The Last Jedi does build upon the foundations in TFA, characters develop. Finn is still a coward at the start of the movie, then starts to grow a backpone. Po is a hothead but starts to be a leader. Rey is a child, lashes out to defend herself, but then develops some compassion and starts to empathize with Ben. The movie picks up right after the last movie ended with a conventional attack on the Rebel base and trying to get away. The Resistance stood alone and is trying to bring allies into the fight. etcetera The movie even tries to explain why Rey is such a bull**** natural with the force. What did people want? Backstory on generic 2d hologram villian? Backstory on generic good vs evil dynamic?
I don't really think it's about deconstructing star wars. Rather people I've seen on other forums think that the film has a feminist agenda. And people are lashing out as what they perceive by Disney's star wars on the "heterosexual white man". Because you know, while every Disney Marvel movie features a heterosexual white man as the hero (until BP comes out), Disney has a "feminist agenda" because TLJ's director liked a feminist t-shirt on twitter. Just read the user reviews on rotten tomatoes, many of the complaints don't stem from the actual story. Personally I think Star Wars just has more girls in it to sell more merchandise and movie tickets.
With Luke people also seem to fail to grasp the fundamental role that he's playing in the story. He's not the hero anymore. He can't be. Because the movie is NOT about him. What these movies do right is that they focus on important times in the characters life. You know, there's an idea that if you're telling a story you ask "is this the most important thing that's ever happened to this character? And if not, why isn't this story about that instead of this other thing". Stories aren't interested in happily ever after. That's the end of the story not the middle of it.
All those years when Rey was scavenging junk? don't matter. This is important.
Finn's life as a janitor? Doesn't matter. It's when he defected that matters.
Kylo as a student and a pawn? Less important than becoming supreme leader.
Luke's failures as a teacher and life as a hermit are less important than his days teaching Rey and his destruction of the jedi tree and his ultimate sacrifice to save the alliance.
First of all, if you as a director are hired to make a sequel and that the sequel is supposed to follow immediately after the first movie, then make sure the story continues from the first movie. This is already failed at the beginning of TLJ. If Luke wants to die alone and forgotten, he doesn't leave maps behind him. Yes, there's plenty of reasons why this could have happened anyways, but it's a failure in the direction to not show this. It's an obvious conflict and breaks the continuity unless some info is given about this. Another thing is that showing only the "relevant" bits (haha) of some character's life, you end up with a mish mash of some seconds long clips that reveal no real identity. The lulls are important in the stories, as that's the point where the characters tend to actually come alive. It's interesting that nowadays in Robocop (1989) lulls suddenly are far more interesting scenes than the actual action scenes used to be. And talking about cutting to the chase, how does Canto Bight enhance anything? Release the animals and leave the kids enslaved?
I don't find the character development particularly functional, Finn for example was more relatable in the first movie than in TLJ. They could have pushed him to a Han Solo type scoundrel which would have made more sense given that he is a deserter, but instead he is eagerly shooting his squadmates in the end of the movie. That's him going back to storm trooper basically, or something even worse. Poe is a ridiculous stereotype of a Topgun combat pilot to begin with. Most dudes falling to this category in the army failed or cracked on the first month. Worse, his mutiny does not lead to any kind of punishment, i.e. the surroundings are not reacting to his continuing stupidity when he probably should have been shot for his actions inadvertently exposing the escape pods to the First Order.
Most what I got from Rey and Ren scenes is that Rey is aroused by Ren. I was actually thinking that these two should just get a room to went out their angst and I fully expect an alternate version of this scene from a certain industry in the near future
Thematically speaking, the movie attempts to portray Rey having an idea of Ren being something, but this idea is not explicitly mentioned, nor is the character background known well enough for this scene to have any emotional impact or allow the audience to judge it in any way. Ren, well, there's always room for the comedic relief in the movies. What other motivations does Ren have than epic RAEG? It's not even clear he actually wanted to surpass Snoke or get power, he probably just wanted to kill him to stop the master berating him. The scene of him establishing his position over Hux seems done in afterthought, and not as something he has planned for a some time.
Note that the movie starts from the assault against Le Resistance base and ends with pretty much the same. What did Le Resistance accomplish in the movie? Hope? What's shown is that the galaxy is giving the figurative middle finger to the entire group, and they still don't get it. Movie attempts to portray the younger generation as hope for the better future, even that comes out wrong in a way that instead of adults, La Resistance has to resort to child combatants and agents.
If the movie has a hidden agenda of feminism, I don't mind. If it is indeed intended, it mostly demonstrates why the current feminism is a self-limiting phenomenom. It's the undertones of social commentary that I find quite hilarious as even that comes out "a bit" wrong on times. Monocultural First Order crushes Le Resistance as I'd expect any homogenous army to roll over a heterogenous one. Furthermore, once the other race participants died from Le Resistance,
now there's hope of a better tomorrow?
Then again, Le Resistance group is also now more homogenous so they might actually get something done in the next installment. I'm sure it wasn't intended to look like that, but yeah, the thought did actually cross my mind during the film.
The deconstruction of Star Wars is related to Luke character (and what the character actually represented in his era), destruction of the idea that the Force has to be harnessed, learned and actually practised to become useful. It also now makes it official there's a nerfing and buffing trait built-in to the Force itself
It just wasn't awake in the beginning of New Hope, but better late than never in TLJ. Understandably, this cheapens and trivializes the entire thing as now Force sensitives should be popping up like mushrooms. Most of the relatable stuff in the installments were gone after RotJ, and this I think is what made the OT work as well as it did while prequels had little to relate to even if that was intentional by Lucas.
But now we witness Force Ghosts trolling and manipulating things on the current plane of living things while they did nothing earlier
I guess Yoda and Obi-wan just sat there eating popcorn and watched Luke deal with Palpatine and Vader, betting whose gonna win.
Finally, it's deconstruction of the Rebels or the nowadays Resistance. The original premise was that the Rebels were fighting against an evil Empire. That's principally in the opening text crawl. The Rebel Alliance by its own words pushes for the galaxy wide democracy and opposes the current system that allows Tatoiine and the like to remain nests of illegality as the Empire particularly doesn't care.
After TLJ, it appears that the Empire actually had it right all along, the Rebels just want to usurp the power to themselves and change nothing. This makes me wish I had been there in Death Star making the demise of the Alliance faster. And that god damn propagandist at the opening crawls got me for like thirty years until I only now realized he cannot be impartial
Original trilogy made sure it kept its message the same throughout the series, while prequels pretty much had none, and the TLJ is just plain random and contradictory. We don't win wars by sacrifying ourselves, well, thanks for that, but it had been more powerful if you hadn't just demonstrated an admiral wiping out half the enemy fleet just by doing that.
As I have said earlier, most of these ideas could have worked if pruned and executed carefully. The problem is in the direction and how it's been handled. And it manages to make the previous movies look bad,