This teaser is great. 1000 generations of Jedi distilled down to one person. A girl orphaned on a small junk planet holds that much hope/sway. Pretty badass. Lando is back and has chewy as his copilot. It's a teaser and it got me interested. I think any actual Star Wars fan will be excited by seeing Lando and in the premise of the Jedi being down to one person. My guess is that by the end of the film, there are more people with force powers being incorporated back in to the fold. They teased at this in the Last Jedi, with the kid with the broom. I think the chemistry between Rey and Kylo is great and makes for some amazing scenes. I'm in!The Last Jedi was so awful, it made the prequels look good in retrospect.
-Nope. Nothing, nothing in the whole world could make the prequels look good in retrospect. The Last Jedi was a fine movie. Not a great movie, not even a good movie, but it was fine. The prequels are horse-shit. You must be young enough that they were released when you were a child. That's the only possible excuse for you thinking this :)
I disagree on The Last Jedi. It took any loose premise built by the previous film and threw it away, creating a confusing chapter in a story arch. It made the big baddy Snoke a joke by killing him dismissively and it made Hux a clown, robbing from the viewer any chance of seeing either as a credible threat and therefore the satisfaction of seeing them defeated by the heroes. You can have neutered villains, the sheriff and his son from Smokey and the Bandit are a great example, because they're never meant to be taken seriously, but if you want your villains taken seriously, say a supreme emperor and the general of a galactic military force, then you have to treat them seriously. The humor thrown into the scenes was often done so in a way that negated any sense of drama, humor is great for breaking tension, but if it feels forced and out of place or if it is over the top, it makes it very difficult to reestablish that sense of tension.The capital ship chase was a slog and nonsensical (how could energy weapons arch in space and why didn't the villains send half their ships ahead to cut the heros off?). The casino planet scenes completely ruined what semblance of flow and pacing the film had. On and on I could go. It really was not a good movie. I was not a child when I saw the prequels, did not like them when I saw them and do not remember them fondly in the slightest. However, in everything from maintaining tone and pacing to having clear character motivation and development, as far as memory serves, as awful as they were, they did a better job. I really hold The Last Jedi in that poor of a regard.
Phasma has totally been under utilized, so much so, that I honestly can't remember anything important that she did in The Last Jedi. Which is a real shame, because embracing an extended universe or not, if you want a character to be a key character, they need to be fleshed out and developed in the film. My same criticism applies to the use and development of Snoke in this trilogy and Boba Fett in the original trilogy. Everyone remembers Boba Fett for being a total bad ass, but that's all due to novels and such. In The Empire Strikes Back, all he really did was track Han and Leia and their party to Cloud City, then Vader basically did his job for him. He was even worse in The Return of the Jedi, his death being reduced to an on screen gag. I can barely talk about how Poe acted like anything but a respectable leader in that film. Dude was acting straight up crazy and his refusal to listen to his superiors put so many people in harms way. That's something you'd expect from a rookie private, not someone already in a position of command, responsibility, and accountability. I'd have been much more okay with that kind of behavior from someone like Finn or Rey, but for an already established leader like Poe, it seems inappropriate. If the story was better written, the whole trip to the casiono planet wouldn't be necessary. The whole chase, when you look at it differently is kind of like a siege. Yes, they're moving, but it the resistance's options are limited and time is running out, much like a siege. There have been films that work with those limitations and tell compelling stories. In fact, going back to Poe, if the film was written focused on more realistic efforts for the resistance to collaborate and overcome said siege, and he worked with both leadership and every day soldiers to get it done, he would have shined much better and you would be able to get some real, meaningful character development for him. The film kind of proves my point for me on the salt mine planet, which is basically, a second siege in the same film. It still wasn't perfect, but the movie felt much more put together in that area. Like I said, I could go on and on about how flawed this movie is. I wanted to enjoy it, I really did, because I've been a huge Star Wars fan since I was eight and I immediately fell in love when my mother rented me Return of the Jedi. It's just that as a whole, from writing to execution, this movie is really rough and the only thing that it has going for it is that it's part of the Star Wars franchise. Unfortunately, I don't think that's enough to save it.