I’m having a really hard time being a Star Wars fan these days.
As is the case with nearly every nerd in America, I grew up with the Star Wars franchise. Watching the original trilogy was always a family tradition around the holidays, and at some point or another I owned several Star Wars toys, blankets, apparel, and video games. I was nine years old when The Phantom Menace was released, and I rushed to the theater to see it. At nine, I loved the hell out of that movie. When Attack of the Clones was released, I bought the DVD and watched it more times than I care to admit.
By the time Revenge of the Sith hit theaters, I was 15 years old. I had seen every film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and actively sought out classics and arthouse films. I was fluent in the language of cinema, if only from consuming so much of it. Having fond memories of the entire Star Wars franchise, I had very high expectations for Episode III. The time I spent in the theater watching that movie was truly a transformative experience, but not in the pleasant way one typically waxes poetic about “transformation.” It was an absolute nightmare, and it forced me to re-evaluate the franchise and my connection to it.
Of course, I had to go back and watch the previous two films to confirm that they were superior. They were not. Each film in the prequel trilogy was utter garbage, full of masturbatory CGI, disgusting and often baffling dialog, poor pacing, and the kind of acting reserved for daytime soaps. I still enjoyed the original Star Wars trilogy, but the prequels took a serious toll on just how much I cared about the franchise as a whole. I felt duped and somewhat embarrassed, the way everyone should feel when revisiting the awful entertainment they enjoyed as children. While the prequels were traumatizing, they felt like original films rather than re-treads of Star Wars 1977.
In spite of all of this, I was still excited for the release of The Force Awakens the moment I was informed of its existence. Like a battered spouse returning to their abusive partner over and over again, I rushed back to the theater on opening night. I was two seats away from an obese, sweaty man-child, as was to be expected, and throughout the film he was reacting to every frame with gasps, claps, and the occasional squeal of joy. His unfortunately palpable enthusiasm wasn’t quite enough to completely ruin the experience, but it did serve as a painful reminder that I was watching the original Star Wars film again.
So many aspects of The Force Awakens felt beat-for-beat stolen from A New Hope, from the seedy alien bar to the entire trajectory of Rey’s character. It was more of a reboot than a continuation of the previous films, but in the spirit of excessive fan service, we were bombarded with constant unnecessary reminders of Star Wars past. Much like the prequels, in the absence of a truly compelling plot, the fact that these films exist mostly as a way to push toys on children was painfully apparent. The few original elements of The Force Awakens at the very least made it bearable, and showed some potential for future installments.
For obviously nefarious reasons, audiences were gifted with Rogue One the following year, a movie so inconsequential that I refuse to dedicated more than a single sentence to it.
These factors did not bode well for my own experience with The Last Jedi, but once again, my masochistic tendencies drew me back to the cruel mistress who had wronged me time and time again. This time, my expectations were sufficiently low. It exceeded those expectations. I’d even say it’s a fine movie.
Spoilers, for those who care.
In some ways, The Last Jedi suffers from the same tendency to revisit previous films, but not as egregiously as The Force Awakens. Episode VII chose to borrow plot points and concepts in a very sequential way, to the point of making its plot predictable. This time around, these homages occur throughout, and don’t appear in an obvious order intended to emulate the formula of another film. That said, not every instance of fan service worked for me.
The script of The Last Jedi at the very least makes an attempt to give us an intriguing plot, while still following the basic trajectory of every Star Wars film. We get a story with multiple plot threads that climax at the hour-and-a-half mark, leaving plenty of time for these to converge in an action-packed third act with its own second climax. Some may find this bothersome, but it’s too pervasive in the franchise to criticize too harshly.
The plot revolves around a scenario in which the remnants of the Rebellion are trapped on a ship, with the First Order in pursuit. If the ship doesn’t leave range of the First Order’s fleet, they’ll be obliterated. If they attempt to flee, they’ll be caught, because “for the first time ever” the First Order is able to track ships through light speed. This issue has never been raised before to my knowledge, but the film sure acts like this new technology is a major revelation. In the meantime, Rey is on an island where the jaded, grumpy old Jedi Luke Skywalker resides in exile.
As the Rebellion makes one escape attempt after another, Princess Leia is thrust into space, and uses her force magic to float back onto the ship. She remains in a coma until the final 20 or so minutes of the film, conveniently bypassing the potential need for another poorly-rendered CG Leia. With their commander incapacitated, the Rebellion must appoint a successor, and the next in the chain of command is Admiral Holdo, played by Laura Dern. Holdo spends most of the film trying desperately to be as badass as Leia, and often comes across as a child with too much power. The way her character is built up, you might think she was about to fall to the dark side. She’s a secondary antagonist for 2/3 of the movie.
Renegade Rebellion pilot Poe Dameron has a plan to lead the Rebellion to safety, but Holdo believes his plan is too risky. Holdo and Poe bicker for a while, until Poe decides to enact his plan without Holdo’s knowledge. He enlists the help of Finn, the former storm trooper and emotional blank slate that we were inexplicably introduced to in Force Awakens, presumably because Rey needs someone to want to fuck, although you know she never will. Hormones are, after all, the greatest motivator in the Star Wars universe. Also tagging along on this mission is Rose Tico, an Asian in a universe without an Asia, who is a Finn mega-fan. Every one of her scenes is cringe-worthy, as The Last Jedi tries to ensure that we care about Rose and her spunky charm, in order to set up an obvious love triangle in Episode IX.
We follow Finn and Rose to a planet full of corrupt wealthy gamblers. They’re visiting this economically baffling planet in order to track down “The Code-breaker,” a guy who is supposed to be able to get Finn and Rose onto the star destroyer that is pursuing the Rebellion. After identifying the code-breaker, they’re thrown in jail, and decide to settle for a second-rate code-breaker named DJ, played by Benicio Del Toro. He betrays them, but none of that matters, because back on the Rebellion ship, Holdo is following through with a plan formed by pre-coma Leia.
The Poe/Finn subplot, which co-occurs with Rey’s story, is vastly inferior to all the sweet Jedi action we’re getting in the main plot. Every time we leave Rey’s side and are brought back to the Poe/Finn scenario, the movie suffers greatly. The difference in quality is quite staggering, it and could have been done away with quite easily. This subplot gets preachy, introduces some potentially compelling characters that it quickly forgets about, and provides us with a sexually-repressed back-and-forth between Finn and Rose that feels like the Anakin/Padme scenes in the prequels, if Padme were cute, and Anakin wasn’t such a whiner.
On the more exciting end of things, we follow Rey and Luke as she attempts to convince him to leave his comfortable lifestyle as a fish-nun plantation owner, for the good of the Rebellion. I’ve heard quite a bit of praise for Mark Hamill’s performance as old Luke. I wasn’t as thrilled. In Episode VII, I thought Leia’s role served to highlight what a shitty actress Carrie Fisher actually was, and I thought the same of Mark Hamill here. He’s a fantastic voice actor, but there’s a reason he’s primarily known in the live-action world as Luke Skywalker, and not Private Griff from The Big Red One. He’s old and bitchy, and sometimes this is played for laughs.
As Rey begins to slowly wear him down, she gets closer and closer to his secret. When Luke had a Jedi training base set up, Ben Solo, now known as Kylo Ren, was his star pupil. This was established in the last film, but this time around we learn that Luke tried to murder Ben in an attempt to destroy Ben’s potential as a force for the dark side. Much about this seems illogical, but I suppose this serves to give us a glimpse at just how much Luke’s faculties have degraded over the years.
Luke’s bitching and moaning reaches an apex when his beloved library of ten or so books that make up rules for the entire Jedi order is burned to the ground. Yoda appears to Luke as a force ghost, this time as a glowing puppet touched up in post, rather than an unrealistically badass video game character. Yoda laughs at Luke, and tells him that the Jedi order is more than the rules that govern it. This ties into a point that Luke makes earlier in the film; one that, in my opinion, should have been introduced far earlier in the franchise.
The force is made up of the energy from all living things. For so much of Star Wars, characters have been dreading a world where all the Jedi are dead. The fact is, without the Jedi, the force still exists. There will still be force-sensitive people out there. They may not call themselves Jedi particularly, but as often as Star Wars has introduced characters that very conveniently have minor force powers, a post-Jedi world is inevitably going to bring about another similar order. Luke even calls it arrogant to believe that the Jedi somehow have a monopoly on the force.
While on the island, Rey begins to receive “force messages” from Kylo Ren. They begin talking to each other as if they were in the same room, which was almost cool, until you think of it as a clever way to develop those characters without actually needing them to be in the same room. I’m willing to overlook this convenience, because it’s the only reason Rey and Kylo’s relationship is developed at all.
Rey and Kylo aren’t necessarily thrilled with these force interactions, and it’s revealed that Snoke was forcing this to happen the whole time in order to test Kylo and manipulate Rey. The two confront Snoke together, defeating him, but ultimately decide to part ways, because Kylo is still a selfish, whiny man-child hell-bent on channeling the dark side, and he can probably sense that Rey is frigid or something.
After this end-of-second-act showdown, the entire Poe/Finn/Rose subplot is rendered moot. Leia awakens from her coma, and reveals that just across the way, there’s a nearby planet with an empty former Rebellion base. This is supposed to make Poe look brash, but it really just shows us that Holdo is an incompetent leader who deliberately withheld information from vital members of her crew in order to bolster her own ego and look like a badass when she saves the day. This is never pointed out, and Holdo becomes a martyr for the Rebellion by needlessly staying inside the empty Rebellion ship as it’s destroyed, allowing the Rebels to flee to the nearby planet.
Once all of our characters have converged onto this small base on a desert planet, the First Order once again pursues them and attempts to break into the base. The Rebels charge toward the First Order troops, many of them dying in the process, and Finn decides he’d like to be a martyr and aims to crash straight into the enemy’s large laser beam. Rose crashes into his vehicle and stops him, because it’s more important for the emotionless love interest to live than to ensure the safety of the Rebels. This ties into a pervasive theme explored in several areas of the film, one which boils down to, “The Rebellion is rapidly shrinking from several thousand people to a small handful, so STOP DOING STUPID SHIT THAT GETS EVERYONE KILLED, AND STOP BEING SO GODDAMN FATALISTIC ABOUT YOUR OWN DEATH, AS IF IT’S FUCKING INEVITABLE THAT THE HOLY MARTYRDOM OF YOUR PASSING IS GOING TO TURN THE TIDE IN BATTLE! IT’S NOT!”
After this, Luke appears, and he fights Kylo Ren as the Rebels flee to safety. It is revealed that Luke never left the island. The Luke that appears to fight Kylo is only a projection of himself, and projecting himself across the galaxy ultimately proves to be too much for Luke. He dies, and the Rebels are free.
Back on the casino planet, one of the slave children that Rose “inspired” wears a symbol of the rebellion, and wields a broom as a lightsaber. You could view this ending in two ways:
- The slave child is shown to tell the audience that there is a new generation of Rebels coming, and that so long as the force exists, hope is never lost.
- The Last Jedi ended before this sequence, and this finale is a commercial for Star Wars merch, inviting children everywhere to buy as much as they possibly can, because it is only through materialistic capitalism that we can save our own world.
It’s a lackluster ending that feels corny and tacked-on no matter how you interpret it.
One of the most compelling parts of watching the original trilogy was the introduction of new alien races and creatures. The Last Jedi offers us a few of these. First of all, we have the small furry Porgs that populate Luke’s island of exile. The film lobs these cute-bombs at the audience like T-shirts at a sporting event, if you were to replace T-shirts with 5% off coupons for sports memorabilia that you’re going to have to purchase later. I’m looking forward to the day that I come across a plushy Porg, because I’m going to ceremonially burn it as a giant middle finger to George Lucas’ excessive merchandising.
On this same island, we meet the Caretakers, or, the fish-nuns. They serve to clean Luke’s living quarters, which totally isn’t slavery. When characters accidentally destroy parts of the island, the fish-nuns are visibly offended, mumbling in their fish-nun tongue.
Also in this category are the Vulptex, ice foxes that shimmer and make jingly sounds. In some small part, they end up saving the day. The principle characters notice that these bastards are fleeing for their lives in the third act of the film. Of course, because animals are magic, our cast follows them to safety in an otherwise impossible scenario. I suppose they get points for working merchandise-bait into the plot.
My personal favorite of these are the Fathiers, the abused horse-dog-cat-lions with big sad eyes that we’re really, really supposed to care about. They’re used as racehorses in a seedy gambling ring. Their riders prod them with shock batons, because just like horses, they perform better with multiple stab wounds. I’m a bit shocked that we weren’t introduced to a glue factory facsimile, but we still have episode IX to look forward to. Clearly, there is no metaphor here. Clearly.
These new additions to the universe are mostly harmless, but they all suffer from the same issue: CGI. Nothing about them looks real. The creatures and aliens in the original trilogy may have often been mediocre puppets or children in furry costumes, but they felt like a part of the Star Wars universe. The Last Jedi’s additions look like inserts from the inevitable upcoming Star Wars video games. What makes this so baffling is that some of these are actual puppets…touched up with CG to add detail. I would’ve never noticed this without some after-the-fact research. It almost feels a shame, but by now the Star Wars universe feels so synthetic that at least they blend in. At least they aren’t Ewoks.
As you may have noticed, I have many problems with The Last Jedi. In spite of all these, it’s mostly an engaging film, full of exactly what you’d expect and want from a Star Wars movie. The primary subplot is really messy, but the main story is compelling, and didn’t feel nearly as phoned-in as The Force Awakens. I’m pretty middle-of-the-road on this one.
6/10