‘It would be idiotic to write a review of this film, because chances are you’ve already seen it.

That sums up the power and influence of the Star Wars franchise. It’s the kind of thing people often flock to without question.

That’s not to say that this movie is bad. However, it wasn’t great. That’s the problem with this film: It ranges from mediocre to good. I will explain my thoughts, and there will be spoilers if you somehow have not already seen it.

This film has great eye-candy. The effects are top notch, making up for lack of innovation with interesting imagery. Like in the scene where Captain Phasma dies, the floor collapses all around her, concluding with her descent into a hellish pit of fire, or when the Resistance cruiser destroys the First Order Fleet by becoming a light-speed missile. The final scene steals the show when the First Order fights the Resistance on a salt flat, and it sends red dust flying in the air.

The acting is believable, and I enjoyed how all the sets were actual locations rather than CGI recreations. You can tell these scenes are  labors of love. The music is exciting, best defined as a complex orchestral tune that still tastes like Star Wars.

The plot is what holds this movie back. It is simply okay. Rey still lacks a character arc like in The Force Awakens, Luke dies for no established reason, and worst of all, new characters and ideas are introduced that contribute little but clutter.

The Canto Bight scenes, for example, are not well connected to the bigger ideas in the film, although they introduce anti-corporate ideas (coming from Disney?) that can tie in to the themes of Star Wars, as seen with the codebreaker’s logic.

It could be said I’m “nitpicking”. Why demand so much from a movie? I demand much because its predecessors set the standard for quality in Star Wars movies. The lessons from the original trilogy were nothing new. It presented a black and white moral universe where good beats evil and heart beats tech. What was important was that these themes were executed well.

And think, that was when Lucasfilm didn’t have Disney’s Olympic swimming pool of money. Yet, Disney doesn’t use that dough to take risks. That’s the thing. Look at any artistic enterprise, and you’ll see a pattern.

Artists start working in a small studio, trying to be different to find the next big thing. When they strike gold, and they strike it hard, they rise to the top. When they’re at the top, they don’t take risks like the ones that got them there in the first place.

A good example of this is the well known Call Of Duty franchise. The first few games were celebrated by the  industry as the cutting edge of innovation. What is the Call of Duty series now? An annually-released, mediocre first-person shooter that tries to scam kids out of their parents’ money.

So, these ‘artistic’ megacorporations sit on their money until they destroy the last shred of the original work’s integrity (just as the First Order sucks the hope from innocent civilians), and the suits will float off to retirement with their golden parachutes. It can be said that Star Wars: The Last Jedi is just another byproduct of this plague on art.