This review has spoilers. It’s been a month since I saw the movie, but I never got around to putting up this review, so we’re probably outside the time when I need to warn about spoilers, but here it is all the same.
I loved this movie. I thought it was entertaining and well-written. Did it have problems? Sure, but I walked out of the theater excited about what I had seen. The resistance is on the run from the First Order. I was not expecting that to be the plot of the entire movie like it was, but it ended up working out.
Rae is off doing her own thing, trying to get Luke on board, learning about the force, and in general having a surprising (but not that surprising) amount of skill considering her lack of training. In fact, I was really happy with how they had her basically get completely duped by prune head (I am bad with names.), due to her lack of training.
And Rae’s brush with the ‘dark side’ on the island really lead me to believe that maybe we would get off this stupid ‘light side’ ‘dark side’ crap and realize that the force should be balanced in a single person as opposed to there having to be a good person and a bad person to balance them out. I bet that would piss off the die-hard star wars fans though.
Finn gallivanted off with our new character, Rose, sewing the seeds of hope back into the minds of tiny children. This ended up being the only thing the two of them accomplished considering everything else they did turned out to not matter.
Poe got a character arc. Which is good, because he seemed rather ancillary for the first movie. I’m happy with the lessons he learned, even though they basically came out of Purple-hair straight up not telling Poe what the plan was. There could be the argument that she was trying to teach him a lesson after Leia demoted him for being reckless, and not just that if she had told him, everyone would’ve sat around on their hands waiting for the plan (ie, not telling him was just a plot device).
Someone who had seen the movie before-hand told me there was some humor in it that was completely unexpected for a Star Wars movie. It certainly caught me by surprise, but by half-way through the movie I realized that all of the comedy was completely necessary or else the movie would’ve been crushed by it’s own weight. This is Star Wars, the emotions and expectations for it are high. I feel if they’d tried to play it straight, it would’ve become a parody of itself.
And I like how well this movie played with expectations. From expecting Finn, Rose, and Poe to be successful, to the Codebreaker betrayer, as well as the connection between Rae and Kylo. And every time another bad thing happened, whatever popped up to save them had been foreshadowed well beforehand.
And oh man, taking a ship to warp speed through a fleet. Even the anime-style-see-this-shot-from-three-angles did not ruin the majesty of that.
Overall score: 5/5 because not only did I enjoy it, it blew my mind and inspired my own writing.
