Winston Smith

I didn’t care about the main character until my missus told me she was Eleven from Stranger Things. So I started rooting for her. But then she was thrown down a blimmin deep chasm, bashing into horizontally growing trees on the way down and slamming into the chasm floor with lethal velocity, and survived. There were a lot of laughs along the way. Like the scene where Eleven’s dad is refusing to call out for her to come out of hiding, but is calling out “Can you hear me?” And she’s right there the whole time. Then Eleven and the dragon sneak around a column like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. The best part was when Eleven met her recently stabbed stepmom after escaping from the dragon’s den, then takes her stepmom’s horse, leaving her stabbed and alone on the side of a mountain, and rides back into the dragon’s den to speed run the levels again. The movie had an old Sierra RPG feel to it, which I liked. It was like King’s Quest, but without the ability to play it yourself. I don’t know. It was a bad movie but I tend to enjoy bad movies. If you can watch it on 2X speed then you should. But I don’t know if that’s possible on Netflix.

Perhaps the funniest Star Wars flick yet, at least in the first half. There were many painful interactions between Rey and the guy from the Evil Dead films with Corporal Friendzone constantly trying to rooster block while getting completely ignored. Still, at least he’s out of his coma. The scenes with Alan Driver were as profound as said actor’s nose - I would score the film an even ten if only those scenes were included and all others cut. But alas they killed him off. Then did it again. Fortunately Miss “Did Nothing Good for the Stereotypes of Drivers that Look Like Me” was hardly featured. They literally told her she had to stay behind. I thought that was great. She was later seen puffing during a full-on battle scene on top of a star destroyer - dunno if it was in the vacuum of space or not, didn’t care by that stage. The ending was almost brilliant. Leia left her lightsabre for “the one who would be the Jedi she couldn’t be”. So Rey took that, and Luke’s one as well and went off to confront her granddad. Two lightsabres, that’ll be handy, right? Then someone mentioned something about the only hope being at the place where Rey was at that time. So of course we all thought they meant Rey was the only hope. But, in an absolutely brilliant twist, which had me almost off my seat, we suddenly realised that Rey was going to pass Kylo Ren his mother’s sword because HE was that last Jedi Leia had talked about earlier. It was going to be Rey’s last pious act before she struck down her granddad and turned to the dark side leaving a redeemed Ben to fight the good fight for the side of the Jedi. But that didn’t happen. Nothing good happened after that. Not until the end. I enjoyed the preview for Jo Jo Rabbit at the start. That looks like a good film.