Click PART ONE, PART TWO, PART THREE or PART FOUR if you want to revisit an earlier chapter.
One last bit of trivia for you: The Last Jedi was released in 2017, just in time for a couple of major anniversaries. It was the 40th anniversary of the original Star Wars, which started this whole franchise, and the 30th anniversary of Spaceballs, the second Star Wars film I ever saw (after Return of the Jedi).
40 years is a ruby anniversary, so maybe that explains all the red in the movie and the marketing. It's like how Doctor Who switched back to the classic diamond logo for its 60 year diamond anniversary last year. I've been trying to remember if Star Trek did anything similar for its 50th anniversary in 2016, but there's not much evidence anyone was even aware of it. In fact, the way Star Trek Beyond was marketed, it's more likely they would've been celebrating 15 years of The Fast and the Furious.
There will be SPOILERS below as I'm giving the whole movie a bit of a review. Maybe I'll still like it after 7 years of reflection and watching YouTube videos hating on it, maybe I won't. You'll have to keep reading to find out.
Sometimes I look at the things that people have been criticising and I wonder why it didn't work this time. I mean, here are some of the complaints I've been seeing:
- "Luke just tosses his lightsaber away, showing no respect." - He does the same in Return of the Jedi.
- "Luke wouldn't be hiding away in exile while the galaxy is threatened." - Obi-Wan and Yoda did.
- "Rey is strong with the Force without being part of a Jedi bloodline." - Same as Obi-Wan and Yoda.
- "The hyped up Sith villain gets sliced in half before we learn who they are." - Just like Darth Maul.
- "The heroes go on a long chase and a side mission to a city that ultimately achieves
nothing and only makes things worse." - That's the plot of Empire Strikes Back.
Something can be good in one movie and bad in another due to context or execution or even just the mood the viewer is in when they reach that part of the film. If they're not on the film's wavelength they're not going to be receptive to what it's saying. But why wouldn't a Star Wars fan be on this movie's wavelength? What did the film do to make so many people turn on it?
- Tone - Cringy humour, the feel is off.
- Believability - The bombing run, Mary Poppins Leia, the space chase, etc.
- Payoff to Mysteries - Snoke turned out to be no one, Rey turned out to be no one.
- Disrespect to Star Wars - Luke tried to murder his student, he says the Jedi were rubbish.
- Confused Messages - Is the film saying 'kill the past'? If Holdo's sacrifice is good, why is Finn's sacrifice bad?
- Structure - Too long, Canto Bight is pointless, it resolves too much to set up the next movie.
- "Woke" "Mary Sue" Characters - Rey, Holdo and Rose are perfect and right, and everyone else sucks.
I think the first thing about The Last Jedi that rubs people the wrong way is its vibe and sense of humour. If Luke had thrown that lightsaber off the cliff in despair it would've felt very different to the unexpected anti-climax of him tossing it over his shoulder. Instead of showing his pain, the movie went for bathos: breaking a serious mood with surprise comedy. It's not very Star Wars.
A New Hope took cheesy adventure serials of the '40s and combined them with gritty '70s realism, so even though people were swinging across chasms accompanied by a shamelessly heroic orchestral score, you could still buy into the world. It was only as absurd as it had to be to enable swashbuckling escapades in a world of spaceships and magic powers, that's why the more grounded Andor TV series doesn't feel laughably dark for a Star Wars story.
Star Wars has been mixing comedy and drama from the first scene of C-3PO bitching at R2-D2 while their ship was being boarded by Stormtroopers, but the comedy in the first movie generally came from the bickering between characters, rather than things they were saying to get a laugh from the audience. Sure characters like Han and Vader were known to make a few quips, but Luke and Leia were absolutely sincere for the whole trilogy. So it's jarring when Luke's saying lines like "Alright, that is pretty much nowhere," and Leia is joking about how she's changed her hair. That's not their character, or at least it wasn't when we knew them.
The original trilogy was a product of the 70s and 80s, but its storytelling was a throwback to an earlier era, before the postmodern cynicism of its time, so it deliberately avoided irony and genre-savvy protagonists. A New Hope doesn't deconstruct pulp sci-fi adventures, it just... puts them in a blender. Sure it had a sassy princess with a laser rifle to spice things up, but at its heart it was a straightforward story of a young hero who starts as a nobody on a sand planet, learns that they have special powers, and ends up helping to blow up the death ball to save the rebels.
Unfortunately, that was also the plot of The Force Awakens, so fans started to suspect that this sequel trilogy was just going to be a retread of the original trilogy. Rian Johnson could have stuck to that template here or just told a completely new story, but instead he decided to get clever and play with expectations. The Last Jedi is thinking about The Empire Strikes Back all the time and it knows that you are too.
I actually love that kind of writing, building expectations in order to subvert them is solid storytelling technique, but people can struggle to get immersed in a world when they can see the hand of the author. Plus the movie makes the mistake of building expectations for things the audience wants, without giving them a prize of equal value after it's revealed that the box is empty.
One thing a lot of people wanted was to see Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master, absolutely kicking ass. This was it, the last chance, and we didn't get it. Force Awakens already crushed everyone's hopes of seeing him running a Jedi academy and now this gives us a broken hero who saw the prequel trilogy and started recording YouTube video essays on why the Jedi were the bad guys all along. Though on the opposite side, some people were fascinated by the idea of finally ending the Sith and Jedi and moving Star Wars somewhere new, and we didn't get that either! No uncomplicated heroism for one audience, no complete deconstruction for the other audience.
I suppose part of the problem with the film is that it's got so much to say and takes so many turns that I had to make notes to keep it all straight. Instead of having one or two clear themes it keeps laying them on.
THE MESSAGES
This ties into Kylo Ren's message of letting the past die, which Luke is also trying to do. The two characters want a clean slate, a reboot, but after Rey hears the synopsis of the old films from Luke she loads up her ship with Star Wars reference books because she's curious about the franchise and wants to get into it. So despite Yoda's glee at blowing up a tree he knew was empty, we know that killing the past is bad. Learn from it instead. Was that made clear enough in the film? Probably not.
Then there's a theme of sacrificing people for something that matters, which gets kind of muddled due to what sacrifices are made. Paige dies to destroy the fleet-killer ship, risking the cruiser in the process, and Leia says that was bad. But maybe that stopped the fleet from getting killed during the chase? There's a bit of a question mark there. Later Holdo dies to protect the shuttles, and that's portrayed as unambiguously good. But then Finn sacrifices himself to protect the base, which is bad. At least according to Rose, who sacrifices herself to stop him. And that's good?
That theme gets even more complicated because poor Finn was only sacrificing himself because he'd learned the message that some causes are worth joining and completed his arc of becoming Rebel scum.
Anyway, Rose gives us the message that heroes need to save what they love instead of fighting what they hate. But the first thing she does is stun Finn so he can't run off to save Rey, then at end of the film she rams into his ski speeder so he can't save the Resistance. Both sides of his arc she comes and stops him!
I could list a whole bunch of problems with the fleet chase, but one issue is that it means the heroes are on a deadline, and that means you kind of want them to just get on with things. Even at the end when Rey and Finn take a moment to stop and hug, they haven't escaped the First Order yet. There are Stormtroopers right there on the other side of the tunnel, so they need to move! Hurry up guys, HURRY UP!
While I'm mentioning things that are bad, I should talk about...
THE BAD
The trouble with Holdo is that the movie really puts in the work to make us hate her so that we're on Poe's side when he comes up with his secret plan and ultimately mutinies against her. Then it pulls a swerve, saying that she was in the right all along and we were wrong for not trusting her blindly! But it doesn't really give us a shift in perspective to let us see her actions in a different light.
The film pulls off the opposite twist with DJ just fine, his choices make perfect sense in retrospect, but when I rewatched the movie I still thought that Holdo handled Poe badly. If it had been Rose or Finn that was bothering her, then yeah, I could see her being kind of dismissive, but despite his demotion Captain Dameron was still representing all the people on the ship that needed more reassurance and she chose not to give him any. I know she didn't want her secret plan to get leaked, but look at how that worked out!
It's frustrating because this is a movie where other characters are learning from failure in order to do better, while her choices are never examined.
Finn's journey mirrors Rey's as he gets an education on how things are, faces his nemesis, and ultimately commits to the cause. But on this rewatch I was paying attention to what he does in the film, and he mostly just falls over. Canto Bight has him learning about the injustices of the galaxy and getting a taste of rebellion, it's crucial to his arc, but it would've played out exactly the same if he'd been Rose's imaginary friend. He never has to adapt to situations and overcome obstacles, or contribute to their mission in any way. In fact, that's a problem with the movie overall.
On Canto Bight basically all they do is get stunned in the casino, walk out of an open cell door, convince the kids to release the fathiers, and then let an action scene happen around them. When Finn fights Phasma at the end he walks backwards for 30 seconds while they smack sticks against each other, then he falls over and wins, the end.
Also, the movie gives Finn a character arc but it doesn't really explore who he is as a character. He just goes from 'don't join' to 'join'. The dude's an ex-Stormtrooper, there's got to be something interesting to mine there beyond his knowledge of First Order bases gained from mopping their corridors! Of course, this is only a problem if you're assuming that Finn is a protagonist like Rey, but I think that's what we were led to expect and want.
However, there was plenty I liked about the movie as well, including...
THE GOOD
I have to admit, I'm kind of with Hamill on this one. I'm not into this trend of taking fun, proactive, inspiring heroes from the past and making it so their life fell apart right after the happy ending. Sure they usually rise again by the end (often just before dying), but that moment of catharsis isn't worth the cost in my opinion. Let my favourite characters be happy! Bring Mara Jade back!
Of course there's nothing wrong with giving a character a tragic story, but it's wise for a writer to take into account the combo multiplier from the audience's existing emotional investment. When Paige dies it's a bit sad, when Holdo dies it's dramatic, but when we learn Luke isn't hanging out with his friends anymore, that's a real gut punch. And when a film comes along after 34 years and starts being mean to our hero, of course we're going to resent the film for that.
But it was The Force Awakens that burned down the temple and stranded Luke on an island (apparently inspired by George Lucas' story treatment), so I can only judge The Last Jedi on how it played the hand it was dealt. And honestly, I don't hate the idea of a traumatised Luke exiling himself because he came to believe that ending the Jedi was the heroic thing to do. Count Dooku, Darth Vader and Kylo Ren were all fallen Jedi, it keeps happening, and the consequences are always horrifying, so the guy does have a point.
He could do better at communicating it though.
I really like Rey to be honest, I think she's a good protagonist. People say that she never loses fights, she never suffers consequences, she doesn't have an identity, she didn't earn her power, and so on. A lot of that's kind of true, there's a reason why recent Star Wars series go out of their way to make it clear that their super-capable protagonist has been well trained. But this is a story about a confused nuclear weapon and a man who's scared he might accidentally arm her, so it makes sense that she's incredibly dangerous and a bit of a blank slate. She starts off thinking that Luke Skywalker is this trilogy's hero, then she thinks its Kylo Ren, and it's only at the end that she realises that it's her, and her joy while saving the day is subversion of Luke's journey in Empire that I can get behind. Though she's going to have to study those books and learn how to do some flips if she wants to step into Luke's shoes. The dude loved doing flips.
In fact, I like basically everyone in this film (not Holdo). The film turned some people against Rose by having her crash into Finn at the end, but as a character she's really likeable. Kylo Ren is always more compelling than he probably should be thanks to Adam Driver's performance. John Boyega delivers Finn's lines with a conviction they might not all deserve. Poe is more flawed than he was in Force Awakens, but that's a side effect of being a real character now. Man, even Snoke is great in this movie!
And then there's BB-8, who I loved in Force Awakens... that dude did not deserve what this film did to him. Everyone talks about Rey being a Mary Sue or Holdo's hyperspace collision ruining the setting, but where are the 5 hour video essays about him being a Jar Jar Binks all over the place? He's the worst part of the movie for me.
Man, even when I'm praising this movie I can't help but take the piss out of it. I still really like the film though... I think.
RATING
The more you love Star Wars and the more invested you get, the harder it is to accept a movie that brings a hero back to destroy their life, punishes fan speculation, and more importantly gets the vibe wrong. Though I've already endured Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace and C-3PO in Attack of the Clones, so I've been taught to expect and tolerate a bit of awkward comedy in my Star Wars. Plus I was fortunate enough to come out of The Force Awakens not giving one singular fuck about Snoke or Rey's parents, so I wasn't disappointed in the slightest by this film's reveals.
In fact, I'm into things like Angel, Thor Ragnarok and Steven Moffat's Doctor Who, so I was inclined to give the smart-ass subversions a pass. As much as Last Jedi's attempts to be clever sometimes trip it up, I can respect that was an effort was made to give fans some actual surprises. And I appreciated that the film deliberately derailed a story that had been heading straight toward Return of the Jedi 2.0 and instead set up the third movie to be something new. Though maybe planning out all three films at the same time so that they worked together as a trilogy would've been the smartest move!
I can't rate the film as high as I would've done in the past as I've really started to notice all the little annoyances that annoy me, but I'm going to give The Last Jedi a fairly positive...
7/10
COMING SOON
Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, Star Trek: Discovery reaches the end of its five year mission with Life, Itself.
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