Following it learned that Star Wars: The Last Jedi tanked big time in China, now the reasons are trickling out, which mirror a lot of fans worldwide and here in the United States.
Sixth Tone has a rundown of China’s reaction to Star Wars: The Last Jedi where it’s mentioned the Chinese audience weren’t at all happy with the movie and think it to be an insult to intelligence.
It’s pointed out that a Chinese popular review site (similar to Rotten Tomatoes) gives Star Wars: The Last Jedi a weak 7.3 based on 43,000 reviews, with the most up-voted review having complained that “the whole film really insults the IQ of its audience,” and the review questions how the universe could possibly be ruled by such an incompetent Galactic Empire: “In Star Wars, it seems only Darth Vader had a brain — it’s such a shame he’s already dead.”
It’s noted that Star Wars: The Last Jedi also failed to be among the trending topics on China’s Twitter-like Weibo social network.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi had a measly $28.7 million opening in China, which is a lot lower than Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($52 million) and even lower than the standalone Star Wars: Rogue One movie not a part of the trilogies ($30 million).
Chinese fans also echo sentiments about the direction of Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker:
Wang and Chen both described the new film as visually appealing but riddled with issues such as atypical behavior from established characters. Luke Skywalker was particularly disappointing to Wang, who felt that the character’s brooding behavior didn’t jibe with the resilience and fearless optimism of the young Luke he had come to know from the original trilogy.
Our own review for Star Wars: The Last Jedi offered: The basics of focused storytelling are being woefully neglected. Simply throwing together an amalgam of stuff into the production machine doesn’t actually generate Everlasting Gobstoppers. The Last Jedi’s nature as a Frankenstein’s monster of corporate mass production featuring as many politically correct bullet points to be as sellable to as many demographics as possible for their own sake rather than for the sake of the story is as true as the sun.
