You know what sucks? What really sucks? This movie came out at just the right time, in just the right little nexus of events, that it is more or less inextricably tied to the indoctrination/grift phenomena that set the entire internet on its side for about 6-8 months straight - granted, it's STILL here, but for about 6-8mo there, it became basically EVERYTHING there was online. And as a result, there is almost no other context by which the film can be placed or discussed. Even this EMPIRE piece (because IGN isn't doing anything but quoting Empire here - IGN sucks, stop reading it) doesn't know how to do it, because basically nobody does.

It just sucks that the film is irrevocably tainted by the concerted effort to frame it as a proxy for whatever real-world fights everyone WANTED to have but was too insecure to wade into in good faith. Insecure assholes WANTED to join the culture war, but were too chickenshit to have any skin in the game, and so they made Star Wars the battleground instead, because it's easier and safer to warp perspective to fit all that shit onto it than it is to deal with the world outside. It is, in it's own weird way, mythic in a way nobody ever intended, or wanted. It's never just itself. The Last Jedi is almost always a metaphor or a symbol for something else, something simultaneously larger and smaller (and more bitter) than a Star Wars movie. It's basically a giant glowing stove coil that everyone HAD to mash their palm on for a year straight, and I don't know if it ever gets to JUST be a movie again

Which really sucks because AS a movie, it's easily top two Star Wars. It's just so clearly well made, and beyond that, it's literally THE ONLY Star Wars movie to go off without a hitch. Every other film was a mess to one degree or another, with ample behind-the-scenes drama of one sort or another. EXCEPT for this one. This one was smooth as hell, and turned out basically exactly like it was supposed to. And it's legitimately great as a piece of introspective, metatextual myth-making. But it seems like it'll never get appraised as such because there's almost no way to extricate it from the Grifting Froth that drowned it for all of 2018.