Star Wars: The Last Jedi - 9 Moments Everybody Misunderstands
It didn't go the way we thought.
It's been almost a whole month since Star Wars: The Last Jedi arrived in cinemas, and yet the film continues to be divisive and provoke a heap of debate.
Just as darkness rises and light to meet it, for every person who dislikes the movie, there's someone there who loves it. It has a 90% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, an A grade CinemaScore, and 89% ComScore, and yet it also has a 49% rotten audience rating on RT and a middling 7.5 on IMDb. It's got people talking, if nothing else.
There are a number of reasons this has come about. One is that Rian Johnson is a very different filmmaker from J.J. Abrams, and largely chooses to play in his own sandbox, rather than open up the mystery boxes of the Lost creator. It's also a film that takes a huge number of risks, subverts most expectations, plays with the question of what Star Wars is, and pushes the saga in bold new directions.
That's what has led to the divisive nature of the film, with a number of moments held up as sticks to beat the film like Yoda hitting R2-D2. There's been a lot of criticism, but there's also the view that these moments help make the film great, and are worth exploring further, even if they didn't go the way we thought.