Fixing the Last Jedi

So we finally finished watching The Last Jedi and found ourselves enjoying the third act more than we did during our first viewing.

The second act was bad enough to be in a Lucas Prequel and this left us reeling. But having put a week between the second and third acts we are able to appreciate the former on its own merits.

Unlike the Prequels, about which nothing can be done, there's a good moving in The Last Jedi. One just has to chop away the bad parts. Unfortunately these are considerable.

To start, let's drop the second act, it existentially sucks. The second act sucks so bad it goes back in time and makes The Force Awakens suck.

Instead of that stupid, contrived chase and sojourn to the casino let's just have the Resistance fleet flee directly to the salt planet. The action there is actually pretty good if one forgets about the second act, which sucks so bad we feel we need to restate that it sucks so bad.

So now the second act is just the interaction between Ray and Kylo and Luke's retelling of the destruction of his temple and the turning of Ben Solo into Kylo Ren. By doing so we lop off 40 minutes of really bad movie, cutting the time down to a more manageable 150 minutes.

Also, drop all the humor, none of it works. When Luke said, 'See you around kid,' we almost wretched.

Axe all the big stuff. The reader(s) will know what we mean. We're thinking of the massive flying wing, the super-huge AT-ATs and the battering ram. Everything had to be bigger in The Last Jedi. Why? The super-star destroyer in Empire was so cool, but like George Lucas, director Rian Johnson over did it and made everything as big as possible. What's he trying to prove?

As Rian Johnson wrote and directed The Last Jedi we remain hopeful that the bad bits are the work of Lucas Film head and Social Justice Warrior Kathleen Kennedy. They better be, because Johnson is in charge of his own Star Wars trilogy.