Star Wars: The Last Jedi Review - Warning Spoilers
As a new Star Wars is released, the excitement, intrigue and love for the franchise covers everyone’s eyes in a rose coloured tint. Except this guy. The thing about The Last Jedi is, is it isn’t very good.
Star Wars: Episode VIII: The Last Jedi is familiar yet too different, it is funny when it really shouldn’t be, it is over the top when it should be restrained. Writer/director Rian Johnson has clearly bitten off more than he can chew especially off the backs of his smaller films Brick (2005), The Brothers Bloom (2008) and Looper (2012).
If the world of Star Wars came back in The Force Awakens it has left this universe and gone elsewhere. In a world where Trump is president and racism and social inequality is prevalent more than ever, people are naming this the darkest timeline. This film helps prove that theory. This is not the Star Wars you remember or wanted.
The Force Awakens lived off the nostalgia of the original trilogy while introducing new characters and a not so new story, The Last Jedi seems to throw nostalgia and characterization out the window and launch into what can only be described as fan fiction, that is only legitimized as it is actually a canon film.
It is surprising that after the grief The Force Awakens received for being a replica of A New Hope, that The Last Jedi copies the story beats from The Empire Strikes Back. We start with the rebels leaving a planet as the clutches of the Empire, sorry, First Order close in while our hero is on a distant and barely inhabited planet in search of an old Jedi master who just wants to be left alone. As our hero’s friends travel through space to escape the villains in black, they get to meet new characters and find themselves being betrayed before our hero reunites with them and with newfound power tries to save what is left of the day.
Visually, there are moments that are the most gorgeous in the entire series: Supreme Leader Snoke’s red on black throne room and Vice Admiral Holdo’s Hyperspace sacrifice, but without a strong story and likeable characters to follow, relying on visuals alone is not enough.
The storyline involving Rey, Luke and Kylo Ren is the most interesting and captivating but when it deviates to the other superfluous storylines, it sags and you realize how much the new and newest characters don’t fit into this universe.
Focusing on the original characters, Johnson has altered the way in which they will forever be seen. Leia is now more force trained than ever, even though her power came through emotion and empathy. It could be argued that as she was near death, her unconscious mind took over and saved her, but considering she didn’t do anything for the rest of the film and that Carrie Fisher has passed after filming, it would have been a very effective death for the character.
Luke is now Yoda: crazy, alone and wants to die. His reason for leaving everything is that he felt the darkness in Ben Solo and got caught in the brief moment of attempting to murder him that he left everything he believed in and everything that the original trilogy set the character up as. Here we have a very different man to the one that was willing to sacrifice his life just to prove that there was still good in his father who was the biggest mass murderer in their universe. In Empire Strikes Back Luke leaves his training early to save his friends, here Luke won’t leave his isolation to even be with his family. This turn for the character doesn’t hold true to what was previously built but works within the context of the film, except for Ben Solo’s reason to destroy everything that Luke had built.
Kylo Ren is one of the strongest characters in this film, changing from a petulant child to a soldier that is torn between what he knows is right and his orders. Adam Driver works hard to show the turmoil inside of Ren but when push comes to shove at the end of the film, this turmoil seems to be gone, rendering the power play between light and dark within him moot. It is not explained why he choose to massacre the other padawan’s in Luke’s temple before burning it to the ground after Luke’s attempt at confronting Ben.
Finn and Poe have the most superfluous storylines, so off the mark in fact that they don’t do anything heroic and end up getting more than half of the Resistance fleet killed. Their misadventures introduce us to the newest characters of the Star Wars universe. Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose, Benicio Del Toro’s creatively named DJ and Laura Dern’s Vice Admiral Holdo. Both Rose and DJ are tied for the worst character, while Holdo should have been replaced with a character that we cared about, Admiral Ackbar anyone?
Rose seems shoehorned in as Poe can’t journey with Finn to the casino planet (with it’s heavy use of CGI characters, exploration of the world and scenes aimed at children – this felt like it belonged in the prequel trilogy). Here they need to find a hacker and then hack the First Order ship tracking the Resistance convoy. What we’re given is this paper thin character that explains to Finn how war profiteering is bad, gambling is bad and that slave kids are bad. She also delivers the most groan inducing line of this series so far, ‘We’ll beat them by protecting the ones we love’, before kissing a non-reciprocating Finn and passing out or dying. I’m hoping for the latter. This is also after she knocked out both her and Finn’s fighter so Finn doesn’t kamikaze himself into a giant laser beam that would have blown open the base shielding the remaining Resistance fighters.
DJ is a stuttering hacker that is only in this film so that there can be a betrayal. That’s it. We don’t care too much about the character nor his relationship to Finn and Rose, so the shock-horror of his duplicity barely registers as anything too important. Holdo has the most to do here, but the audience has no connection to her, even though she was doing the right thing all along and Poe is actually the traitorous scum that nearly got them all killed.
This film delves deeper into Poe’s character and by that we are shown a shallow rapscallion with a death wish that will do whatever he wants because he believes himself to be a hero. In the end he doesn’t gain the audience’s trust back but doesn’t seem to have any guilt over his terrible decisions. Holdo’s sacrifice should have been swapped out with Poe, resulting in a more emotive moment over a loss of a mainstay character.
After two films, I still don’t get who Finn is. What I know about him is that he was kidnapped as a child, brainwashed by space Nazi’s, became their janitor, worked his way up to a soldier, then during his first mission out his indoctrination didn’t work, decided it wasn’t for him and ran away. This film adds little else to the character. He likes to make light of most situations but most importantly he has no idea what he is doing and doesn’t really seem like someone who was groomed to be a soldier.
John Williams is back again as composer but here the music doesn’t seem to be iconic or special and that really sums up this film, there is nothing special about it.
The Force Awakens opened up so many questions and possibilities that aren’t actually answered here but swept under the rug to not be explored again. Supreme Leader Snoke, who we only saw via giant hologram last time, makes his full appearance where we see that he is actually a powerful Sith Lord and …. That’s all. We don’t know who he is, where he came from or why he cares about Rey and Ren nor will we find out. The possible love story between Rey and Finn is now gone, replaced by Rose’s affections for Finn and the complicated feelings between Rey and Ren as they try to convince each other that their side is the best.
The film tries to create a serious tone around the theme of failure. Everyone fails in this film or reflects on their failures; Luke failing Ben Solo, Leia failing the galaxy, Kylo Ren failing Supreme Leader Snoke. This theme fits with the second movie of trilogies being the lowest point for all the characters. It is the turn before the heroic ending, except this film is so light hearted and filled with jokes that the weight of characters failures fail to land. The film starts on a joke, rendering earnest and serious characters into baffled and bumbling idiots that were only reserved for droids in the original. There are also ridiculous moments that leave the audience unable to suspend their disbelief any more because these moments don’t belong; BB-8 controlling an AT-ST or the one lone ship among wreckage and flame that is unarmed on the horizon and in Finn and Rose’s line of sight.
The use of the force in this film is overused and everyone is over-powered. If you reflect on the original trilogy Luke had a tenuous grasp of his telekinetic powers after two years of training. Here Rey, and even a little slave boy, can use these powers on a whim. Anakin Skywalker, who was apparently the most powerful Jedi and the Chosen One, didn’t even have this power without training. It’s moments like these that lack credibility in the already well-constructed franchise. Even though these things aren’t real and don’t exist they still need to conform to their own rules and sense of believability, it’s why Superman flying backwards to change time doesn’t make sense.
Episode IX needs to hurry up and be released so that this entire trilogy can be ignored like that fourth Indiana Jones film that never came out.
Fans of Star Wars will flock to the film and so will most regular cinema goers, so it isn’t about whether it is worth seeing the film but really its worth in the mythology that is the Star Wars universe. So given that, it’s worth? Wait until the New Year where audiences will die down, find your cheapest cinema and see it there, or just wait until it is on Netflix.