Ok, I’ve wanted to take the longest time I could to mull this over and to protect myself as much as possible from putting something out there that would be a knee-jerk reaction. Star Wars Episode VIII – The Last Jedi.
(This ought to be needless to say but: “there will be spoilers!”. Here’s the non-spoiler version of this review: “The Last Jedi is probably what it feels for a woman to be subjected to a two-and-a-half-hours sexual encounter without ever achieving an orgasm”. Make of that what you will, but know it’s STILL the most positive thing I can say about the movie, at this point. This also qualifies as TL;DR, no quitters from this point on)
I don’t intend to rag on the movie just for the sake of ragging on it, I don’t intend to list or single out the good bits vs the bad bits and I don’t intend on offering up an alternative as to how I would have made things better (except for two points which will be included below). I am by no means a Star Wars fanatic, I have not watched (and not for the lack of trying) anything outside of the main movies( Episodes I-current + Rogue One) and I have not read any of the books from the now-defunct expanded universe. I don’t have a dog in the Lucas SW vs Disney SW battle. I’m just a guy who enjoyed the movies as a kid, who cut school to watch the Special Edition reissues when they came to the theatres in my town back in 1997, who moderately enjoyed the prequels when they came out and who was enthralled when Episode VII came out, ending up seeing it three times in theatres.
Before the release of The Last Jedi, my ranking of Star Wars movies was:
1. The Empire Strikes Back
2. A New Hope
3. The Force Awakens
4. Return of The Jedi (there is a great half movie in there, on its merits alone I would have ranked this at number 2, but as soon as the fucking ewoks show up, I’m out)
5. The Phantom Menace
6. Revenge of The Sith
7. Rogue One
8. Attack of the Clones
Where does the new movie fit into that ranking? Allow me the courtesy of first making my point before revealing my ranking.
Ask yourself this question, please: what is “The Last Jedi” about? I, personally, find that a very difficult question to answer. I have found an answer, in the end, (to be perfectly honest it occurred to me on the walk home from the theatre and, in spite of my attempts at perhaps finding a more accurate one, it remained the answer I settled on), but the answer I came up with, not only does it not make enough sense for something called “episode eight”, but I find it not meaningful enough even as a standalone. Before I explore it, let me go down a few roads about what the previous Star Wars movies meant, both to me as well as in a larger context. This will help setting the frame.
The first thing that you need to understand was that, the original Star Wars movie, back in 1977, was not meant to be a trilogy.
I don’t care what George Lucas retconned about it in trying to boost up his writing cred when it was suddenly convenient for him to do so; from a story perspective everything in A New Hope ties up and it makes it a good stand-alone movie. It was a good movie, that had an organic success and then generated two sequels.
Episodes five and six were a story arc. The prequels were a story arc. Rogue one was a self-contained wedged episode 3.5 in between the prequels and A New Hope.
Episode seven was an open loop with plenty of open threads that served as a re-establishing shot into the universe and it could have been pretty easy to connect it to a couple of new movies to link up a trilogy. Hell, the fans have been doing that on the internet over the past two years, so how hard could it have been?
So, with the stories nicely delineated, what were they and why were they good/bad?
A New Hope is a classical heroes journey, the mythical Arthur gaining a sword that shaped his destiny, hooking up with an old sage for guidance, going off into the world on a life-defining quest, saving the princess and slaying the dragon with a well placed shot to the heart, finding good friends along the way, and getting a medal for it at the end.
Wrapped-up into new (at the time) award winning special effects (by the way, I totally recommend watching the despecialized editions of the original trilogy, especially A New Hope, look them up online), fun dialogue and overall likeable characters, and you have the giant hit that launched this movie into a franchise.
Empire and Return of the Jedi, is a much more complex story. On a surface level, it’s a story about family, about intergenerational conflict that ultimately gets resolved by the revelation of the tyrannical nature of the elders to themselves and their ultimate redemption through self-sacrifice in siding with the new generation and toppling the tyrannical system.
It about making one’s parents see the light and values of one’s own generation and accept that their gained wisdom is just as valid, if not more, due to the fact that it’s more recent.
Wrapped into that narrative we have a few more sub-plots that spice up the movie and bring it value: a love story, a story about loyalty to your friends, a story about the value of proper preparation and ultimately a couple of stories about the fact that one’s actions have consequences.
The prequels are a world building effort, at best. They are somewhat restricted by the fact that they need to arrive at a set conclusion and are trying to retro-build the character of Anakin Skywalker.
Sprinkled in there is some exploration of the mechanics by which a democratic political system can succumb to corruption and tyranny (spoiler alert, it’s a preference for safety over freedom that does it in), there is some interesting exploration of the consequences of unheeded advice of one’s elders, and ultimately and most amusingly it’s a very heavy handed metaphor over the dangers of single motherhood.
Wether or not the writers of the stories, had the intention to write all those stories out as they have with all the implications that they had is irrelevant, because these stories that I laid out above tap into several meta-stories and meta-archetypes that end up writing themselves to fruition whenever they’re used. Regardless of where they are used.
For instance in A New Hope, Luke is the archetype of the explorer, of the knight on the quest for the holy grail, of the novice that hones his skills through practice and study.
In Empire and Return, Darth Vader and Luke are playing the archetypes of the Tyrant-Father and the Redeeming-Son. Luke’s going up against him in Empire resulting in a crushing defeat is the tale that you cannot defeat tyranny at its game, but only through reform (you don’t attack a more powerful enemy head on, you flank it).
Luke’s doing that in Return, he’s hell bent on bringing his father back from the dark side, which is the archetypal story of rescuing the blind father from the underworld, and this story comes to fruition when Vader finally SEES (I mean he literally sees it in front of him all of a sudden) that his system (personified by the Emperor) will kill his own son in front of him and he succumbs to that ever-old archetypal story of the motivation for parents to sacrifice themselves for their children.
These inclusions of larger archetypes in particular stories are what lend the stories strength, they are the reason why people resonate with them, and I think there’s no surprise that most people who are fans of Star Wars place Empire and Return as their best two movies (and I swear I would have done the same if not for the fucking Ewoks). Lawrence Kasdan has probably included the best archetypal stories into this two movie story arc.
It’s almost a direct connection: archetypal stories are archetypal because they appeal to the largest crowd, so if you don’t horribly botch the execution, then the bigger success is guaranteed.
Kasdan also wrote Episode VII and to a certain extent he also worked along the same archetypes, but into a polar opposition. The intergenerational conflict is present again, but with a very interesting twist: the nurturing good parents (that we imagine Han and Leia to have been, because they are established as good characters who will live on to the happy end in episode six) have spawned the new villain.
It’s essentially the same story but told from the opposite perspective, and I think it was done this way because it was aimed primarily at the generation that was brought up with Han, Luke an Leia in the 80s and they believe about themselves that they are fundamentally good, that they haven’t switched sides, and further more this generation has (of itself) another positive story to tell, that of parental sacrifice for their children.
This is the biggest archetypal story that inhabits The Force Awakens, Han is making the ultimate sacrifice for his child even though he has no guarantee that his sacrifice will change anything, but that’s what a good parent does and irrespective of the parental faults of Han (leaving Leia is implied, not being a good role model is implied) he embodies the good parent in that moment.
Then there’s the archetypal story of loyal comrades: Chewie to Han, Finn to Poe and vice-versa and even to Rey to some extent (even though that sinks into the romantic conflict).
There’s a rehashing of slaying the dragon, this time it’s a team effort and it’s dispatched with quickly, in part, because we have visited that story already in this franchise. There’s a new quest for the holy grail, which is begun by Poe and then taken over by Rey and the movie ends with this quest of the holy grail reaching it’s conclusion. In a way, in The Force Awakens we have a variant of the descent into the underworld in search of the spirit of the father (this time embodied by Luke) who is also wilfully blind (just like Vader was) and it ends just as the eye (Rey with the sword) has reached him.
Kylo Ren is a good character study of an aimless, searching, young hero in training. The talented hero, looking for guidance. He finds it in Snoke, but ultimately, he is not pure evil, Kylo/Ben, needs his own biological father’s assistance and guidance to progress down the path he chose, no matter how evil or destructive that might be.
Rogue One is not particularly relevant here, but it may be worth noting that it plays with another set of archetypes: the duality of man caught between his positive side in his family and his destructive side in his working environment, the coming together of separate players into a team purpose, the archetype of the unwilling leader emerging naturally rather than through selection, and the willingness of individuals for ultimate self-sacrifice in the service of what they believe will lead to the salvation of others regardless of the fact that, probably for the first time in the Star Wars movie universe, the leaders of the Rebel Alliance are pictured to be of doubtful morals.
The reason why Rogue One might have had a negative impact was that people tended to be somewhat irritated by seeing each of the team players go through their own moment of self-sacrifice, but that was only because we knew the set ending. We knew it would take more sacrifice from other people down the road. This isn’t meant to imply that their self-sacrifice in Rogue One was useless, but in terms of the story, it didn’t pay off within the same narration episode, therefore, the positive side of it was not directly apparent.
Conspiracy alert: what if Disney retro-tested Rogue One to figure out why people were lukewarm on it and got back the answer: “I didn’t like the pointless deaths” and then Frankenstein translated that into what we saw in Episode VIII?
One last point about archetypes before we move on to the movie itself (I swear it’s relevant).
On the masculine side, we have the positive “The Encouraging Father” (Han and Obi-Wan to an extent, even Qui-Gon) and the negative “The Tyrannical Father (Vader).
On the feminine side we have the positive “Mother Nature” (nurturing Shmi Skywalker, Anakin’s mom) and “The Source Of Chaos” (conspicuously missing not only from Star Wars, but from most movies post 1970, with the only manifestation that we get of it being the trope of the neurotic love interest).
The archetype of the exploring hero or of the redeeming hero are not necessarily connected to a sexual denomination, however, I can argue that these archetypes are inherently masculine.
I will base that statement on the fact that men relate to these types of characters more than women, even if a woman is embodying the character. Wonder Woman was the female equivalent of Superman, yet mostly men watched the Tv Show and bought the comics. Xena was the equivalent of Hercules or Connan for women, a female embodiment of the Noble Warrior Hero archetype, yet mostly men watched the show.
So I will preface everything with saying that it is possible, that women need different archetypes to identify with and different meta-stories than we are accustomed to in order for them to bond with a narrative and there is no shortage of evidence that Disney is re-orienting its franchise to cater to women (Kathleen Kennedy, the person who’s in charge of everything Star Wars, was walking around in a t-shirt that said “The Force is Female”).
This isn’t meant to say that they’re wrong in doing so, ultimately the marketplace will decide that, but considering that we don’t really have access to women-centric meta-narratives and archetypes, we can’t really evaluate wether we’re dealing with a good or a bad execution of the concept.
If you ever read literature done by women, for women, or watched movies written and directed by women (excepting the porn substitute of 50 Shades and Twilight, where the male archetypes are clearly identifiable) they will seem almost alien.
They understand the world differently than men, I don’t think that there’s a feminist out there that will rebuke this claim, so it then makes sense that, to a man, women’s way of looking at the world might seem alien.
Unfortunately, and this is where I’m gonna go to with my analogy, exposure to an alien culture (as in foreign and fundamentally different to the western culture that was born out of the meta-stories and archetypes that I mentioned up to now) also feels alien and a certain man (here’s looking at you Rian), trying to “write for women” might misidentify one for the other.
From this perspective, The Last Jedi, is ultimately a female story, in the sense that it’s an allegory of the birthing process. It is a prolonged constant struggle, peppered with meaningless suffering, where reason and purpose (Leia) fades in and out, where the man can only provide moral support and nothing more (Luke).
It’s a process that leads to a total draining of energy and resources (the entire resistance fits on the Millennium Falcon by the end of the movie), passes through a climactic painful crux (called the crowning – did you catch a moment of total silence in the movie? that was it), and ending with an uncertain potential coming from the next generation.
That’s neither good nor bad in the overall scheme of things, it’s a valid story, I just think it’s the wrong story to have as the main story of something called “episode eight” and ultimately not really something I might be interested in seeing as a standalone (as I’ve said before).
But just imagine what most people experienced going into the eight episode of a saga so peppered with familiar and familial archetypal stories and being exposed to this. If you want an answer for how this movie ended up so low on it’s Rotten Tomatoes audience score, there it is.
And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, Rotten Tomatoes audience score rated The Last Jedi as of the time of this review at 49% which is the lowest (by far) of any Star Wars movie. Over at IMDB, The Last Jedi boasts a rating of 7.5 out of 10 which is enough to net it a position of third from the bottom in the Star Wars list of films with only episodes one and two achieving a lower score (much lower in this case).
Having said all of that, come join me on this rollercoaster ride called The Last Jedi.
I kept away from the hype, from the fan theories, even from the trailers to some extent. I walked into the movie as blank as I possibly could with the only two “spoilers” that I had allowed myself being someone retweeting their already two year old tweet that said “You will beg for George Lucas before the end” and a meme of Luke Skywalker saying Mario dies at the end of Super Mario Kart 8. I didn’t believe the first and I was sort of expecting the latter so not much was spoiled.
As I was in the theatre, that feeling of giddiness for getting to see a new Star Wars movie was taking me over. To be honest, it’s been a pretty crappy 2017 for me, and this particular moment in time gave me some hope that it was about to get a little bit better. Then, the movie started…
I blame Red Letter Media, for breaking down the formula for starting a Star Wars movie (it was A New Hope, to be perfectly honest) and putting it out on YouTube during their review of The Phantom Menace, but goddamn it, after seeing The Force Awakens starting with this formula, after seeing Rogue One start off with a variation of this formula, when I saw the Last Jedi pan from the crawl (which worked as intended for me, I had no qualms with it) to a shot in space with a couple of star destroyers entering the picture, I started to grumble.
The dialogue and the “yo’ mama jokes” between Poe and Hux, I didn’t mind at all, quite the contrary, I enjoyed it. I don’t watch Marvel movies, so I suppose I’m not burnt out on it like most other people.
But, damn, did I start to get pissed when “the bombers” came into play. Fuck physics, fuck gravity, fuck everything… You know what would be cool? If we use our naval bombers to take out this giant dreadnought… Only somebody forgot to tell the idiots writing the script that we’re not in the Atlantic in world war two anymore, we’re in fucking outer space, in a galaxy far far away.
Physics, is still physics and putting aside for a second the fact that gravity doesn’t exist in space (you know, the very thing that makes bombing and bombing runs possible), but Star Wars was one of the very few franchises who treated space battles as something three dimensional (as opposed to Star Trek where battles tend to be one or more ships squaring off in the same plane giving birth to something called the “navy” view of space battles). Well, the three dimensional part is still in there but the navy view is fully entrenched in Star Wars too, thanks to this movie…
So the bombing run is sorta successful when some unknown character gets to make some kind of self sacrifice (should I insert a joke about an asian looking girl pulling off a Kamikaze move?), after a talisman praising moment and the rebel fleet manages to escape to light-speed.
By the way, I have to point out that I was severely disengaged and couldn’t rub two fucks together for the whole self-sacrifice angle of this sequence. Not only was it characters I didn’t care about, I paused a few seconds on the face of the asian girl to evaluate wether I knew her or not and decided I didn’t, but I was constantly reminded by the action breaking the laws of physics that this was not happening.
I have to mention that one of the things that caught my attention was the gratuitous usage of the “punch it” expression by someone involved in the evacuation of the planet. In fact, “punch it” seems to be something that everybody likes to say in the Resistance, which sort of retroactively minimises the cool factor of Han using it in the first place.
Jump cut to Leia “demoting” Poe for losing too many people during his attack, which I sort of bought at the time as the tragedy of the human cost of war.
In retrospect, however (I saw someone pointing this out in a video) Leia is showcasing poor judgement and poor leadership even in the context of the movie alone. Not only was she in charge and had the authority to break up the attack and order Poe to stand down, which she didn’t, but if Poe hadn’t destroyed the dreadnought, this movie would have ended with the First Order fleet (dreadnought in toe) popping out of light speed and wiping out the Resistance fleet within the first five minutes.
So it was not only the right call to take the tactical advantage of the moment that allowed the destruction of the dreadnought, but the actual losses incurred in the attack were smaller than the whole fleet.
I was in the movie, though, and I didn’t make this reasoning on the spot. At the time, I felt it was a little harsh, but maybe it provided Poe with some room to grow.
I don’t know for sure at what point Luke and Rey on the island story becomes interspersed with this (speaking of which, how was that not the first frame of the movie??????????? I mean, I understand how, after seeing the movie, but…still a poor choice in my opinion especially since what we got was the formulaic intro) but I’ll put the island aside for now and come back to it later.
Next was the meeting between Snoke and Kylo Ren, where the movie decides, we had enough fun with the mask and that emulating the viciousness of your evil grandfather is just stupid, so take it off and destroy it in a fit of rage. Plus now we can sell new Kylo figurines without the mask so that’s good.
I remember Snoke spoke for some time, but I didn’t take away anything from it so it must have been, by definition, forgettable.
Next, the Resistance fleet pops out of light speed, only to discover the First Order fleet popping out behind them and starting to pepper them with fire. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Ben (which is the name I’ll refer to him by from now on since Kylo was the mask) is flying his funky Tie-fighter and targeting the bridge of the Resistance flagship.
He wants to kill his mother, and Leia knows it’s happening, she can feel it and, in a way, I think we were meant to understand that they both were aware of the other feeling them. And we see Leia nod in acceptance, ready to make the same sacrifice for her son that Han had made in the previous movie…
But then we see Ben hesitate and pull his thumb back from the trigger, but it turns out that it doesn’t matter because some other fighter was targeting the same bridge at the same time and pulled their trigger, rendering any moment of internal reflection and growth that we might have had on Ben’s part useless (grab some pop-corn, it’s a theme).
So the bridge is blown up and we see Leia floating through the vacuum of space among debree and other dead bodies. And there’s a close-up shot of her face, with her eyes closed and looking so peaceful and serene.
And I didn’t know at the time that Carrie Fisher had filmed the entire movie before her death – I though it had come midway through the shooting (partly because I didn’t look it up and partly because her hear attack happened on a plane, and I thought she was flying back from London on a break from shooting). So, in my mind, at the time, I was even wondering if they had gone so far as to use a scan of her dead body to CGI this moment of floating in space in order to give Carrie Fisher a proper send off. This gave me chills for a brief moment.
Then, the unthinkable happened!
After floating through space for the better part of a minute… Leia moves her hand and force pulls herself back to the ship (I kid you not, the Mary Poppins memes are accurate about this), right to an escape hatch, which she knocks on and Poe and some other character just happen to be there and they open the escape hatch. Somehow they don’t get sucked out into space, because fuck physics (just like before), and the ship doesn’t depressurise because fuck physics (just like before), and instead they drag Leia back inside and she collapses into a coma.
At this point, I may have been already primed by some of the stuff going on in the island narrative, but I literally went from “Aw, they’re really doing the right thing, this is so touching” to “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!?! NO! NO! NO! NO!”
Since I mentioned the island, I guess I should point out, that the first scene on the island is Rey giving Luke back his sword, only to have him chuck it over his shoulder matter-of-factly and walk away from her.
That has got to be one of the poorest calculations ever made by a script writer anywhere that I know of: that is to trade the cliffhanger moment that people have been waiting for two whole years to see what happens and to get some meaning out of the story in Episode VII (the quest for the grail meta-story that I spoke of earlier) for a cheap meaningless joke rendering any and all emotional attachment that viewers might have carried over into this movie because of that plot line, useless.
Luke doesn’t want to train Rey, he doesn’t want her on the island and it takes Chewie blowing up Luke’s hut door to have Luke ask the question: “Where’s Han?”. But god forbid we pause on that and take a moment to explore the pain of losing one’s best friend, instead we need to cut away to…
Well, to be honest I don’t remember and can’t give a crap what the cut was exactly done for, all that I do remember is that we cut away from a chance to bond with Luke over his experiencing the news of losing his best friend, and I found that noticeable and frustrating at the time.
Back on the main cruiser of the Resistance fleet, Finn wakes up from his coma to find himself being demoted from main character candidate to the status of comic relief. Finn was a character that was naturally humorous in the previous film (which, to be fair, makes very little sense considering his history, but that’s a whole other category of nitpicking), which enabled us to “laugh with him”, rather than “at him”, but in this film the “at him” is certainly more apparent.
After listening to the most cringe-worthy speech possible from Vice-Admiral Purple Hair who’s not in uniform, but wearing a dress because reasons, Finn realises that if he’s ever going to get a chance to see Rey again, he needs to abandon the fleet because it looks like they’re heading down the road leading to a no-win scenario.
This leads us to the introduction of a new character, Rose, who is the sister of the Kamikaze girl from the beginning of the movie, who knocks Finn out in the middle of a recycled routine of “I am with the Resistance” and then is revealed to us that she has the technical knowledge required to retro-engineer how the First Order is tracking them and how to knock it out.
Smash cut to the gratuitous cameo of Maz Kanata and we can begin the unnecessary side-quest. Many-a-critics of this film tend to be of the opinion that this side-quest was included in the movie just so that Finn would have something to do and so we have an excuse to “develop” the character of Rose, and that the movie would have been better served if it was dropped altogether.
I certainly could have done without it, especially when considering the fact that it has absolutely no bearing on the outcome of the movie, but then where would Rian Johnson get the chance to preach about the evil of capitalism and animal abuse, and how would he introduce Benicio Del Toro’s character (a very transparent Lando Calrissian callback, by the way)?
Look, putting the crappy characters aside for a minute, the linear non-imaginative writing, the fact that nothing on screen seemed to make any sense, the fact that this whole movie happens during a prolonged naval chase where the smaller lighter ships keep just outside of the effective artillery range but can’t pull away for some reason because we’ve already established that physics laws are irrelevant, therefore two objects travelling at different speeds will NOT move farther and farther apart, regardless of what reality might have taught you to expect…
Putting all of that aside for a moment, what probably pissed me off the most in this movie, as I was watching it, or the very least in the top two, was all the heavy handed preaching over current events.
As I’ve said before, the prequels contained something that could be perceived as a veiled attack of the Bush administration (especially Episode Two), but to be fair, there was a much larger theme at play in there: democracy does ALWAYS die with thunderous applause, regardless if it was Pericles, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler, George W. Bush, Hugo Chavez, Angela Merkel or Barrack Obama who killed it at the time, it was a theme much larger than the moment and it had that to fall back on, the universality of said theme.
At this point in time, we have something, in real life called “the resistance movement” or the “resist” movement, who think of themselves as standing up in the name of the oppressed everywhere and purple-haired Laura Dern utters what is probably the first ever inclusion of the words “the oppressed” in a Star Wars script, that’s pretty transparent.
When you get Rose “educating” Finn on how all the “beautiful” wealth at Canto Bight is actually bought with weapons money (because somehow making weapons is evil, because US democrats and EU globalist have decreed weapons to be evil rather than the very tools of the preservation of human civilisation).
And when she’s then “revealing” to him how it’s all supported by slavery, and how smashing other people’s property is not only liberating and cathartic but somehow justified (hello ANTIFA).
And let’s not forget that the wookie who is known for ripping limbs off of people who beat him at chess, is now a reformed vegetarian. Yes, Chewbacca is a vegetarian, because porgs are just so damned cute, right?
Thank you, Ryan Johnson and Disney, for bringing me a large serving of social-justice current political themes into my space fantasy, that’s just what I needed to escape my day-to-day… If there’s someone stupid enough not to get the sarcasm of my last statement, you can stop reading right now.
Benicio Del Toro’s character, who was so well established that I don’t remember his name at this point, was actually responsible for my single positive connection to this movie.
He’s fundamentally a libertarian, someone who works by a different moral system than all the other characters in the movie and when he tries to expose the hypocrisy of the thought system held by Rose and recently adhered to by Finn, it falls on deaf ears as it normally does in real life too.
Critically, I find it interesting that this character exists and does what he does. There are two ways to analyse his arc. One, just by going on what was left included in the theatrical release, because he betrays Finn and Rose and doesn’t get to redeem himself explicitly, he is meant to condemn those who sit on the sidelines of the fight refusing to buy into the morality that is motivating those involved in the fight.
The other, going by the history of Star Wars, and by the implications that it was him who helps them escape again, who helped BB8 take control of that AT-AT, it means that Benicio Del Toro is ultimately someone who prefers to stay on the sidelines, who prefers to maximise their own survivability, but who can still discern where the greater evil is and lend a helping hand to the better side as long as his own exposure is limited.
Either way, the character and his philosophy were a refreshing presence mostly due to the contrast it provided to the rest of the behaviours and motivations of the people in this movie.
While on the island, Rey develops a mental connection to Ben, which made me think that we are going to see the archetypal story of the purposeless male force channeled in the proper direction by female influence, or in plainer terms, the black knight being reformed by his love of the virtuous princess/maiden.
The story moves along these lines for a very long time, before it’s senselessly diverted for what feels to be a “just because we need a villain” moment, but it could also have been done in order to prevent this trilogy from becoming “Ben’s story”.
If you go back to the original trilogy and ask yourself who’s the main character, only one answer can win out: it’s Luke. In A New Hope, it’s clearly Luke. There is room for some debate on wether he is the main character of Empire, he ultimately is, even though Han is a much stronger main character in his own story-arc, but coupled with Return of the Jedi, Luke is definitely the main character of the two episode story.
Incidentally, this is the biggest draw-back of the prequels. There is no good answer when you ask who is the main character of the prequels. You’re tempted to say it’s Anakin, but that’s not correct as far as episode one is concerned.
Not only is he played by two different actors throughout the trilogy(which is very hard to pull off with a “main character”), but in the first movie, Anakin is nothing more than a tag-along. The next go-to answer is Obi-Wan, and yes, that is a good answer, but the story is not told from his perspective.
With episode seven, it’s Rey’s movie. All the other characters are in a supporting role, even though Han absolutely steals the show for the length of time that he’s on screen, but you could argue, had Ben managed to complete the story I outlined above and be “turned to the good side” by Rey in episode eight, it could have turned him into the main character of this trilogy. Sadly, the movie, be it for political reasons or others, decides to pull one of its many “fake-outs” at the time.
Luke is one of the worst handled characters in this movie and it’s no surprise that Mark Hamill is on record as having disagreed with every character choice that Rian Johnson made, but I would have been fine with all of it, if only one thing was changed.
I already mentioned what was one of the two things that I would have changed (having Leia die for real when she was blown out into space), it’s with Luke that I would have done the other.
Luke’s portrayed as a disillusioned, bitter and angry old man, scared of his own limitations, stuck in place, in a sense he could be the wilfully blind father archetype that I mentioned before, but his story arc doesn’t follow that narrative.
He’s “talked” into training Rey by a recycled “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re our only hope”, reluctantly announces that he’ll be giving her three lessons (one of them ends up on the cutting room floor) and then explaining to her why he thinks the Jedi must end.
This part is the superimposition that I referred to earlier of the buddhist “alien” culture, which even with my limited means of understanding it, I think it’s misinterpreted in this particular usage of it, and mistakenly believing that it’s what makes a movie “for women”, the alien aspect.
There’s a heavy-handed play on the theme of balance which, in true inconsistent fashion, is only used when convenient (Rey becomes more powerful with the force because Ben becomes more powerful with the force, but Snoke, who’s more powerful than the both of them, is not balanced by anybody, because Luke has cut himself off from the force…).
Meditation seems to be the new go to mechanism which is quite a departure from Luke’s one-handed hand-stand with legs shot straight up and supporting Yoda, back on Dagobah while of course “lifting rocks” of all things, and in the end there’s even a superficial approach to ascension and “integration into the Nirvana”, not to mention “astral projections”.
Luke’s argument, as far as I can tell, is that the force is in balance on its own and trying to manipulate it, even if for the good, because of the balanced nature of it, will end up generating the balancing evil manipulations and, implicitly the evil manipulators.
It’s the ascetic’s way of heeding the old warning of “here be dragons” which is ultimately an over-simplified one-dimensional distillation of the essence of buddhism which preaches the re-integration of the self into the universe, through renouncing the material condition of being.
It is, in essence a constant withdrawal into the self, and a strategy that is fundamentally pursuing the same desired outcome – a reduction of suffering – as the western philosophy based in the judaeo-christian religions, which themselves are based in Egyptian, Babylonian and ancient Mesopotamian religions, but going about it in a most different way than what we, in the western world, are used to.
Instead of placing the most value in the archetypal figure of the explorer, the revealer of truth, the mapmaker who has the capacity to push back chaos and carve out a known territory in the here and now where happiness is an option (especially valid after the protestant reformation of the church, but the themes are valid and present throughout the older incarnations of said religions, going back all the way to Marduk), instead of that, buddhism teaches one to live in the absence of known territory and teaches one not to get attached to any territory because the chaos which is greater than any man’s will and intentions, will wipe out any territory given enough time.
It’s not necessarily a bad approach although it seems unproductive to me, at least if you care about living and “the living”, but that’s ultimately a subjective evaluation.
The problem that I have pertaining to the movie is with the abrupt re-framing of the entire philosophy of what the force is, what you can do and what you should do with it and especially with the reasons behind this giant paradigm shift being a “misunderstanding” in essence of Luke’s intentions with regards to Ben and the spiralling out-of-control consequences of that.
I did like the perspective shift of telling the same moment from the eyes of Ben and Luke, but regardless of which perspective you can understand and empathise with, and I can do so with both, by the way, there are a few facts in that story that are absolutely disturbing regardless of perspective and completely clashing with the character of Luke Skywalker that had already been established in the original trilogy.
I’m not gonna spend too much time on the “Luke would have never considered killing his nephew and drawn the sword” because it’s pretty much been a drum that’s been beaten to death by the critics of this movie, but NO HE WOULDN’T FUCKING HAVE, but additionally, I find it very hard to believe that Luke would have mentally probed an unconscious/asleep Ben in order to divine his intentions.
It’s an act that not only lacks any concept of consent, that not only implies the complete and utter absence of a person’s freedom of choice (a fundamental concept in the western tradition/not so much in the predestined view of the universe of the eastern tradition), but the act can only exist in the imagination of someone (and I’m talking about the writer/director here, not about Luke) who sees no problem with the concept that I can know what you think better than you. Now if that brings to your mind a certain faction of society that would normally make me sick to my stomach, you’re not alone in that.
Now, I don’t have a problem with the fact that Rey’s parents turned out to be nobodies, I kinda like that idea on its own, to be honest, but it’s not something that episode seven set up, and considering the fact that even this movie spends a long amount of time pondering this question (hello the temporal string of Reys), the way it was dismissed was just another fake-out.
The idea just occurred to me that the purpose of this movie is to make you not invest yourself into anything, because there is absolutely no set-up that this movie made, or that was given to it by the previous movie, that wasn’t wasted on a fake-out.
Literally nothing paid off, everything was useless. If that was the purpose of the movie, then fine, it was a great success in conveying that, but I very much doubt that Disney would sanction such a message.
So, anyway, Rey leaves Luke on the island convinced that she can reclaim Ben from the dark side because she telepathically talked to him long enough to humanise him in her own mind.
It’s pretty hilarious though, from a pop-corn popper’s perspective, that his humanisation process began with a shirtless scene, but whatever the reason, it’s normal that Ben and Rey would flow together because they are the only two similar characters in this story. Their paths are similar and they’re the only ones who can adeptly empathise with the other.
But, it turns out that Snoke was in control of it all leading into a throne-room show down with Snoke and Rey where he mind-rapes Rey to extract the location of the planet where Luke’s hiding is, setting up another conflict and potential storyline just to have it crumble within a couple of minutes.
In this scene Snoke is more powerful than anyone can imagine, Ben and Rey are just no match for his power, even put together. So at this point, in spite of all the bad taste I had in my mouth from the useless heavy handed preaching from Canto Bight and from seeing Luke’s pathetic quitter, bitter, nihilist condition, I was slowly getting pulled back into the movie.
“Oh my God”, was the chain of thought, “this bastard is soooo powerful, how are they gonna take him down? Did they just supercharge their villain too much?”. And then, the mental sleight of hand of a five year old is what does him in…
“I see his mind as he’s preparing to draw the sword and strike down his true enemy…”
By this point, my head was in my hands, because the lightsaber next to him had already been shown to be moving… I was still holding out hope, though. I mean, only a few seconds before, we had seen Snoke being in so much control that he redirected the lightsaber that Rey force pulled, to hit her in the back of the head before harmlessly coming back to him, so SURELY he could feel the damned saber force moving next to him…
But no. Rian Johnson decided that the most mysterious figure in the Star Wars universe next to Darth Plagus, would have a fitting ending at the hands of the old Scooby switcheroo…
And then the situation “explodes” into Ben and Rey fighting the red guards together. Every fan boy and their grandmother salivated over this fight in their reviews… but I was just waiting to get it over with. What did you think was gonna happen?
They just killed the most powerful character in the universe, do you think some eunuch ninjas with red pyjamas are actually posing any danger to them? Come on… I was more invested ordering my pop-corn menu, than during that scene, it was just something they had to get done (for the “fans” and the producers) before they could have their heart to heart of “where do we go from here?”.
But writer’s inconsistency strikes again. I was actually willing to buy Ben as the redeeming fallen angel archetype, as the black knight that ends up reforming himself for the love of a virtuous maiden and slaying the tyrant king, but god forbid we ever let an arc reach completion.
Let’s put ourselves in Ben’s boots for a moment: he killed his own father, watched his mother die in front of him (there no reason to believe Ben knows Leia survived), then killed his mentor because he was threatening the woman he’d fallen in love with because she was the only one that showed him some empathy, and when this woman asks him to stop the killing of her friends, he goes: “Naaaah, let it all burn… I know I just sacrificed my entire universe because you treated me with some humanity, but let me kill your friends off and then we can live happily/orderly ever after”.
There is no point in the saga where Ben is depicted as a psychopath, and it makes zero sense that he would be one, so I’ll just chuck this one up to Rian Johnson saying: “I’ve written myself into a corner, I can’t let Ben redeem himself, I need him to be the villain, so… NO”.
I’ll just skim over Poe’s mutiny and vice-admiral Purple-Hair in saying that: either purple-hair can’t tell Poe the plan because the audience isn’t allowed to know the plan at that point in the story, or she won’t tell Poe the plan because he’s a hothead man and she’s in charge he needs to learn to “respect her authoritae”…
So it’s either shitty writing, or she’s a by the book idiot who doesn’t understand the difference between theory and practice… Considering the fact that she’s later presented as the old and trusted friend of Leia, I’m more inclined to go with the first explanation of shitty writing. On the other hand the feminist tropes are a little on the nose and deliberate and damn if they don’t fit with the rest of the SJW preachy vibe I’ve gotten from this movie.
So with the movie limping away to the final showdown, wasting a great effect with everything going to complete silence on the breaking of another “in universe law” with vice-admiral purple hair kamikaze-ing her cruiser into the large destroyer at light speed (which begs the question, why not develop light-speed torpedoes, or why not use this light speed kamikaze strategy to take out the original Death Star), we go back to the island for the final moralising lesson.
We see Yoda, who for some unknown reason is acting all crazy like he did on Dagobah before revealing who he really was to Luke, something he only did at the time to force Luke to challenge his own pre-conceptions. And Yoda endorses the idea of burning down the anchors of tradition (which not only it couldn’t be more alien to a redemption story, being part of the purge mythology rather than the redemption mythology, in other words it has no connection with any story arc that Luke is suggested to be a part of, but it’s the very thing that Ben suggests doing only for some reason it’s bad when Ben’s suggesting it, but it’s laudable when Yoda’s suggesting it). Also, all the fanboys panties got wet when Yoda proclaims: “failure, the greatest teacher is”.
Seriously? That’s meant to be the revelation? That’s the moral message and moral takeaway from all this? Don’t be afraid to make mistakes because you learn the most from them?
While that’s true to some extent, I can’t take you seriously, movie, when you say that in the same breath in which you say, we need to purge out all of our tradition and accumulated wisdom…
In any case, was there really anybody who watched the tree going up in flames, corroborated with the x-wing sunk in the bay, who didn’t think Luke was going back at that point?
Detour for a second to talk about Captain Phasma. Can we just agree that it was absolutely ridiculous to bring her back (she was allegedly in a trash compactor, on Star Killer base, the planet that blew up) as a “nemesis” for Finn? A nemesis that he dispatches as quickly as she came back, but taking the time to remind us that white people in positions of authority are racist. Why do you think the visor is smashed just enough on her helmet so you can see Gwendolyn’s blue eye and a bit of her face as she says: “you are and always will be scum”?
Okay, so here we are on the salt planet, (absolutely GORGEOUS visuals, by the way, 10 out of 10, no joke) reenacting the battle of Hoth with newer characters and different goals and despair is setting in as it’s becoming more and more apparent that no allies answered the call for help.
Regardless, the rag-tag crew of pilots that are left, go out in ass-old speeders and try to defend their base. And it looks like Finn is going to do the whole self-sacrifice thing and drive his speeder into the big gun in order to stop the First Order from breaking down the gate of the base.
And I was sitting there already pretty frustrated at some of the stuff that had been going on, but I was being lured back in… I mean, here was Finn, one of the major characters, that I was attached to, putting it all up to save his friends, a full story arc for the man who was three times presented to us as a deserter.
The scene is set, the music swells up, chills go up the spine, hairs start standing on end, all the fix’uns, and then…
BANG! Rose slams her speeder into Finn’s and knocks him over to the side….
Wha’? Wha’? Wha’? Brace yourselves, boys, here’s the big payoff: “you don’t win by fighting what you hate, you win by protecting what you love…” followed by a kindergarten kiss coming completely out of left field.
That line is delivered with all the depth of an overnight fabricated K-POP teen idol and if it was accompanied by a: “hi-hi…” and peace sign, there would have been no difference from the way it just fell flat in the movie.
At this point in time, I, along with at least half the audience, we were going WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!? The movie was just literally done presenting in a hugely positive light the self-sacrifice of Rose’s own sister, and vice-admiral Purple Hair… Not to mention the idiotic break-down in logic, because most times you fight what you hate in order to protect what you love, I mean, for fuck’s sake, that’s what Finn was doing there, he was going to protect his friends from the “dreaded ram-cannon”…
But no, I guess he was wrong for whatever reason… Reason? No, it has nothing to do with reason… Reason is not in Rian Johnson’s vocabulary, that’s just not his word.
So here we go… the resistance is completely helpless and about to get wiped out by the First Order, when from somewhere in the back of the cave Luke Skywalker appears. And you can instantly see that there’s something different about him. He looks and feels like old Luke from Return of the Jedi, walking into Jabba’s place, self-assured and confident, calm and collected and totally in control. His beard looks different and his hair is neatly trimmed, but his entire attitude is different.
At this point I was thinking: “Luke’s back! LUKE IS BACK!” and I was back in it. And he walks out, a single man in front of the inferno, and all the weapons focus fire at him and he should have been vaporised, but you know he’s fine, and he walks out and ostentatiously dusts himself off. IT IS ON!!!!
“What do you expect me to do, walk out there with a laser sword in front of the whole First Order?”
YES! YES! YES, GODDAMMIT! That’s exactly what we expected you to do. I was giddy in my seat at this point. The movie fucked around with us for so long, but here it is, we’re going to get it! Luke, the greatest Jedi of all time, a single man standing up into the face of evil, planting his foot down and making his stand, giving his friends a chance to escape. Pop-corn ready, lights, camera, action, let’s do this epic lightsaber battle that we’ve been all saving ourselves for!
Swing one, and a miss.
Swing two, and a miss.
Okay, he’s teasing us, it’s okay, it’s coming. We can’t possible get hung up on the fact that Luke won’t raise his sword against his nephew…Surely he can fight defensively, he just managed to deflect all the firepower from all the damned AT-ATs, I mean, surely!
Nope, fake-out!
“You think this is the real Quaid?”…
<<shaking my head in disappointment>>
Turns out Luke’s back on his island in Ireland meditating…
The comfort he offered Leia, fake. The reunion of the characters on screen that people had longed for for FOURTY YEARS, fake. The awesome display of power from two minutes before, fake. The peril about Luke’s life being in danger, fake… Well… Wink, wink. Because it turns out, he fucking dies anyway from meditating too hard.
In the meantime Rey, (I have no idea how she got back on the Millennium Falcon, but I hear it’s in a scene that was cut for time, didn’t bother me at the time though, so it was probably the right call) finds the back entrance to the rebel base, uses the force to “lift some rocks” and allow the rebels to escape to the Millennium Falcon and get off planet.
Cut to Canto Bight and one of the children holding Rose’s rebellion pin and telling stories to the other children that seemed to be about the battle we had just seen. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but then again neither does the narration which basically says, well, we’re all fucked now, we’ve done our bit, it’s up to the next generation to take the torch. Seriously, the only way this comes together into any semblance of a narrative continuum is if you look at this whole movie as an allegory of birth. But, the movie even defeats itself on this point as well. You employ an allegory when you have something that is not fully understood and you want to flesh out the details, when you want to present a new or different explanation for something. The allegory, whatever it is, contains in itself a message. There’s none of that, in this movie. Ok, if you were extremely lenient, you could say the message is: there’s a lot of pain involved in giving birth… Whoa, somebody hold the damned presses! No, actually, we can let them roll, because we KNOW that already. In fact, it’s why we invented painkillers, Sherlock!
I said before that I would have changed two things. The first one was Leia’s death, I would have made that permanent. The second one, I would have had Luke show up in person, using the same imagery of the confident Jedi Knight (not of “Jake Skywalker” the crabby hermit), and duel it out with Ben in the most awesome lightsaber duel you can imagine, all the while using force powers to crash all the AT-ATs into one another and maybe even pull one of the destroyers down from orbit causing the First Order to run away deserting Ben which would anger Ben even more, cause him to rage out and kill Luke (Obi-Wan-Kenobi on the Death Star style) and then be left alone on the salt planet, crying (preferably).
Here’s the problem with this movie overall, I left the theatre wondering if this is it for Star Wars for me. Not only did I have no desire to see this movie again, but it made me wonder if I want to see the next Star Wars movie and I’m not talking about the Han Solo movie, I’m talking about episode nine.
I was so despondent, so yanked around, so disheartened by the state in which the characters were left, that I didn’t care anymore. And it’s not that I’m thinking that the resistance can’t win or anything like that, it’s that Han died for nothing, Luke really died for nothing and they turned him into a fucking coward while they were at it and Leia will either die off screen or there’ll be a horrible CGI death scene… The legacy, is gone… It’s floating in outer space with Admiral Ackbar’s cold corpse.
As of putting together this review, almost a month has passed since I saw the movie and I can certainly say that the passage of time doesn’t do anything in this case. Star Wars Episode 8 – The Last Jedi was the movie that killed Star Wars for me. I’d like to rank it below number nine, I’d like to rank it below number infinity and have it never having happened. I don’t think that there’s anything that can fix this, I mean short of JJ saying, man, how about them blue milk induced hallucinations, eh and try and Dallas the whole Episode into a weird dream and basically re-do the episode starting from Leia’s death and release that as Episode 9. Short of that, I don’t see a new hope appearing from anywhere.
I have a tradition of rating movies by setting up what I think the fair price would be for yourself in order to buy a copy. In this case the price is ZERO. I can’t recommend spending money for this movie, I just can’t. There’s only one question that still holds my interest at this point in regard to Star Wars (absent the miracle scenario I outlined above for Dallasing Episode 9) and that is: will we beg for George Lucas before the end?
