Star Wars is one of the most popular and profitable movie franchises in history. The most recent movie in the franchise, The Last Jedi, came out on December 15th, 2017 and made $220 million in its first weekend. To date, it has made over $1 billion. Despite its popularity on Rotten Tomatoes of 91%, the movie still saw a lot of backlash for plot holes, unnecessary scenes, and iconic character deaths. If you haven’t seen this movie, please do not read until you have, it has spoilers.

 The Last Jedi picks up where the Force Awakens ended. The entire movie occurs over a few days or a couple weeks. (the timeline is confusing and many people debate it) It begins with Rey, the lead female character, going up to Luke Skywalker and handing him his long, lost lightsaber. He dramatically takes it and throws it over the side of the cliff. Luke then grumpily goes back into his hut and tells Rey to go away. This is highly uncharacteristic for Luke and Rey keeps pressing to talk to him. He eventually agrees to train her and tells her what happened that caused Kylo to destroy Luke’s new Jedi Temple. Later on, Rey excels in her training and begins to connect in a way with Kylo Ren. Kylo is across the galaxy and is part of the First Order. He is the son of Leia and Han.

 On the other side of the galaxy, the Resistance is trying to escape from the First Order. An attack on the bridge of the ship causes Leia to go into a coma. Poe Dameron is wanting to go against Vice Admiral Holdo and attack the First order as they are trying to escape but cannot because the Resistance can be tracked even when in hyperspace. The majority of the movie time taken up deals with this situation. Some moviegoers didn’t like how the movie seemed to have an extra 15-20 minutes of unneeded scenes.

 Our resident Star Wars nerd, Mr. Litecky, had a few opinions on the new movie. He thought the ending was not good because they “killed the wrong guy” if a character death was needed at all.  When asked about his favorite scene he said the lightsaber duel between Kylo Ren and Rey, because it was cool. His least favorite scene was when the Resistance ship was partially blown up and Leia was thrown out of the ship, into space. She uses the force (presumably, it is unknown) to bring herself back into a safe part of the ship and saves her life. This doesn’t make sense to viewers because Leia had previously not possessed the force or showed no sign of it.  In regards to the next movie, he has no idea what they will do and wonders how the producers will fit so much plot hole coverage and new plots in such a short time.

The next installment of the Star Wars movies is Solo: A Star Wars Story, which is a standalone movie about the young Han Solo. Star Wars IX (unnamed as of now) comes out on December 20th, 2019.