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RFalvo69 -> RE: OT: The Last Jedi (12/14/2017 12:08:15 PM)
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I watched the Italian premiere in Milan yesterday with my daughters.
NO SPOILERS
At 2h30m the movie is too long. I could see in real time whole scenes and subplots which should have been left on the cutting room floor. This is the movie biggest weakness.
OTOH, the last 30 mins or so were really, really tense (another reason to be left perplexed by all the unnecessary padding). There was a twist a minute: some a bit arbitrary but some really cool. Ironically, one of the best also deprived the fans of another scene that everyone was waiting for - but the rug pulling was hard with this one.
Star Wars wise it was... dunno: half and half. For sure it was not "The Empire Strikes Back". Also, the plot often relied on fortuitous coincidences and "the cavalry arrives!"-scenes which were stunningly convenient. And some scenes were "disneyfied" to the point that they made "Frozen" look like a dark and serious drama (no, the Porg were actually cute; a pleasant surprise).
The acting was quite good all around, with Adam Driver, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Andy Serkis (as Snoke: one day they will recognise the bravura that this guy puts in his thankless job) being on top. The direction by Ryan Johnson "grounded" the movie in pseudo-realistic ambiences. Still, Johnson also showed a lot of visual flair, even managing to film lightsaber battles in a truly original way. There are a lot of ways to use a lightsaber, and Johnson showed us how we saw only a few in the previous movies (I also liked how he mostly kept the camera away from the clashes, so that the audience could follow and admire the unique choreographies).
At the end all is good in The Last Jedi - the acting, the cinematography, the direction... except the script. When it is good, it is great. When it isn't, it is either boring and arresting, or flatly bad (it was, however, also very funny, and Domhnall Gleeson ruled as the Monthy Pythonesque General Hux [:D]). Some of the mysteries left from "The Force Awakens" are addressed - and some in a satisfactory way, some in a perplexing one (like if Ryan Johnson had a lot of material he had to address and got rid of some of it as fast as possible; it was known that J.J. Abrams, as usual, had created "mysteries" to which not even him had an answer).
All in all, it was not totally original but it was also not totally an embarrassing "copy&paste" like "The Force Awakens" (even if a couple of key moments were copy & paste).
But, at the end of the day, those last 30 minutes are really worth it.
My vote: 6/7 on 10
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