"Star Wars: The Last Jedi" is the eighth main film in the Star Wars series, and the ninth including the side story, Star Wars: Rogue One. It stars Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher (who died shortly after filming) as Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa, and Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac and Kelly Marie Tran as the "new" characters Rey, Finn, Poe Dameron and Rose Tico, and Adam Driver as villain Kylo Ren, and Benicio Del Toro in a small but important role. This review will contain minor spoilers.
First: I saw this movie today, and my impressions, while fresh and vivid, might also be biased with the excitement of seeing a Star Wars movie in its first week. The critical reception to this movie has been strongly favorable, but there has apparently been some objection to it among the fanbase, because it in some ways departs from tradition, and also because Star Wars fans are a hard lot to please, especially when changes disturb their precious nostalgia.
If "The Force Awakens" was a successor to "A New Hope", with the same type of adventure serial charm, "The Last Jedi" takes its cue from "The Empire Strikes Back", a darker and more dramatic movie. Not to say that this movie is a rehash of The Empire Strikes Back, because in many ways it makes a departure from what people expect of a Star Wars movie.
The movie follows three main, connecting stories. In one, Rey has found Luke Skywalker, living as a hermit, and attempts to get him to rejoin the resistance, or at least explain why he left. In the second, the tattered remains of the rebel fleet, commanded by Leia Organa, attempts to escape from the First Order. In the third, Finn and Rose attempt a farfetched ploy to throw the First Order off the rebels tail. This third plot has been criticized, and while it seems to distract from the story, I consider it thematically important. These three plots are resolved together, and the movie then goes into its climatic final act. Did I mention this movie is two and a half hours long? Because it is, and even as enthralled as I was, the ending did stretch a bit long.
I don't feel like giving a blow-by-blow explanation of the plot. There were lots of space explosions, lots of lightsaber battles, and many figurative and literal cliff hangers. Given the budget and expertise that goes into a Star Wars film, it is to be expected that they know how to make a spectacular action story. What interests me more about the story is how it answers some of the questions I have had about Star Wars, and which I mentioned in my review for "The Force Awakens". Simply put: how does Star Wars meld its mystical philosophy with its mechanized and seemingly remorseless violence? Yoda told us (and the characters) decades ago, that "Wars not make one great", and yet "Wars" are literally the name of the game. After a hero goes on his Hero's Journey, and understands the mystical connection to the universe, and fulfills his destiny, he gets a...glowing sword, and what else? Luke Skywalker clearly takes this belief and rejects it, saying that a force that ties together everything in existence is not the province solely of one group of people. The Jedi are not the owners of the truth, and their attempt to put the truth into a box is what led to their downfall.
This is also why the subplot with Finn and Rose, while seemingly extraneous, is an important part of the movie. Finn and Rose encounter the oppression and poverty that is normal in a galaxy ruled by The New Order, and their militaristic and fascist allies. Although the political nature of this point might have alienated some fans who would wish for Star Wars to be purely fantasy, it is hardly a departure for the series. If Star Wars has been a story about power and how it can corrupt, a brief glimpse of what that looks like for common people explains the Light and Dark side of the force much better than any number of hokey old monks reciting platitudes ever could. And for this reason, I consider this movie to have succeeded where other Star Wars movies have not.