Pyongyang, April 1st 2019 

In a development sure to add fuel to the fire of Star Wars debates worldwide, the DPRK today proclaimed, after mammoth 20+ hour sessions of Star Wars marathons by top government officials, that ‘The Last Jedi is by far the best of all the Star Wars movies’.

Top general Ha Wing Yu-On, who had never seen a Star Wars movie before the marathon, was reported to have stated that “though the Ewoks in ‘Return of the Jedi’ were a fine example of the socialist underdog struggle against imperialist capitalist aggressors,  the whole song bit in Jabba’s Palace really soured the mood for me. And why was Darth Vader suddenly all young again at the end?”

The DPRK officials who attended the screening only had access to the 1997 special edition releases, rather than the objectively superior original cuts.

When asked why he felt The Last Jedi was the best, Yu-On said he felt that the movie “perfectly encapsulated the reality of the socialist struggle against bourgeois norms and values, as represented by the Republic constantly being dogged by an enemy which, let’s face it, should have been out of the picture after the end of Jedi.” He also claimed that the scene where Luke drinks green milk was a “rousing callback to the Tatooine homestead in A New Hope, which represented the agrarian idyll of a true communist utopia before the imperialist dogs of the Empire ruined it for everyone.”

Yu-On also had nothing but praise for the contentious casino sequence, which he claimed “an apt analogy for the decadent excesses of endgame capitalism.”

The newest entries in the Star Wars canon have been hotly debated since their release, with some fans in particular overreacting and claiming that the Prequel Trilogy was actually better than we all remember. Yu-On scoffed at this suggestion.

“I mean you’ve got this thrilling space opera with laser samurai (death to the Japanese aggressor) and intergalactic smugglers and evil empires (death to the US imperialist aggressor) and you suddenly make it about taxes and some kid pouting about Sand People and why his master is so mean? I mean what was all that nonsense about sand in Clones? Ewan MacGregor pretty much single-handedly kept those movies afloat, and they still suck.”

Asked who the best character was in The Last Jedi, Yu-On mulled it over before replying: “Probably Supreme Commander Snoke if I’m being honest with you. Kim Dae Woo, who was sitting next to me, kept moaning that we had no backstory to him and he just appeared out of nowhere, but was anyone complaining when Palpatine did the same in the Original Trilogy?”

The DPRK plans to next tackle the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe in a two-day binge.