Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Part 5 - The Review

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I think I'm pretty much done writing about The Last Jedi. I've already gone through the film scene by scene and now I'm just going to put down a few final thoughts. Well, maybe a lot of final thoughts. It's The Last Jedi, there's a fair bit to talk about.

Click PART ONE, PART TWO, PART THREE or PART FOUR if you want to revisit an earlier chapter.

One last bit of trivia for you: The Last Jedi was released in 2017, just in time for a couple of major anniversaries. It was the 40th anniversary of the original Star Wars, which started this whole franchise, and the 30th anniversary of Spaceballs, the second Star Wars film I ever saw (after Return of the Jedi).

40 years is a ruby anniversary, so maybe that explains all the red in the movie and the marketing. It's like how Doctor Who switched back to the classic diamond logo for its 60 year diamond anniversary last year. I've been trying to remember if Star Trek did anything similar for its 50th anniversary in 2016, but there's not much evidence anyone was even aware of it. In fact, the way Star Trek Beyond was marketed, it's more likely they would've been celebrating 15 years of The Fast and the Furious.

There will be SPOILERS below as I'm giving the whole movie a bit of a review. Maybe I'll still like it after 7 years of reflection and watching YouTube videos hating on it, maybe I won't. You'll have to keep reading to find out.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Part 4

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the last quarter of The Last Jedi. I'm going to leave the overall review for a separate article this time, that'll be Part Five, but this article will bring you to the end of the movie.

Click PART ONE, PART TWO or PART THREE, if you want to jump back to an earlier page.

The Last Jedi was the highest grossing movie of 2017, which is interesting as if it really wasn't connecting with people it would've dropped right off after its opening weekend. I mean it did have the largest drop of any of the movies so far, clearly it was not winning everyone over, but it was still topping the charts.

It ultimately brought in $1.334 billion, putting it between the other two sequel trilogy episodes in success. But it was apparently the cheapest of the three movies by a significant amount, so it made a suitable amount of bank. It's still the 12th most expensive film of all time though. Incidentally, The Force Awakens is still considered to be 1st most expensive movie ever made after almost a decade, which is kind of crazy to me.

There will be SPOILERS below as I go scene by scene and wrap this film up.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Part 3

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I am yet to stop writing about The Last Jedi.

You've found part three, so if you want to return to PART ONE or PART TWO, click the links.

When Disney bought Lucasfilm and the Star Wars rights in 2012 for $4 billion, the plan seemed to be that they'd have a new hit movie out every single year, which is exactly what happened... for a while. We had The Force Awakens, Rogue One, The Last Jedi, Solo, The Rise of Skywalker, and that was it. Despite all their best efforts, Lucasfilm haven't been able to get a Star Wars movie into cinemas since 2019.

The funny thing is, Rise of Skywalker was a huge hit and passed a billion dollars at the box office. Sure that was only half the take of The Force Awakens, but Star Wars got off the blockbuster bus long before big film franchises started seriously bombing at the cinema and people started watching Barbie and Mario instead. Either Lucasfilm has learned their lessons and are taking the time to do it right... or all of their movie ideas have been getting turned into TV series to feed Disney+.

There are going to be SPOILERS if you continue reading any further, but I won't say a thing about anything that happens in things that were released later. So I can't go into detail about why the last season of The Bad Batch was so good, but I'll totally give away the endings to earlier stories when they're relevant.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I am continuing to write about Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

You're reading part two (of five), but if you'd rather jump back and read PART ONE, just click the text.

It's a bit of a shame I reckon that this isn't called Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi, to match the earlier films. Sure it says 'Episode VIII' in the scrolling text at the start of the movie, but it's not on the poster or the Blu-ray cover. They could've at least stuck the number on the spine!

To be fair, the Star Wars movies only started to put emphasis on the episode numbers when the prequels came out. Before The Phantom Menace's name was finally revealed the movie was just called Episode I. You can get Episode I: The Visual Dictionary and Episode I: Racer. Companies only like numbers in their titles when they're low, that's why comics keep getting rebooted to a new issue #1. Funny thing is, in the rare cases when sequels do get high numbers in the title, they seem to sell just fine. Star Trek VI and Furious 7 did well enough, and the Final Fantasy games didn't truly take off until Final Fantasy VII.

Okay, I'll be going through another 50 minutes of this movie scene by scene, so with any luck I will be hitting the film's halfway point this time. It'll be close though. Also, there will be SPOILERS.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Part 1

Written by:

Rian Johnson

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Directed by:

Rian Johnson

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Release Date:

2017

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Hey, they got the logo right. So far so good!

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the first part of my review of the most divisive Star Wars movie: Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi. And it really is his movie as he was both director and writer (with a little help from Carrie Fisher). He brought his style to the Star Wars universe here in a way that a lot of fans... responded to.

If you organise all the Star Wars episodes by their user rating on sites like IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, etc. there's always one movie that ends up right at the bottom, and that is... The Rise of Skywalker (except on Metacritic where TROS came second to The Phantom Menace). The Last Jedi is even higher up the rankings when you look at critic scores, and I've seen plenty of positivity from fans on podcasts and YouTube. But when people talk about "the movie that ruined Star Wars", it's usually this one they're referring to. There's so much hate for this film out there you'd think it was on the level of franchise killers like Batman & Robin, Jaws: The Revenge, or Alien: Resurrection.

Though to be honest, I actually liked Alien: Resurrection, and I enjoyed the The Last Jedi as well. At least I think I did... it's been a while. I don't know if this rewatch is going to turn me against the film, but I'll definitely see if I can pinpoint where other people's frustration is coming from. I'll be going through the movie scene by scene, so there will be SPOILERS below for this and any of the Star Wars episodes up to this point.