Why I Truly Hate The Last Jedi
To forestall any conjecture and either sate your curiosity or warn you off entirely I’ll preface this post with a summary up front - Star Wars: The Last Jedi is one of the worst films I have ever seen. And beware for thar be spoilers ahead.
I hate it. I know that’s a strong word and one I’ve used wantonly in the past, but in this case I can’t think of another more accurate. I hate the film. I don’t merely dislike it. I find the very fact that it exists offensive. My life is worse for having seen it.
The film has drawn no small measure of controversy. Fans and critics alike seem polarised, they either love it or hate it, with not a lot of middle ground. Ergo there has been no small measure of discussion on this controversy. It’s this discussion that has driven me to add my own two cents to the melee, because at no point have I seen a post that grasps the problem at hand.
The discussion over why people dislike the film is dominated by a false dichotomy: there are those that didn’t like it because it was too far removed from the films that had come before and there are those that didn’t like it because it was too similar to the Star Wars films of old.
Whilst arguments could be made over why The Last Jedi is similar to the Star Wars of old or why it is far too different (a view I personally hold), this entirely misses the point. Regardless of where it sits in regards to the pantheon of Star Wars, The Last Jedi is, in and of itself, a terrible film.
Independent of the franchise it represents The Last Jedi is a clunky, ham-fisted, under-written and over-directed, unmitigated shit show. At its best it is clumsy and at its worst it is infuriating. If I had to sum it up in a word I’d call it “stupid”. The decisions that director Rian Johnson has made with the film just don’t make any sense.
I don’t say this lightly. I have a powerful suspension of disbelief. I’m willing to forgive most plot holes, I’ll quite creatively retcon even the most glaring oversight and content myself with my in-universe explanation (my favourite film is Pacific Rim after all). The Last Jedi doesn’t allow this. It is a 155 minute bombardment on your ability to disbelieve.
The film starts off strongly. In a bold move it opens with a joke and surprisingly it pays off. Poe Dameron’s prank call of General Hux is genuinely funny. I’ve been a professional comedian for over a decade, I know all the tricks, I can see behind every curtain, I despise most attempts at comedy and that bit made me actually laugh out loud. That is no small achievement.
Dameron then shows off his piloting skills in a daring X-Wing raid on the Fulminatrix in a visually impressive action sequence. At this point the film showed promise. This was flashy and exciting and what I wanted the movie to be. Then it did something unprecedented in a Star Wars film – inertia. Dameron’s X-Wing turns 180 degrees yet preserves its forward momentum until it fires the engines. Actual sound science in a space battle. My excitement at this point was at fever pitch.
And then the stupid starts. And once it starts it never stops. Whilst I was incredibly excited after five minutes, by the ten minute mark I was scratching my head. At twenty minutes I was heart-broken. By 40 minutes into the film I was ready to walk out, the only thing driving me forward was the morbid curiosity of seeing just how much worse it could get. The answer was “a lot”.
I’d like to go into every dumb point in detail, and I have for my own benefit, but the document is currently another 2000 words of dot points and I don’t think anyone has the time to read it (another time perhaps). Suffice it to say that from about five minutes into the film it appears that every character makes the dumbest possible decision they can.
For the sake of brevity I’ll only dive in depth into the two most glaring cases in the film.
First is Luke Skywalker. Everything to do with Luke Skywalker. When we meet Luke it’s at the same point as the close of The Force Awakens, with Rey handing him his father’s lightsaber. After a long moment of silent tension Luke then throws the lightsaber away without a word. All of that buildup for what comedians call a “pullback reveal”. Weak. In case you missed it this is the directorial cue that the audience should be willing to break with the past Star Wars films. Isn’t Rian Johnson subtle?
What follows is an entire act of Luke being an obtuse dickhead for no reasonable purpose. At this point I was still willing to give the film the benefit of the doubt. I’d reasoned that Luke was being purposefully asinine to test the patience of his pupil – as Yoda had once done to him. As the film progressed it became apparent that this level of subtlety was not in play, Luke was just being an ass. What becomes clear is that Rian Johnson has completely abandoned the character of Luke Skywalker and bludgeoned him into an amorphous shadow that he can shoe-horn into his own narrative.
None of Luke’s actions in the film are consistent with the character we’ve come to know. Upon the destruction of his Jedi temple and the deaths of his students he has not come to Ach-To to commune with the Force on some vision quest, he has come to run away from his problems in a way that is completely inverted from the idealistic hero of the original films. The young Jedi who rushed to confront a Sith Lord in order to save his friends is now willing to abandon the entire galaxy to a powerful Dark Jedi because...reasons.
We are then treated to a bit of back story over what happened to Luke’s Jedi academy. When he sensed the growing power of the dark side in his nephew, Ben Solo, he contemplated murdering the boy in his sleep. Luke Skywalker, who walked fearlessly into the Death Star in order to redeem a Sith Lord who had murdered the entire Jedi Order, who had gladly decided to die rather than murder a beaten opponent, this is the same person who would, if only for a moment, consider killing someone in cold blood because they might one day fall to the dark side?
So we’re to believe that in the space of a few decades Luke would abandon every principle he held.
That Luke was willing to kill his own nephew to prevent the rise of a powerful Dark Jedi is one thing, but then when Ben gives himself over to the Dark Side and becomes Kylo Ren, Luke runs away and hides. He was willing to murder his own kin to prevent this from happening, but now that it has he’s not going to do anything about it. Rian Johnson shows here that not only is he abandoning the character of the old Star Wars films, he can’t remain consistent within his own script.
Mix that in with a multitude of scenes of Luke being a grumpy old man, a needlessly rude hermit and, for some unknown reason, graphically milking a space manatee and this entire arc is just offensive.
The clumsy and futile handling of the character of Luke Skywalker is one of the major reasons why The Last Jedi is a terrible movie, but as Yoda once said “there is another”.
If you’ve seen the film then you know what I’m talking about, but if you haven’t then I’ll try and paint the scene for you. I say try (I know, I know, “do or do not”) because it’s difficult to get across how jarring and incongruent this sequence is.
The Resistance fleet is on the run. They can’t escape to hyperspace because they will be tracked by the First Order, who will only catch them and destroy them. So they’re flying through space, just out of effective weapons range of the First Order, just staying alive. However the clock is ticking. They’re running out of fuel. They can’t run forever. Why it takes fuel to continue in a straight line in space is never addressed (perhaps the fuel is needed to run the shields? Look I’m throwing you a bone here Rian) nor is the fact that the First Order doesn’t switch from using plasma weaponry which has an effective range to some kind of kinetic weapons which don’t, or just send their fighters ahead. Nor are we treated to a reason why all ships now seem to have the same speed even though every film prior to this shows a mixture of both fast ships and slow.
So Poe Dameron decides to send ex-stormtrooper Finn and random engineer he just met Rose off on a mission to find someone who can get them onto the Supremacy and shut down the hyperspace tracking to let the Resistance escape. Does that sound convoluted? That’s because it is.
So Finn and Rose find themselves on a shuttle travelling to the planet of Canto Bight to find a slicer, instead of using that shuttle and others like it to evacuate the stated 400 Resistance members who need evacuating because of reasons.
And in an instant we go from the incredibly dark and tense pursuit of the last of the Resistance fleet to...a 1930’s style casino! That’s right, everyone is in their best three piece suit dancing the Charleston as if Finn and Rose have just hyperspace jumped into the Great Gatsby. When are then treated to some tell-don’t-show moralising from Rian Johnson on the nature of greed and war before Finn and Rose indulge in a chase scene through space-Marrakesh on space-camels while being pursued by the space-police before they are rescued by Benecio Del Toro’s character DJ who will of course suddenly but inevitably betray them.
If you thought the pod-racing scene from The Phantom Menace was tedious and pointless then Rian Johnson would like you to hold his beer.
How should this scene have played out instead?
Rose: Finn can you sneak us on board the Supremacy to shut down the tracking system?
Finn: Yes, I used to be a stormtrooper, I know a sneaky way in.
Rose: Great, for a second there I thought we’d have to go on a pointlessly wacky side adventure where a drunk leprechaun fills BB-8 with coins.
There, I just shaved 30 minutes off the longest running Star Wars film in history.
Of course the stupidity doesn’t stop there, but it does perhaps peak. The rest of the film from then on isn’t offensive because how dumb it is, but because it is just plain seeks to offend. It is Rian Johnson firmly and proudly raising the middle finger to anyone who is a fan of the franchise.
The previous film, The Force Awakens, raised a number of questions. The film was written and directed by JJ Abrams, a man who is more adept than anyone at creating intriguing mysteries without ever bothering to answer them (the magic numbers from Lost spring to mind). The greatest questions springing from The Force Awakens were “who are Rey’s parents?” and “who is this immensely powerful Dark Jedi, Supreme Leader Snoke?”
In the two years since the release of The Force Awakens the internet has been ablaze with conjecture over these questions. Fans were rabid in their search for answers to these major plot points, enjoying crafting elaborate theories as to where the franchise could take these storylines. Hearkening back to the days of “is Darth Vader really Luke’s father?” or “is Darth Sidious really Senator Palpatine?” this conjecture is at the heart and soul of what it is to be a fan of Star Wars.
This is also something that Rian Johnson blatantly and vehemently resents.
It is one thing to chastise fans for the means by which they choose to enjoy the films, though that is bad enough, but it’s another thing entirely to sabotage the middle film of trilogy to punish those fans for being fans.
The mystery of Rey’s parents is answered with a throwaway line by Kylo Ren that they are junkrat nobodies who sold her. Reasonable enough I suppose, and perhaps even the same direction I would have taken the plot line, though perhaps with a bit more exposition. But I can’t get over the feel that this was never the intended arc for Rey’s character, that this is a backlash for the fan speculation over her parentage.
However if the reveal of Rey’s parents was a subtle rebuke by Rian Johnson for the over-zealousness of the fan base, then the Snoke reveal is Rian dancing around naked, swinging his dick at them while waving a giant sign saying “go fuck yourselves”.
Halfway through the film Supreme Leader Snoke is killed off by his student, Kylo Ren. After some impressive displays of his powers with the Force, after the reveal that it was he who had manipulated Rey AND Kylo Ren with his incredible power, that he had engineered proceedings exactly to his machinations in a way that the Emperor could only dream of, he is abruptly killed. No heroic sacrifice, a la Darth Vader. No impressive fight sequence a la Darth Maul or Darth Tyrannus. No exposition. One minute he’s alive, the greatest threat the galaxy has ever faced, the head of a bigger and badder empire. The next minute he’s dead, never to be spoken of again, as if he never existed in the first place.
Not even the most die-hard new trilogy apologist could argue that this was ever the intended direction for the character. That an entire film and a half would be devoted to this great and powerful evil only for him to be written out with the in-universe equivalent of “Note: Poochie died on the way back to his home planet”.
No, this was a deliberate move by Johnson. This was his objection to the speculation on the character and the nature of Star Wars fans. This was his personal revenge against people actively enjoying the intellectual property instead of passively receiving whatever the film-maker threw at them. He took an important character and story arc and threw them into the fire, writing himself and any future directors into a corner in the process, simply because he wanted to engage in an act of petty revenge and onanism.
And this is the man who has been given the green light to develop his own trilogy.
These are the most glaring examples of idiocy and clumsiness in The Last Jedi. The rest of the film is merely bouncing from one scene to the next with events happening because the plot needs them to happen. The whole venture feels like they went ahead and filmed the first draft. As if at no point a second party has looked at the script and said “why are they doing this? It doesn’t make any sense”.
And even though I’ve gone into such detail on a couple of major issues with the film, that’s probably the main problem with the film. It doesn’t make any sense. None of the decisions made by any of the characters make sense. They all seem to do the dumbest thing possible because that will generate the most drama.
Rian Johnson has obviously read the rule of storytelling that says to create drama you take your characters and challenge them. That you put them in a tree and throw rocks at them, as it were. But he doesn’t know how to do it. He doesn’t know how to make it look natural. So he just clumsily engineers situations where the characters are faced with adversity brought about through their own stupidity or the stupidity of others.
The core of this problem isn’t limited to The Last Jedi. It was present in The Force Awakens and numerous other films as well – the new Hollywood trend of the “writer/director”. Not every writer is a director and not every director is a writer. Some can do both and do it very well – Tarantino for instance is a brilliant slashie. But you can’t skimp on the writers.
The Last Jedi is a brilliant spectacle. It looks amazing. The use of lighting and shot selection to convey story is wonderful at times, if a little heavy handed at others. But the whole film is a delight to look at. It’s just a shame that the story, the core of it, is so very, very poor. It is the result of a director saying “we need to do this and this, go from point A to B to C” without knowing how to accomplish that as a storyteller.
The whole film is an exercise in what could have been. The Force Awakens wasn’t brilliant by any stretch. But it was a lot of fun and it introduced a lot of rich plot lines which begged to be expanded on, deeper mysteries that would have been fun to unravel. Imagine the wonder and excitement we could have had if the next instalment of the story was given to someone who knew what to do with them instead of an obdurate madman hell bent on his own “artistic vision” and driven by a need for petty revenge. If this had been a solo film, without the rich history and lore that burdens Star Wars, it might have been amazing. The terrible storytelling and massive plot holes might never have occurred if such a stubborn director hadn’t been forced to work within confines of a universe not of his own.
But such wasn’t to be. Unlike Gareth Edwards, who created the utterly brilliant Rogue One in an even more restrictive narrative confine, Rian Johnson proved incapable of budging even an inch and the result is a film that is an utter mess and a waste. It makes one nostalgic for the glory days of The Phantom Menace and Jar-Jar Binks, which was until 14.12.17 the worst thing to ever happen to Star Wars.
I think about how much I hate The Last Jedi and I wonder why. I wonder why this movie hurts me so much more than the prequels did, why the disappointment is so much more gut wrenching. It’s because of what it could have been.
The prequels were George Lucas’ baby. It was his universe, his product and he was going to make it his way. That way might not have been the right way, or even a good way, but it was his. Nobody could fault him for doing what he wanted with his own creation. We all knew the man’s ambition outpaced his ability. His greatest excesses were held in check by his ex-wife, Marcia, and when they divorced there was nobody stopping him from doing dumb things like racist aliens, cannibal teddy bears and a 40 minute love letter to NASCAR racing.
But it was his house and he could paint it whatever ugly colour he wanted to.
This new trilogy was supposed to free us of that. We had an opportunity to build on the world he created and take it in new and exciting directions. We had the opportunity to put it into hands more competent than those of George Lucas, thankful for what he created but more thankful for gracefully stepping back.
Instead Disney decided to go in the other direction. They decided to keep Star Wars in the hands of an intractable autocrat and the result is more of the same. A film more notable for its potential and its failings than for its ability to deliver.
But still while that accounts for my disappointment in the film, and for my crippling depression as a result of it, but it doesn’t account for the hatred. I truly do hate The Last Jedi.
The reason being that these new films have wiped the slate clean. They have rendered null and void all of the former Expanded Universe, what is now known as Legends.
In the wake of Return of the Jedi in 1983 there was a great demand for more of the Star Wars universe. What became of the characters? People demanded to know. What was happening in the rest of the galaxy? What other stories were never told? What else was possible?
Writers and storytellers began to fill the void. Some of them weren’t weren’t great, others were laughably bad, but most of them were incredible. Most of them were incredible stories set in the Star Wars universe.
I grew up on these stories. I read and re-read nearly all of the Expanded Universe books, handed down to me from a benevolent uncle who fostered such imagination.
Timothy Zahn’s cuttingly amazing Thrawn trilogy dared to imagine what became of the Empire after the Battle of Endor. Beaten and broken they faced defeat and retreat until they were revitalised by a new villain – Grand Admiral Thrawn, an alien whose intellect and tactical brilliance was fuelled by an appreciation of art. The Thrawn trilogy proved the be the skeleton from which the new canon trilogy was built, although without the panache of Zahn’s writing, while the character of Thrawn was so iconic, so brilliant, he was adopted into the new canon.
The X-Wing series took a background character but fan favourite, Wedge Antilles, and put him front and center. These novels were rollicking tales of the fighter pilots so iconic of Star Wars, with their laconic wit and dashing bravado, racing from one impossible mission to the next. If you enjoy Poe Dameron in the new films (and who doesn’t?) then imagine an entire series of people just like him. The death of Han Solo in The Force Awakens never really resonated with me but decades later the death of Ton Phanan still gives me chills.
There were so many stories of Luke’s attempts to recreate the Jedi Order. His Praxeum on Yavin IV where he tried to mentor students as young and as brash as he once was, all while wondering if his own brief training was enough to prevent him from creating the next Darth Vader. This Luke was wise and caring, confident yet humble. A true servant of the Force who would never have imagined murdering a student in his sleep but would have done all in his power and more to prevent him ever falling in the first place.
These are the true tales of Star Wars. These are the real continuation of the story. And now all of them have been cast aside, destroyed by the myopic treatment of JJ Abrams, who never wrote a story beyond his first movie, and Rian Johnson who never gave a shit about anything other than his “artistic vision”.
That is why I hate The Last Jedi. Not only is it a terribly written story, it is by its very existence an erasure of all of the good stories that came before it, the ones crafted by competent writers who cared for the subject matter. Not building upon what came before but utterly rejecting it out of spite.
It isn’t a matter of whether The Last Jedi was too far removed from the old Star Wars movies or whether is was too similar to them. That doesn’t matter. All that really mattered was that it was a good story. Which it most certainly wasn’t. It was terrible. And if this film was the audition by which Rian Johnson received his own trilogy then I truly mourn the Star Wars saga, for it is in the most unsafe of hands.
For those wondering, because this is what the reviewers all seem to do, this is my ranking of the Star Wars films:
