Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) is the most divisive film in the series, and not because of its quality but because of what it does. Rian Johnson takes every question the previous film left open and answers each one against expectation. Who Rey's parents were turns out to be disappointingly ordinary. Who Snoke was is never explained. Luke Skywalker is not a saviour but a man who ran and hid because of what he did to his own student. The real idea is that legends do not help, they obstruct. Luke is fleeing his own legend, Rey is freed by not descending from anyone important, and Kylo Ren wants to kill the past. Every expectation the series built is deliberately broken. That choice split the audience. Critics largely wrote favourably; a section of the fanbase read it as a betrayal, and the argument ran for years. It is Carrie Fisher's last performance. She died after filming and the film is dedicated to her. Visually it is among the boldest work in the series. The throne room fight and the red salt planet Crait stand apart cinematically. It runs 152 minutes. Good for: Star Wars, science fiction, and films that play against genre expectation. Less good for: newcomers cannot follow it, the casino sequence in the middle was widely considered unnecessary, and it is long.