Deeply divisive, “The Last Jedi” is a great Star Wars film. But it isn’t your Star Wars. You’ll love it, or hate it.

Lets not muck about : Rian Johnson has done a phenomenal job here – and delivered the best official canon “Star Wars” film in a very very long time ; probably in 37 years. This film delivers surprises, it delivers what the story needs, and it delivers them with flair. But some of you really won’t like it.

The stakes are high. Major characters die. Mythologies are destroyed. What you think about Star Wars is only .. half of it. It’s all here though. It’s all on the surface, if you know where to look. The key lines, which are by no means subtle, are clear.

“We are what they grow beyond.”

“Let the past die.”

“This won’t go the way you think.”

If nothing else, “The Last Jedi” is not the Star Wars film you wanted, but the one you needed. The one that moves beyond the frankly insular world of the Skywalker family being the font of all things Forcey, and the film that opens Star Wars up to almost infinite possibility. The plot is straightforward, and the presentation generally unshowy, but it drives the film at a pace and frequently dodges either the obvious, or the lazy ‘surprise’, both so beloved of turgid plotting. This isn’t the poorly written nonsense of Damon Lindelof, but a dense, fully thought out tale of what happens when you cannot control other people. You think you know what you want from Star Wars, you think it’s a bunch of lazily plotted stop points like a James Bond film, but this film shows clearly that other people have different ideas. Even down to the fact that Kylo Ren takes a very different path from his parents, or Luke does what he needs to do and not what you think he should do, remember these characters aren’t at your service. They are doing what makes sense to them ; sometimes that is illogical, and sometimes it isn’t what you would choose.

The film opens speedily with a pacey and exhilarating setpiece as good as anything from the George Lucas era : it continues at pace with some truly eyeopening setpieces, including – about three-quarters of the way through, an incredible suicide mission that actually brought gasps to the audience. But more importantly, characters learn through the course of this film, and neither Leia, nor Luke, are the same people we remember from the original films ; they are older, wiser, and in some cases, have learnt from their previous mistakes that doing the same thing twice will only give you the same results. Would you do the same things at 57 you did at 22?

Poe Dameron is played cockily by Oscar Isaacs – and whilst you may have thought Poe was a hero, here he most definitely isn’t. Han Solo plied the same stock-in-trade, the arrogant flyboy with an ego his skills can’t cash. But whereas Han probably had The Force guiding him, and ignorantly ascribed his successes to being supermegaawesome, Poe keeps coming up with stupid, one-in-a-million-shots but they often blow up in his face. His opening salvo manages to destroy most of the fleet and is a moderate success, but his standard idea is always to run head first into battle against impossible odds and somehow it’ll work out. In this film, Poe is clearly a representative for the unthinking warhawk and tends to be out-gunned intellectually by everyone around him. It’s refreshing to see a lead whose approach of Bomb Everything You Can often goes dreadfully wrong.

Rey’s arc is more obviously a standard hero role, but even in this case, she is learning who she is. Makes her own decisions, and has her expectations and hopes dashed.

Perhaps the biggest surprise here is how Star Wars still operates ; rather than the pointless explanations we are used to in other franchises, here, the story is told simply ; we know what we need to know to tell the story. You might think you care about some of the back story – but you don’t really. And, as is shown many times, just because we think characters should behave a certain way doesn’t mean they will. We don’t necessarily need the backstory behind certain key parts of the Universe ; it won’t make the story better to understand how Han and Leia split up. We are where we are, and we need to navigate our way from here.

Luke tried to make the better world, and did a terrible job of it. Such a terrible job, that he retreated from everything for fear of making it even worse. Obi Want took a similar path, and Luke saw the effect that had.

I must admit, there are parts of this film I didn’t completely love : there’s probably 10 minutes of unnecessary material, and the part Phasma plays in this seems a waste. The sequence on Cato Bight seems to unnecessarily shoehorn in prequel slapstick and shininess where it feels like a poor fit for the rest of the film. Benecio Del Toro’s role feels miscast. They’re running out of opportunities to include Lando in this, where perhaps there was a prime opportunity for him to appear. The ending makes a sort of sense on an emotional level consistent with the characters as they find their paths and powers. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this is the best Star Wars canon film in a very long time, easily better than the servile Fanfiction of The Force Awakens and its box of mysteries that had no answers : JJ Abrams facile storytelling in that is treated with the contempt it deserves, and the mysteries are easily destroyed ; Snoke, Rey’s parentage, Luke’s missing years, are all given the answers we need – not the ones we want. Star Wars is a bigger and better world now, and the new generation have grown up, become adult, and are starting to take different decisions to the ones we might have done. The elders have been grown beyond, and this isn’t going to go the way you think. The Star Wars universe is a bigger world now, and the future is wider : The Force doesn’t just inhabit the Skywalkers, and the mistakes of the past have been learnt. Bold, brave, unexpected, and exciting.

However, the big problem here is that the Star Wars Film Universe is much bigger than other peoples expectations of it, which is also what the other films are being hated for : "This Star Wars Doesn't Do What I Want!!!"

It isn't Your Star Wars, or My Star Wars, anymore. It belongs to everyone.