8 Reasons Why ‘The Last Jedi’ Is the Best Star Wars Movie

4 days ago 8

Published Feb 23, 2026, 6:31 PM EST

Jeremy has more than 2300 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
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The Last Jedi is a Star Wars movie. Webster's Dictionary defines a movie as “a recording of moving images that tells a story and that people watch.” Further, Webster's Dictionary defines a star as “a natural luminous body visible in the sky especially at night.” And, finally, Webster’s Dictionary defines a war as “a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations.” Presumably, wars would thereby be “open and declared armed hostile conflicts,” what with it being pluralized and stuff. We can use these very useful definitions to begin to understand what The Last Jedi is.

It’s the eighth movie about a war – or wars – in – or around – stars. Episode VIII. But Rogue One was released before it, as its own thing. People don’t agree about Star Wars generally. People do usually like Rogue One. People really like Andor, which came after – but is set before – Rogue One. But Andor is a show. We can’t talk about shows here. This is the movie room. Shows are also recordings of moving images that tell stories that people watch, so you can see how some confusion might arise. Speaking of confusion, there’s a lot of it when it comes to The Last Jedi. I am very smart and incredibly stupid at the same time, and I’m here to explain things, or make them worse. Nothing is easy. Life is hard. You can look up the Webster's Dictionary definitions for “nothing,” “life,” “hard,” “incredibly,” and “stupid” in your own time, if you so desire. And maybe there are more than eight reasons why it's great, or maybe it's just cute to cite eight reasons for Episode VIII. Ponder.

8 Grumpy Old Men

I am grumpy sometimes, not old, and a man, so two out of three ain’t bad, and might go some way to explaining why I like Luke “The Gromp” Skywalker, as he is in The Last Jedi. If I reach old age (maybe I'm already there; if I were a grumpy woman instead of a grumpy man, I'd be six years too old for Leonardo DiCaprio, after all), it’ll be three out of three, and I’ll have to contact Letterboxd and ask them if they can introduce six out of five star ratings that might not make mathematical sense, but will have to become a thing, just so I can adequately acknowledge how much more I feel Luke resonates with me, as a (1) grumpy (2) old (3) man.

Luke yeets his lightsaber, acts like a jerk to Rey, then saves the day without doing anything physical, before yeeting himself out of the world because he’s tired. It’s wonderful. But nah, genuinely, it is moving. It’s a fine exit for the character, there are reasons why he turns his back on certain values he once held, and then in the end, he is a hero. And in being a hero and rising to the occasion, there is an acknowledgment that what he did – and how he acted – was kind of wrong. He finds that spark again and has a more cathartic death than fellow grumpy old man, Han Solo, who f**king died in The Force Awakens.

7 Adam Driver Doesn't Have to Wear a Mask

Adam Driver has an interesting face, and he uses it well whenever he acts. If you didn’t like the last entry using the word “yeet,” then you're also going to dislike this entry using the word “vibe,” but Driver’s vibe is interesting and unique. Adam Viber. He’s particularly magnetic in The Last Jedi, and Rian Johnson understood this well, writing in a scene early on where Driver’s Kylo Ren treats his helmet in a manner even worse than Luke treated his lightsaber.

Even with wearing the helmet a bunch of the time, Adam(n he’s a good actor) Driver gave a memorable performance in The Force Awakens, but he’s better here, and you see his face more, so… but like, even the people who don’t like this movie might begrudgingly admit Adam Driver is good in it. You might have to get Jack Bauer to literally torture such a confession out of them, if they're particularly strong in their anti-The Last Jedi feelings, but you'll get there eventually, dammit. Secure the perimeter first. Jury’s out on whether they’ll also be able to tell you where the bomb is. The bomb actually came out a few months after The Last Jedi.

6 Now Snoke's Just Somebody That I Used to Know

The Force Awakens said, “Hey, here’s a new bad guy, and his name is Snoke,” and then a couple of years later, or whenever Rian Johnson wrote/made The Last Jedi, Johnson went, “Nah.” Snoke gets sliced in half in one of those “subverted expectations” moments that people like to complain about, but this was one of the better ones The Last Jedi deployed. Snoke was a bit of a dull big bad, anyway.

It also led to the best action scene in the movie, which does have its flaws if you go frame-by-frame and analyze it, but the same can be said for a surprising number of action scenes. That throne room fight looks and sounds great in the moment, and works as maybe the high point excitement-wise of the whole movie. Well, that or the Star Destroyer being destroyed at lightspeed, which happens around the same time. That was quite the moment, too, and The Last Jedi is good enough that such a scene doesn’t even get its own spot in this amazing and objectively correct ranking. How ‘bout that.

5 The Lack of BackstoR(e)y

Rey’s backstory, and the idea of her parentage being related to someone significant within the Star Wars universe, was cut down about as swiftly and effectively as Snoke himself. No one saw a certain reveal about parents coming in The Empire Strikes Back, but most people consider that plot twist an all-timer, whereas the one option regarding Rey that no one seemed to see coming was rejected by some.

Hey, Rey gets to be her own person. Her not being defined by people who existed before she did is kind of inspiring, and it’s enforced by the film’s ending, where Luke dies but what he stood for lives on, and anyone could be another Luke, and blah, blah, blah. It’s an interesting place for Episode IX to go, if they ever make it. Speaking of intriguing sequel hooks and the future of Star Wars…

4 Sets Up an Intriguing Sequel We May Get Some Day

It’s weird, you sometimes see people talk about The Last Jedi as if it’s part of a trilogy – some even call it the sequel trilogy – but then the question must be asked: where is the ninth episode? It's more of a sequel duology. Disney has milked Star Wars since, in the world of TV and stuff, but it was weirdly restrained to have The Force Awakens in 2015, and then The Last Jedi in 2017, and then… nothing in 2019? Craziness. Blasphemy. Madness.

At least we can now theorize about what this potential movie could be called. The Pies of Skywalker? Rey could open up a bakery on the planet of Jakku. That would be fun; a nice change of pace. It would be better than Disney doing something silly with Episode IX like, oh, say, having Emperor Palpatine return. Somehow. Can you imagine? At least The Last Jedi ends where it does, putting a nice bow on the Skywalker Saga, for now. The ride provided by Episodes I through VIII is not perfect, but at least a terrible Episode IX does not exist. We should count our blessings wherever we can!

3 The Casino Sub-Plot Ends

Rose Tico and Finn talking at a Rebel base in Star Wars- The Last Jedi

There’s some time spent on a casino town in The Last Jedi, and it’s not great, but it takes up a surprisingly short amount of time, considering the extent to which people complain about it. And yeah, I’m complaining about people complaining, and maybe you can write a comment complaining about my complaining about people complaining, and then I can respond and complain about your complaining about my complaining about people complaining, and on it'll go, endless like Star Wars seems to be.

I’m complaining about people complaining, and maybe you can write a comment complaining about my complaining about people complaining, and then I can respond and complain about your complaining about my complaining about people complaining.

There’s an argument to be made that Star Wars shouldn’t go on and on the way it keeps going on, but while Star Wars might well be unending, that casino town part of The Last Jedi does mercifully conclude. And even if you think this is a silly thing to be positive about, it’s like two scenes in a movie that goes for about 2.5 hours. Your steak's well-cooked, the serving of fries adequately salted, and the sauce top-notch, but you don’t like the look of the lettuce on the side of the plate. Just eat around/ignore it, you coward.

2 There Was the Cinematography

The Last Jedi looks nice. There was the cinematography. It uses color well and just looks good, you know? And expensive movies should look good, but not all of them do look good, and so unfortunately, we live in a world where we have to celebrate a $300+ million movie looking like it cost $300+ million. But whatever. Better than it not looking like a $300+ million movie.

Some of that has to come down to Rian Johnson being an arguably better director than he is a writer (though I do like most of the screenplays he’s written), and also, cinematographer Steve Yedlin, who has served as such for all seven of Johnson’s feature films to date. The Last Jedi is the best-looking Star Wars movie of the Disney era to date, and if you want to argue otherwise, you're welcome to, I guess.

1 Money

Even if you hate money, you like money. You have to like money. The Last Jedi made money. It didn’t make all the money, but it made some of it for sure. It made enough of it. And The Last Jedi does not like money, nor greed, but it exists, at least in part, to make money. It’s a mess of a movie and a masterpiece. It hates and loves money.

I hate the concept of money, but like having money. I also need money. The Last Jedi is not in theaters anymore, so it doesn’t really make money like it used to, but it still probably generates some money for Disney and whatever, and its existence as something that can be written about means it generates money for writers. I’m a writer. If you’re reading this literal final sentence of the article, it means you have engaged sufficiently with the whole thing, and so you have contributed to me making a little money, so thank you (and if you didn’t read this final sentence and have already written an angry comment about some other part of the article, then that’s also engagement, and that too leads to money… ka-ching).

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