I would take the reverse view myself, alot of the films you mention are I think actually far more committed to delivering a feminist message, its just that because of that this message takes a form that you find more palatable since it has more depth and balance to it.
The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi to me though feel like there something more cynical, basically co opting a feminist message as a bit of a shortcut to cover for less than great writing. Rey just being "strong" as her defining trait for example rather than a character of depth or the almost total lack of depth to the Poe/Holdo plot where gender alone is pushed as a a reason.
Its a strange situation really as again I felt Rogue One last year was worthy of being mentioned with the other films you brought up, a film with a female protagonist that was actually built up as a character of depth and never fell back to cheap co opting of politics. Maybe just the people involved were more skilled or perhaps Disney are taking a different view of the "saga" and anthology films?
I think The Last Jedi is in a league quite different from the other films I listed for a number of reasons.
Rey being "strong because she is, deal with it" is something I could potentially chalk up to just bad writing in general. Bad scripts are rife with Mary Sues and Gary Stus and I guess soon there will be transgendered Mary Stus that are gifted the ability of being the best at everything just because they're so awesome.
Movies like Aliens, Working Girl and GI Jane are great because they feature not only a strong female protagonist, but a strong female villain. That's something we certainly didn't see in The Last Jedi. And that's setting aside the fact that in those movies, the protagonists actually are strong and overcome things. Demi Moore isn't gifted "being the best soldier just because" by any stretch of the imagination, nor is Melanie Griffith simply the perfect fusion of Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett in Working Girl. They work their way up, step by step, obstacle by obstacle. There are male villains, but they aren't all just cowards, retards or mustache twirling evildoers.
With something like The Terminator, the message is that woman are capable and women are important, and like the above films I listed, that women CAN achieve things. It isn't that women are better than men, that men are toxic, that women make better men than men themselves, that men need to defer to women, or any combination of these. Reese has to save Sarah, and Sarah has to save Reese. Sarah Connor develops her strengths continuously throughout Terminator 1 and Terminator 2. At the end of T1, Reese collapses and is ready to just let the Terminator finish him off, until Sarah pulls him to his feet. It isn't because men are pathetic; it's because everyone is fallible and everyone to needs to lean on somebody sometimes.
Ripley likewise develops her strengths over the course of the first two Alien films.
But what really sets the Last Jedi apart is how a new female character comes in and the existing male heroes are diminished in the service of showing how much better she is. Luke is turned into a pathetic, cowardly, child-mind-raping evil asshole, in order to make Rey better than him. Rian Johnson couldn't or wouldn't write Rey to be strong on her own merits, so he just tore Luke down to say, well at least she's better than THIS asshole. Stop calling her a Mary Sue, she beat your male hero, deal with it.
I don't know what the equivalent scenario would be elsewhere. Ripley and Connor were there from the start in their own franchises. I guess the best example would be if the Neill Blomkamp Alien 2.5 is actually made, and it's a misogynist film where a new MALE hero we've never seen before comes in and makes better decisions than Ripley all the way through, turning her into Gorman from Aliens where she fucks everything up, is a bad leader, lousy under pressure. See how good the new male hero is? We're not going to write him well, but at least he's better than Ripley, so deal with it. Kill the past. Now Alien is for MEN.
But like Star Wars, Alien was never a gender politics statement or battleground. It was just a movie filled with several interesting characters, and in the end the most capable one happened to be Ripley, a woman. Ridley Scott didn't make Tom Skerritt and Yaphet Kotto into pathetic losers to show that Ripley was better. James Cameron didn't make Michael Biehn piss his pants when he saw the Alien. He was strong, so was Lance Henriksen, so was Sigourney Weaver, so was Jenette Goldstein.
If they want Rey to be a strong character, then write her as one. But tearing everyone else down around her just makes her the tallest person in a crowd of toddlers. It doesn't make her tall.
I agree that the Poe/Holdo thing was blatant propaganda, and that the messages in The Last Jedi may have been largely marketing-driven to take advantage of current social trends. I mean, what else is the point of a purple haired admiral? But I think demonstrating that Luke is inferior to the new female hero is part of the film's intended political message, and not simply a more benign weak writing of Rey.
