Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Success or a Total Flop?

By: Kristian Konstantinov - February 5th, 2018

 

Star Wars: The Last Jedi came out in December 2017 and was thought to be one of the best and biggest movies of 2017, but was it really the best? No, much better movies came out last year and even compared to other Star Wars movies, it is bad. This is considering that The Last Jedi was the 9th place movie in history when it comes to how much money it has grossed, making 1.3 billion dollars.

    In the Last Jedi, The first order is planning to take over the entire galaxy. The Protagonists, The Resistance, led by General Leia are trying to prevent the First Order from taking over the galaxy. The First Order is on the “Dark Side”, The Antagonists side.

The movie starts with Poe Dameron and his droid over one of the First Order ships, the Dreadnought. Then there is all the other fighters going for the ship trying to destroy it. After much struggle Paige is able to get to the remote to drop the payload of the fighter, she was able to destroy the First Order ship, but at the expense of her life. The rest of the Resistance then enters hyperspace to escape the ship.

After all this, Snoke, the guy in charge of the First Order, Rebukes General Hux, who was in charge of stopping the evacuation of the Resistance. Then Kylo Ren, The Apprentice of Snoke, enters the meeting where Snoke is losing faith in Kylo.

Then we go to Rey who was in charge of finding Luke Skywalker with a message from Princess Leia asking for help. She comes with R2-D2 and Chewbacca to an island to find him. When she arrives she hands Luke his Light saber which he goes on to throw off the side of the cliff signifying him refusing to go back to being a Jedi and helping. At this time he had lost confidence in the Jedi way. Rey stays around to try and convince him to come back and help, but he keeps on refusing.

After that Poe gets demoted for his actions and insubordination on the Dreadnought. Immediately after, it cuts to the First Order ship finding them by tracking them though hyperspace, which was impossible before this. Kylo Ren gets on his own Tie Fighter to go lead the killing strike against the Resistance. They destroy most of the ship and Kylo gets to charging the front where he can shoot the killing shot but he senses his mother. He decided not to attack, signifying that there is good in him considering he killed his father in the last movie. Then, another Tie Fighter comes along to destroy the ship. After the front getting blown off Leia gets pulled back into the ship through the force and gets sent to critical to be saved, Vice Admiral Holdo assumes control.

Finn tries to get into an escape pod and is stopped by Rose, who is mourning the loss of her sister, Paige. Rose is a huge fan of Finn but she zaps him with a taser when she figured out he wanted to escape.

They end up trying to find the master code breaker to get them on the First Resistance ship. They find a Code Breaker and get onto the ship before the Code Breaker gets paid by The First Order by ratting them all out. Luke Starts teaching Rey some of the force and she almost goes to the dark side, but Luke intervenes when Yoda persuaded him. Rey and Kylo are able to communicate to each other telepathically while she was on the island. The resistance goes down to a planet until at some point the First Order also comes down.

Luke is there to fight and distract the First order until everyone else escapes. First Luke gets shot by all the artillery which fails, so Kylo comes down to fight in a Light saber duel. Luke and Kylo fight while everyone is escaping through a pile of rocks until in the end Luke allows himself to be hit, where Kylo figures out he is just a hologram and screams out in rage. Luke is seen in pain, then he sits down on the edge and just fades away in peace.

Anyway with the summary out of the way, this was not a very good movie, It was not well received by the public either with Disney even getting news stories on ABC, which they own, to try and promote the movie. The basic plot line of the movie was the same as many Disney movies, and this movie didn’t contribute much to the overall plot of the series. Star Wars: The Last Jedi is the 8th movie in the sage, making it more of a desperate attempt to squeeze more money out of the Saga from the fans more than anything, and it worked. This movie made 1.32 billion putting it on the top 10 most grossing movies.

In conclusion, it is just another one of the Star Wars movies. It is an ok movie, but not a great one. Disney is trying to make it out to be a high budget and a “Star Wars Movie”. At the end of the day throwing money at something won't make it a good movie, there are many low budget movies that are better than this movie, it was not engaging or significant enough. Just wait for Star Wars to be around still making new movies when you have children and then your children have children.