You know there is a strong divergence of opinion when "professional" movie reviewers almost universally praise the latest Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi, while ordinary reviewers give the film about a 5 out of 10 rating, which is to say not very good.

Warning: spoilers ahead.

Disney, eager to make back the four billion dollars it paid George Lucas for the Star Wars franchise, started cranking out new Star Wars films with The Force Awakens.  The Last Jedi is the sequel to The Force Awakens.

1) It features a perfectly diverse cast of protagonists, except for white men.  The film stars Daisy Ridley as a female version of Luke Skywalker from the original trilogy, a humble nobody from a desert planet who has a strong connection to "The Force."  John Boyega plays Finn, a black American Stormtrooper, who joins the rebels, because black people are no longer allowed to be villains in films.  Gwendolin Christie plays "Captain Phasma," the first female Stormtrooper, who wears chrome armor and speaks in the soothing tones of magazine subscription telemarketers.  Oscar Isaac plays Poe Dameron, a Aispanic X-Wing pilot.  Kelly Marie Tran plays Rose, an Asian rebel fighter.  Notice a pattern here?

The only white protagonist in the film is Luke Skywalker, and he dies at the end of the film.  Han Solo, the "other white meat" from the original film, was killed in The Force Awakens.  With their deaths, there are exactly zero white male protagonists left in the Star Wars universe.  Note that I said "protagonists."  Adam Driver and Domhnall Gleeson play the villains, and they are white men.  It seems that in the Star Wars universe, the only roles left for white men to play are those that were traditionally reserved for British actors.

2) The film is without drama.  It feels as though the writers went out of their way to eliminate the mysteries of The Force Awakens.  One of them was the identity of Rey's parents.  There had been speculation she was related to Luke Skywalker (or, more likely, Obi-Wan Kenobi).  It turns out that Rey's parents were nobodies.  One source of a potentially interesting storyline was tossed out.

Then the main villain, Leader Snoke (played by Andy Serkis, a – you guessed it – white man), is killed midway in the film by Adam Driver's Kylo Ren.  Snoke had been built up as a mysterious, powerful Force-user in The Force Awakens.  Here we find out nothing of his past or his powers.  He is simply killed off, as if the writers had lost interest in him.

Then the "Boba Fett" villain, Captain Phasma, is killed by Finn easily.  Rather too easily.  How can she be an effective villain...when she never does anything villainous?

With Snoke dead, the Empire is now ruled by Kylo Ren, a character who acts like an upset teenager.

In short, the mysteries of the protagonists and the antagonists were shortchanged, and any dramatic potential was left unexplored.  But the film does have nonstop mindless action!

3) The film kicks the original Star Wars in the face.  By the end of this film, combined with the last one, Han Solo is killed by his own son, Leia bitterly divorced Han and was forced to suffer through his death, and Luke Skywalker died a lonely death on the "Ireland Island" planet after a life spent living alone in deep regret.  What a terrible ending for the big three from the original films!

Contrast that with the ending of Return of the Jedi, where Han and Leia are in love, and Luke is a super-powerful Jedi, and they are celebrating with the local chapter of the Northern California Gay Ewok chorale.  That was a happy ending.  Skip ahead to this film, and you find out that they all lived terribly unhappy lives after that.  That's unsettling for fans of the original film.

More than that, this film seems to reject the idea of the Jedi entirely.  Luke has become a bitter old man who throws his lightsaber away dismissively and hates the Jedi ways.  Luke even gets together with Yoda and burns the book of Jedi knowledge.  It's that scene more than any other that screams out as if to say all the past movies featuring Jedi have been discredited.  Here's the actor Mark Hamill's comments on the way his character was written:

I at one point had to say to [the director] Rian, "I pretty much fundamentally disagree with every choice you've made for this character. Now, having said that, I have gotten it off my chest, and my job now is to take what you've created and do my best to realize your vision."

With the Jedi discredited, the big three having terrible lives, and the Empire run by a moody emo kid, the ideas of the original Star Wars seem to have been intentionally dragged through the dirt to be replaced with...what?  A perfectly balanced multicultural cast fighting CGI battles with enemies who have all the depth of characters from the Star Wars Holiday Special.  How the mighty have fallen.

Ed Straker is the senior writer at Newsmachete.com.