I’ve written perhaps a little too much about Star Wars: The Last Jedi, especially considering I have yet to see it.  Further, unless I somehow find some free time, I suspect when I do catch it, if at all, it will be when it hits home video.

Even though I’m not a huge Star Wars fan, as I’ve noted far too many times before, the reality is that as a sci-fi and movie fan I’m fascinated with the stuff that is popular -or, conversely, the stuff that hits cinemas with a massive “thud”.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (LJ from here on) as I stated before looked like it would be a “can’t miss”.  Before its release and after Disney allowed critics to publish their thoughts, the reviews were gushing.  It looked, for all intents and purposes, that this would be a hit with fans, as well.

And then the fans/regular audiences saw the film and, well, I’ve written about that before (here and here), but the bottom line remains: LJ has very sharply divided audiences.  The film, on Saturday, had an audience approval rating over at rottentomatoes.com of 57%.  Since then and as of today, Tuesday the 19th of December, that rating has further slipped to 55% positive.

Disney probably doesn’t care: The film took in a whopping $220+ million over the weekend and will no doubt earn its investment for the company (whew… wouldn’t want Disney to have to face any hardship! 😉 )

Anyway, the point of this post is that I stumbled upon this fascinating analysis of the film by Gerry Conway.  Mr. Conway, for those who may not know, was a prolific comic book writer who wrote just about every major comic book character there is.  He is most famous for writing the “Death of Gwen Stacy” story for Spider-Man and has, more recently, done considerable work in television.

Here he presents his thoughts on LJ and I have to say, its one of those analysis pieces that is so deep and insightful that either he’s dead on and the makers of the film really thought through more things than one thought were possible… or that perhaps Mr. Conway is seeing layers upon layers within this film that aren’t there:

Conway’s Corner – Star Wars: The Last Jedi

I have to admit, either way I’m fascinated by his analysis.  I think he is right in the sense that LJ is the first “Gen X” version of Star Wars and as such provides an analysis/critique of the Boomer generation which came before it in the form of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and (while he doesn’t appear in this film) Han Solo.

Having said that, I stand by the feeling that his analysis might, in the end, be a little too much…

Still, a fascinating read if you’ve got a few minutes and definite food for thought.