It's the visuals department where recent movies like Alien:Covenant and TLJ excel. While I find this look is a bit too clinical, the sets and the visuals are generally fantastic. I personally think Barry Lyndon is unsurpassed in the looks department, but it's a taste thing. It combines great sets with more artistic film style, which leads to the still frames of the movie looking like paintings themselves. It's a jarring effect, but was very difficult and time consuming to achieve. Been photographing for almost all my life as hobby, and I'm only now starting to scratch that stuff.
Unfortunately, Alien:Covenant and TLJ seem to fail at everywhere else, starting from a story that carries the film, and characters not matching their descriptions, or plain dumb character development decisions.
This is strange because I thought Rogue One was a good flick (particularly the ending and the droid saved the movie) with an actual Star Wars feel for most part (with some too close parallels to Intifada too), and while TFA was kind of bland, Rogue One boosted my hopes that The Last Jedi could be good. I couldn't have been more wrong. As a side note, I've never been particularly interested in the Star Wars franchise since the childhood, the only "extra" over the trilogies I've played or read is KOTOR and KOTOR II, and that one novel from the 80s when I was a kid. No other stuff, like X-Wing or TIE (which I played for a couple of hours) for example. I could have accepted pretty much everything they threw in the movie,
granted they did it and grounded it well.
What the TLJ did in deconstruction is that they went too far with it and did it so thoroughly and made me not interested in anything they could possible do in the last installment. Frankly, Star Wars is now over for me. I guess I'm killing the past just like the movie instructed. The past was just the thing that kept me coming to see what would happen to the characters I was interested in. Those characters are no more, and the new characters couldn't be more blank or uninspiring. They had two movies to get any of Ren, Rey, Poe, Finn or Snoke interesting, and they managed none. [Obi-wan] Well done! [/Obi-wan]
Next time the screenwriters get the writer's urge to deconstruct something in plots, make sure there's only one or two things to deconstruct, and elaborate and execute those selected points well, now apparently an extinct skill. Also, remember to have that little thing called plot which carries the movie and consider any derailment from it very carefully. It's amazing that the best action movie of the decade is Dredd 3D, and it happens in a single, albeit large building, and doesn't deconstruct anything. It doesn't need to. It has a simple plot that is just executed to the point of perfection while the characters all make sense in their contexts. The art style is also very unique, including several grotesque injuries happening in bright saturation colored slow-mo drug enhanced scenes.
Also, Hollywood generally has to up their game with sword fighting scenes. The cutting is all over the place, making it unclear who is doing what and what's the impact. Make the god damn camera stay in place for more than 2 seconds!