The Last Jedi recently appeared on Netflix which seems to have reignited that debate I thought we got over a couple months ago and since I missed out the first time around, here are all the things I have to say about it. I’m aware nobody asked for this.

Criticizing The Last Jedi is like criticizing Hilary Clinton. Any legitimate criticism you may have gets drowned in a deluge of toxic misogyny and becomes indistinguishable from the rest of the noise. However, it’s probably still worth having the conversation about both/either and to be honest, the whole Clinton thing is a quagmire without winners so today we’ll stick to The Last Jedi.

As far as I can tell, most of the (nontoxic) criticism of TLJ boils down to this: it is the least Star Wars of all the Star Wars films. This is confusing as criticism for a few reasons. First of all, most of the criticism of The Force Awakens is that it was too much like A New Hope. It’s hard to take this in good faith considering most people that have a problem with the newest movies are angry that they acknowledge that women and nonwhite people exist. But, again, we need to start this conversation somewhere.

I would say that the more important reason saying “but it’s not as Star Wars as the Star Wars movies I watched as a child” is actually a non-criticism is because duh, that’s the whole point. As it turns out a movie about “letting old things die” is actually about letting old things die.

The crux of their argument is that Star Wars is an objective thing that exists in the universe at one end of a spectrum. Anything with the Star Wars logo on it is placed somewhere along this scale and the closer it is to the pure essence of Star Wars the more valuable it is.

My extremely lukewarm take on this is that it is obviously bullshit but we still, for some reason, have to have this argument over and over again. It’s maddening.

The popular music I grew up with was good, anything new is bad. – Everybody ever.

The same people that hate The Force Awakens because it’s too much like the old movies hate The Last Jedi because it’s not enough like the old movies. Nostalgia is heroin, you’ll never get as high as that first hit and you will forever be chasing something that can’t possibly exist anymore.

Rian Johnson decided not to play a game that there was no way to win. Burn the Jedi Order to the ground and move on because things change and we all have to deal with it. Who knew that a large and vocal portion of nerd society absolutely cannot deal with change?