Star Wars: 8 Ways The Last Jedi Says F**k You To J.J. Abrams

3. The Overarching Theme Of Unavoidable Failure Undoes The Force Awakens' Momentum

Onto one of the most contentious issues of The Last Jedi, and why it was once labelled by RedLetterMedia as "Wheel-Spinning: The Movie": The whole point of everything only reinforcing the theme of "failure". All this, despite The Force Awakens' masterful intertwining of A New Hope-inspired events with a cast of new characters, giving fans reason that the new Resistance could fell the First Order, one blaster bolt at a time.

This ties into my aforementioned comments of subversion not always being good, but because The Last Jedi does subvert expectation by making every major plot thread backfire, there's no shining beacon of hope or reason to think anything will change going forward. We know that as a film franchise, the good guys will prevail, but to paraphrase a line in the movie, "There is a lot of dark, but no light to meet it".

Thousands have reported coming out of The Last Jedi feeling utterly deflated, and it's because the core message of "Just believe, pull together and we can do this" doesn't come across whatsoever.

Instead, The Last Jedi literally states that things won't go "the way you think", actively removing hope from a movie that's supposed to exemplify why it needs to exist in the first place. In the end, a once-propulsive sense of unity circa-TFA is replaced with "Urgh, why even bother?"

The likes of Leia, Nien Numb and Admiral Ackbar have been fighting the same battles for 30 YEARS, and even Luke can't be bothered to show up to his final battle. The movie tells you to discard everything you once knew, so what's going to change?