Okay, I wanted to see the movie. It’s Star Wars, and I’m
going to see and want to see the movie no matter what. Will I like it? Probably
yes, but liking something is just a knee-jerk reaction of taste and attraction,
so let’s dig into the movie’s form and content to see what’s there:
In terms of form, the movie is, of course, a Star Wars
movie, which means the filmography and special effects are first rate. There
are well-composed shots of landscape and character throughout the film,
especially in the Luke/Rey scenes, where Ireland’s rocky soil evokes the themes
of those scenes wonderfully. The attention to color and palette in the movie is
brilliant, possibly the best of the SW movies, though of course it contends
with Empire. While the use of color
and texture in The Last Jedi is more
contemporary and more vivid, I don’t think the films use of those techniques
surpasses Empire, especially in
comparison to the duel between Luke and Vader on Bespin (Empire). Like Rogue One,
the pacing is fast, almost too fast, and even with the slightly longer run time
of the movie feels like a sprint rather than a marathon.
There were some genuinely inventive moments of special
effects, and the theatre audience I was with seemed awed or impressed at times,
especially in the hyperspace-ramming sequence, which is striking. The use of
practical effects, especially in the Yoda scene, was welcome and necessary.
There were obvious borrowings from more contemporary cinema; for example, the
throne room fight with the new Praetorian Guard was very much a Chinese cinema scene,
with layers of red on red and clever use of angles and slow motion. Formally,
the use of slow motion was rather new and experimental—for a Star Wars
movie—and Johnson pulls it off sometimes. The hyperspace ramming aftermath was
good. The slo-mo in the throne room, too much like a “music video.”
Beyond the above, form is harder to split off from content,
which is good. Johnson’s movie ties its characters and plot together very
neatly. Characters make decisions, they make realistic and timely decisions in
line with their characters and their character arcs. Rey, Finn, Kylo Ren, and
Poe Dameron, each lead characters in their own right, are believable enough to
hold the movie together. The content of the movie ties neatly into the formal
aspects, which is not something that can be said of The Force Awakens, where plot was completely unrelated to character
(a general problem in J. J. Abrams’s big budget SF films).
The film has four lead characters, which is perhaps one too many.
The movie follows Rey well, and as Kylo Ren is a villain for her narrative arc
he fits into the film neatly as her antagonist. Poe Dameron’s character arc is
fairly stock (reckless flyboy learns the harsh realities of military
leadership), but Oscar Isaac is charismatic enough that he carries it off, and
the plot beats around him—probably the easiest to write—are fleshed out and
resonant, leaving lots to work through in a following movie. I think the Rey
arc is also well-plotted and there weren’t any beats missed in her plot. There
are little moments of scene jumping—where clearly something important happened,
but the filmmakers don’t show you the scene, say when she moves from the throne
room to the Falcon—but every scene is either logically elided through dialogue
or through reasonable exclusion, and so her beats are clear and effective. There
were beats missed in her character development, but not in the plot. Kylo Ren
becomes an even better villain, exploring anger as an aspect of the Dark Side
of the force. Vader, and all other Dark Side characters have generally been
merciless and cold, their presence one of either inhumanity (Vader) or of
decadence (the Emperor in Jedi)
[Darth Maul is a meaningless element in these discussions, as he lacks motive
and identity beyond the aesthetics of his appearance]. These are all
compliments to the film.
That said, Finn feels tacked on and stuffed into the movie.
His entire arc has interesting thematic implications, especially given the
Benecio Del Toro’s argument about war profiteering, and there were nice ties to
the Episode One and Episode Two in the Casino bits, but the entire piece sees a
little less character development and has no impact on the plot. It’s a big
problem that the casino is just a waste of plot.
A critical problem with the movie is that it is saddled with
too much corporate memo-oversight and too many weak ideas from The Force Awakens. Abrams made several
bad plot and world-building choices in that movie, and for some reason—I
suspect corporate—Rian Johnson’s plot focuses on the bad ideas at the expense
of the good ones. Some good ideas slip through – Luke as a hermit, Kylo Ren as
conflicted villain connected with Rey—while some bad ideas—the Resistance most
glaringly, but also a slavish reworking of Episodes 4-6 were likely forced on
him.
The Resistance especially is clearly a kind of corporate
memo argument:
Corp: Look the original trilogy had them be rebels, so make
them rebels.
Writer: But they won in those movies. They’re not rebels any
more.
Corp: People liked the old movies better. Find a way.
The First Order makes complete sense, as a remnant of the
Empire, weakened, guttering, but maniacal in its fascist ideology. The idea of
a New Republic works as well, as new state, rising up to meet them. The
Resistance also can make a kind of sense—they operate as New Republic funded
terrorists in First Order territory, which is probably too close to political
allegory for Star Wars to work. It turns Leia into a Bin Laden, which runs too
counter to the idea that Star Wars trades in Campbellian mythos-making in
contrast with Star Trek’s allegorical arguments about our present. In fact, the Holdo-Finn dynamic would work
even better if they weren’t a “resistance” but a functional army. (As an aside,
I’ve seen a lot of complaints about Holdo not explaining her plan to Finn,
which makes me think a lot of people don’t understand how an army works). The
prequels walked too far back from the myth-making, but you cannot fault the
world-building Lucas did for Episodes 1-3. Each of episodes 1-6 make
geopolitical sense and they maintain a consistent verisimilitude throughout.
So, let’s forgive the movie for being saddled with too many
lead characters and a lot of bad world-building. Johnson was stuck with that.
He was probably also stuck with a directive to callback elements of Empire and
maybe Jedi as well. He does this somewhat well. The throne room here is from Jedi, the final scene obviously plays
off of Empire. Kylo Ren’s offer to
Rey isn’t original, it’s the same argument and offer Vader makes to Luke in The Empire Strikes Back. (In fact, Ren,
like Vader, kills his master, just in a different order with less pathos in the
scene).
Less forgivable is that the first act and third act dovetail,
and that the second act is mostly negligible. The entire section of the Finn
plot does little to increase tension and resolves nothing. The character
development of the Finn arc is rushed and clumsy. I liked the moment when Rose
Tico kissed Finn, but there needed to be a moment where love could have
blossomed, and that beat isn’t there. There is a beat where Finn could fall for
Tico – her meditation on slavery and economic abuse—but there isn’t a beat
where Tico could fall for Finn. We needed to see Finn be tempted by cowardice,
which was a core element of his character in the Force Awakens, and see him
make a redeeming choice, showing Tico what kind of man he is and allowing the
love to develop naturally. While the Finn character was integral to Force Awakens, he’s just eating up time.
Further problems lie in the way the first and second act end in
the same place. Yes, Rey’s character arc progresses, but to be honest, the
third act is just closure to a set of scenes that should have ended at the close
of act one. While the plot is more coherent than the plot of The Force Awakens, it just swims in a goldfish
bowl of un-resolved “tension” for two hours. The escape scene is great, the
bombing run is good (I’ve read people grumping about how bombing in space is
dumb/bad, but remember: Star Wars “space battles” follow the logic of WWII
movies, just as a good Star Trek battle follows the logic of a submarine
battle. Stop trying to get your science into the romance fantasy of SW), and
the idea of trying to outrun the First Order is fine (not fine is the fact that
at least one Star Destroyer could’ve jumped out in front of them easily [and if
Han can plot a course into an atmosphere, yes the hyperspace jump could be
accurate enough]). Honestly, the plot of this movie ranks second to last of all
the Star Wars movies, despite the tie to character and despite some very
memorable moments.
Worse is that the verisimilitude of the movie
keeps breaking down. The Cewbacca-Prog scene made little sense; the sudden and
inexplicable appearance of the “nuns” on Ahch-to, who are dressed like…nuns;
the Holdo-charge, as cool as it is, doesn’t really make sense with how
hyperspace works in all the other movies (we go “into” and “out of” hyperspace in
all the dialogue; the ships lunge forward, then vanish from the screen, they do
not fly forward really fast [again, it seems like people confuse Star Trek’s
warp speed with Star Wars’s hyperspace], but I suppose it’s possible, just not
probable, like it’s possible for magicians in Harry Potter to not use wands,
but it wouldn’t be probable given what we know of the setting). The humor is too
knowing, and often mugged to the camera. That’s a mistake Lucas made in The Phantom Menace with Jar Jar Binks
and fart jokes, and Johnson makes it here again with a different set of gags. The
humor needs to arise from the wit and the setting, as it does in say, Episodes 4-6,
the Obi Wan lines of Episodes 2, and TV’s Star Wars Rebels. There’s two
sections of the film—the “take out the guns” part and the way the crystal fox
leads them into the tunnel—that are too ludological, essentially using video-game
language instead of film language, but that’s a common problem with movies like
this (at least there’s no platform jumping in this movie).
Finally, and most damaging to the verisimilitude, is
the treatment of General Hux and Supreme Leader Snoke (the naming of this
villain and the decision to make him low-rent Voldemort in design is beyond
me—it’s probably the second major failure of visual worldbuilding in ALL the SW
movies, after Ewoks). General Hux has good moments, and I do think the
character has merits, but there’s too much playing for humor. He has no
gravitas, and if Kylo Ren is your conflicted, angry villain grappling with
parent issues, you’ll need a villain who’s got gravitas. Hux could easily be
that character—the scene in the throne room where he debates killing Ren was nuanced,
humorous, and good writing—but he’s made to be a fool too often. Admiral Piett
had more class in Empire and Jedi, and was a better commander villain, even
though he had to compete with Vader’s immense presence and, here’s the rub: Vader’s
gravitas. You took Vader seriously, and I take none of these villains
seriously.
Snoke is well CGI’d, but he’s meaningless. Just as the Emperor
appears without a real sense of purpose in Jedi,
Snoke emerges and then dies. However, the Jedi scenes are better forewhadowed
and its scenes are held together by the myth-making work of the series, os the
Emperor and his temptation of Luke is memorable. Snoke benefits from none of
that narrative weight. He’s just the angry guy in the chair. Not once did I
believe he wasn’t a stock character without motive. He brought nothing to the
setting, little to the scene, and, if we’re honest, chewed scenery. A romance
lives and breathes by the quality of it’s villain. Roger Ebert said it of Wrath of Khan, and it remains one of the
truest criticisms of narrative I’ve ever found. Kylo Ren is a great character,
and a solid start as a villain, but he needed real villains around him to
contrast his development against. We are not given those villains.
Other pieces of The
Force Awakens are thrown away, most glaring the Knights of Ren. Who were
they? Are they a group led by Ren? You’d think so, and Johnson doesn’t touch on
it. The failure to use that element from Force
Awakens harms the verisimilitude more (the masters of the craft, say
Tolkien or Herbert would never do that; Tolkien would, hell he did, rewrite the book to make sense of
the Ringwraiths rather than let them appear and then disappear).
And the final complaint, Luke Skywalker. Luke as jaded Jedi
was a good choice. His lines about vanity and believing in his own legend are
great. His arguments about the force and ecology were interesting and build
neatly on Yoda in the original trilogy as well as in this film (though I do
wish Yoda could’ve come clean about his abject failures in Episodes 1-3). The
idea of luke cutting himself out of the Force was great, but a missed extended
beat should have been Luke opening himself up again. Yes, there’s a beat, but
it’s too short and too muted; if the Force is the all-binding Gaia that the movie
claims it is, inspire us with it through beauty or sublimity, not just action
sequences. Everything is great about the island. BUT, the problem is what got Luke
to the island. The reservations Mark Hamill raised in interviews are probably
about the idea of him sneaking up on, spying on, and then briefly considering
killing Ren as a boy. Honestly, it’s not that bad as a writing beat. It’s
supposed to make us sympathize with Kylo Ren (but remember, Kylo Ren’s a mass
murdering head of a fascist war machine—we’ve seen him order mass executions
and kill his own father, so not so much sympathy should be felt), and it sort
of works. Except it doesn’t work with Luke’s character. It feels forced on the
character by a writer’s idea. At first, I forgave it. They wanted a different
Taoist priest stereotype instead of the Zen master stereotype of Yoda, and they
gave us one. Okay.
But not okay. Remember the Knights of Ren? Who are they? Who
was it gathered around Ren in the Force
Awakens. Couldn’t you write an backstory where Luke ignores the warnings
about Ren—he’s the guy who turned Darth Vader, so you keep the “believing my
legend” content—and in the end, he’s betrayed and Ren and his cronies, these
Knights of Ren—a new order of Sith, no more of this “only two” garbage, a full
order of evil Jedi—and Luke abandons it all, seeing how violence begets
violence and the Jedi must come to an end. All the plot content remains, but
you have solid clear understanding of the character. You can have Kylo Ren lie
to Rey about the events, keep the dramatic tension, heck, go for dramatic
irony—we know Ren is lying, but Rey doesn’t. Luke could be evasive, insist that
Rey find “her own truth” and talk a little about Obi-wan and his “points of
view” problem. It keeps all the content and all the themes the film wants in
play, but doesn’t “forget” about the last movie and doesn’t alter the Luke
character in odd or counter-intuitive ways.
It seems like the movie wanted desperately to be different or
separate from Force Awakens, and yet struggles
again with plot and supporting characters. It flails, crutching on genre
convention at the same time as it ignores genre conventions. If the movie
accepted a three-act structure and gave us more meat in the training sequences
and in the Finn sequence, then the movie would work better. It’s too bad, as
the movie’s attempts to slough off the past—Ren’s “Kill the past” is great, and
Rey being not-special, just from no where and no one, not a destined Skywalker,
is welcome and important – much like Rogue
One’s rejection of wizard-knights as characters was important (One I wish Star Wars Rebels had done on TV). But for
all that swagger, the substance isn’t there. The movie drops us off thematically
at the start of The Force Awakens,
with some ways to go to establish its themes in another movie. While Episodes
1-3 will always be dragged down by weak direction and weaker acting, they at
least kept a coherent plot and worked their themes with focus. I worry this
film is sound and fury, signifying nothing, leaving the last movie to pick up
all the pieces. Sadly, pieces like The Knights of Ren would be hard to pick up
due to this film’s ignorance of them.
If it seems like the movie is bad, let me say it’s got
better acting and some tighter visuals than Episodes 1-3. It’s a good movie,
but there’s a better movie available to us, and The Last Jedi isn’t it. Disappointing, because it’s got some very
compelling reasons to be good.
The main redeeming factors of the movie are two-fold: first,
Luke’s send off is perfect. I’d almost forgive the fish-bowled plot because of
it. It works, and works well—the music, the pacing, the whole thing is solid
art. Second, this film is the first post-ecological Star Wars movie, building on
Yoda’s lines in The Empire Strikes Back.
The use of animal life, the arguments Luke makes, the general idea of the human
abuse of the Force (Jedi and Sith taking natural forces and using them as tools
of violence) was good, and could have been expanded on. The conversation
between Luke and Yoda was good and meaningful. The movie has such promise, but it’s
not fully constructed around its themes. There’s a need less singular direction
and writing in movies like this. While Tom Stoppard didn’t help Lucas in the
prequels, but it was Marcia Lucas who helped pull the original Star Wars (A New Hope) together,
and Leigh Brackett made Empire an
elevated script and gave it its intensity and prestige. Movies like these seem
to need better and more collaboration.
The Last Jedi is a satisfactory and sometimes good movie.
