board,” they say. Oh boy. If only they’d known. We’ve long mocked the Empire for orchestrating their own downfall thanks to their frugality with ammunition, but compared to the First Order they’re positively on the ball. General Hux, who was suitably slimy and evil in The Force Awakens, is reduced to wholesale buffoonery by the end of The Last Jedi, being thrown around in slapstick fashion time and again by Kylo Ren. By the end he’s only missing the Benny Hill theme tune. And as if to demonstrate just how comical the First Order have become, General Hux has hired Eddie Hitler from Bottom as his second in command.

But by far the silliest thing about the First Order in The Last Jedi, though, is their plan to stop the Rebels. The Rebels are driving away from the First Order, and so the Order are chasing them. They’re moving at the same speed so the Rebels are always just out of firing range, thus saving their skins until they inevitably run out of fuel, and the First Order ships blow them out of the sky. What this amounts to is an incredibly slow chase through space, but for some reason, absolutely nobody in the entire First Order says, “Hey, why don’t we just engage the hyperdrives on a couple of our ships and move them to the other side of the Rebels, trapping them between us, and shoot them to shit?” I mean, I’m not a military general, and so perhaps there are flaws in my plan, but honestly, somebody had to have had a better idea than to keep firing every now and again just to remind the rebels they’re there.

1. Crying Over Spilt (Green) Milk

One thing dumber than anything that happens in The Last Jedi is the absurd level of fan backlash to it. I’m old enough to remember a time when it was Jar Jar Binks’ vaguely racist comedy routine in The Phantom Menace that had ruined Star Wars forever and retroactively destroyed childhoods across the globe, but apparently, if the hilariously overblown user reviews on collation sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are to be believed, The Last Jedi is literally the worst thing ever. Sure, it’s got some silly moments in it, and some of the story beats don’t quite hold up to scrutiny, but it’s a movie about space wizards and laser swords and we’re really going to start a petition to force Rian Johnson to admit his movie sucked over a couple of plot holes? Give over.

A quick perusal of said user reviews reveals that there are a bunch of people who take massive issue with the lack of answers as to Snoke and Rey’s heritage, a selection that are real sad about how Luke Skywalker buys the farm, and a not insignificant portion bemoaning that not every hero in Star Wars is still a white American dude. For shame. Duder77 on Metacritic has this to say in his in 4/10 review:

“Last year we got to see a 15 year old girl lecture battle-hardened rebels that “rebellions are built on hope.” Thank you, Mary Sue.

This year, we get to see a purple-haired kindergarten teacher appear out of nowhere to lecture a reckless “flyboy” on his toxic masculinity before she single-handedly takes out a huge first order starship.

I wonder what the Solo movie will have in store for us. Maybe it will be revealed that he’s really a girl identifying as a boy. Actually, as I write this I’m getting scared…”

chabbledubbs82 was even more critical in his thought-provoking 0/10 review:

“Star Wars is officially dead. Disney is a corporation simply to serve SJW agendas by piggybacking off popular names. End of story. Even with the shoehorned diversity forced upon people for no reason other than to tell you what to think and that women are powerful (every major heroic moment is all females for the feminist agenda).”

Although perhaps Parag0N says it best in his in-depth critical analysis of The Last Jedi in which he awarded the movie 0 marks out of a possible 10:

“Sucked this movie did…lost their damn minds the critics have…ruined Star Wars Rion Johnson has…Ive never left a theatre more pissed off and disappointed in my life. This felt like being diddled by your favorite uncle for three hours then offered ice cream afterward. Every single major plot point and mystery from Awakens is wasted in the worst of ways. Star Wars has always bordered on hokey and corny but it had just the right tone to keep it dramatic and serious. Rion Johnson didn’t understand that and went full on Lucas (ep I-III) with the tone. I was waiting for a laugh track to kick in during the very first scene it was so bad. F this movie and Rion Johnson! Do not support this trash. A waste of some of the best characters of all time…the people raving about how great this pile was would probably be just as entertained watching dogs hump for three hours…”

Everyone’s a critic.

Seriously, though, get yourself on there with a bag of popcorn and you can waste at least an hour trudging through the mire. There’s some glorious work by a bunch of Star Wars fans that are super not happy (again), and they really want everyone to know about it, and you can have a good laugh reading it all.

Yes, sillier than anything that transpires on screen during The Last Jedi is the absurd overreaction that some fans have had to it, with some even claiming that they’ve developed bots to artificially lower the user rating of the movie on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, because apparently just not liking something quietly and getting on with your life isn’t an option. Let’s face it — there was a bunch of stuff in the old movies that didn’t make a lick of sense either, and I didn’t give a fig about any of that when I was watching The Empire Strikes Back on VHS for the twelfth time in the mid-’80s as a kid.

So suck it up, star dorks.