darthfledermaus

[darthfledermaus]

My Review of The Last Jedi

I’ve seen TLJ a couple of times now. Overall I recommend it. There is much to like and some to love, but there are also problems that are not minor. Below I have some thoughts that include many spoilers. Don’t read further if you haven’t seen the movie.

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What I Liked

Quite a lot.

The movie really quite beautiful. Johnson’s use of color and composition to establish pacing and tone are brilliant. I love that so many wonderful artists and craftspeople work at Lucasfilm doing animation, sets, character design, costumes, creatures, and CGI. They are some of the best in the world and I admire their work unreservedly. When Lucasfilm announced with the new trilogy that they would do as much as they could with practical effects I was skeptical that it would look cheesy in this modern digital age, but by now they really have it down.

It is especially great that they used the original molds to create a new Yoda puppet and had Frank Oz back. Unlike James Earl Jones, whose voice work in Rogue One clearly shows that he has aged, Oz’s Yoda is as he always was. Delightful.

The score, again by John Williams, is very good as always. I don’t find it as compelling as in some of the movies (the prequel trilogy, despite numerous problems, had stunning orchestration), but it is easily good enough. (The sound design was perfectly adequate, but it bears note that Ben Burtt, who did the sound in all of the first 6 SW movies, is no longer involved. Sound design is something not usually noticed in an action movie, but his work was brilliant and its absence leaves the new movies without that extra touch of auditory perfection.)

I also like the way Johnson establishes several themes that repeat and resonate throughout the movie. The basic one is of letting go of the past, but others include stepping up to responsibility and learning about one’s true self. I like how these are echoed back and forth between the heroes and villains. The use of humor throughout the movie was well timed and tonally right (some have complained about the Poe/Hux communications gag at the start, but I thought it worked just fine). I think the thematic coherence is a lot of why the movie has scored so well with critics, who really tend to notice that sort of thing.

All of the action scenes are well filmed—it is always clear what is happening, which is often not the case with modern movies. I have come to appreciate clarity very much.

The cast is good to excellent, with no poor performances. The performances by Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Daisy Ridley, and Mark Hamill are especially solid, but there are no weak links. Ridley and both of her co-stars have great chemistry together. Andy Serkis also does very well with his portrayal of of what turned out to be a fairly uninteresting villain, doing some fun scenery chewing without overdoing it.

Mark Hamill plays old tired Luke very, very well. Luke was always a flawed character who makes mistakes but comes through at the end. He manages to be true to that history while also being, ultimately, a wise Jedi master.

I thought Kylo was one of the best conceived characters in TFA and I continue to like him TLJ. It was a great decision to not try to out-Vader Vader. His further development into a more mature and capable villain (but not super-villain) makes internal sense and works on pretty much every level. The relationship between him and Rey is very well played.

Similarly, the reveal that Rey’s parents were nobodies was the right choice. There was no established character that she could be related to without causing all sorts of plot problems. As Rian Johnson has said in interviews, the hardest thing that she could have discovered was that she had been abandoned by her now dead, no good parents, just as the hardest thing for Luke to find out in ESB was that his father was Vader. Good choice.

The scene with Kylo and Rey fighting Snoke’s guards is solid, ending with the mutual discovery that they will have to be enemies after all. That is a very well done piece of romantic drama, almost operatic. It fits the emotional scope of of a SW movie perfectly.  

Luke vs. Kylo was also really fun to watch. The choice to have him then pass on is bittersweet, but fit the old tired Luke character they had established since the last scene in TFA. I really hope they bring him back as a Force ghost in the next movie. Hamill has become a fine actor as he has aged and it will be a shame if they do not take further advantage of his talents—especially with the untimely passing of Carrie Fisher.

Speaking of Carrie, I thought she did well with Leia. I think it shows that she was in ill health. It doesn’t look like she had full control of her face and physical movements, for whatever reasons that may be related to a long and sometimes difficult life and career (about which she bravely made no secret during her lifetime). If she had been healthier I think she could have portrayed Leia a bit more fluidly. As it was, seeing her play this role for the last time was evocative and bittersweet. Having Leia display facility with the Force by instinctively using telekinesis to save herself, is a an inspired touch. The final meeting between her and Luke, in which they were able to share one last tender joke, is perfect. Eyes did not remain dry in the audience as that played out.

Finally, the last scene, with a force-sensitive child inspired by the story of Luke Skywalker, is great touch.

What I Was Neutral or Ambivalent About

I don’t mind the porgs. The new character, Rose, is a serviceable but a fairly unremarkable example of the Spunky Female trope. She’s presumably set up as a love interest for Finn, since Rey will almost certainly continue to be asexual (Rey/Kylo is not going to happen) and Disney is unlikely to go with the fan speculation of a romantic relationship between him and Poe.

It was a good choice to get rid of Snoke to make way for the ascension of Kylo, but Snoke turns out to be a generic villain in the same manner that Rose is a generic supporting hero. He is almost exactly the same character as the Emperor is in RotJ. He even dies in the same way—done in by overconfidence in the loyalty of his apprentice, in his throne room, while trying to turn a young potential Jedi who shows great promise. It’s fine that they take Snoke out in act 2 of the second movie instead of act 3 of the third, but that variance in timing from the original trilogy turns out to be the only thing notable about him.

What I Didn’t Like

I thought the script had some significant problems. The biggest was the side plot with Rose and Finn. SW is a genre full of harebrained schemes—the plan to rescue Leia from the Death Star was pretty farfetched, for example. However, this one is not only an obvious long shot, but also nonsensical. The First Order can track ships through hyperspace, OK. All of their ships can do that tracking, but our heroes know (how?) that only one of them is actually doing it. So they need to do, uh, something or other to interrupt it. It’s a bunch of obvious bullshit technobabble that could easily have been streamlined into something that makes more sense. They set it up like a mini caper film but then don’t really follow through. (The bit with the video call to Maz is hilarious, though.)

The trip to Canto Bight is well-filmed, but…problematic. Unfortunately, we have yet another movie made by very rich people about how all rich people are irredeemable monsters. Rose’s declaration that the only way to get wealthy enough to visit a casino planet is to trade in weapons is just stupid. We have a galaxy spanning civilization with pervasive space travel and city-covered planets. Yet nothing but weapons can be traded profitably? Food, minerals, luxury goods, speeders, droids? Nothing? There are no rich movie (er, holovid) producers? The banality of what I can only think of as unthinking Hollywood Marxism-lite, from incredibly rich capitalist moviemakers, is beyond parody. Of course, this could just be Rose’s ignorance (any glance at a typical social media feed shows how little most people know about the culture they live in), but that she is presented as savvy and then says something so dimwitted demonstrates the cluelessness of people making movies these days.

A bigger problem is that the side trip is not just a pointless failure, it is a disastrous mistake. I can live with the coincidence of running randomly another one-of-a kind brilliant hacker after the first one turned out to be unavailable. This is SW after all. The hacker (not named but credited as DJ) is presented as a sort of lovable rogue, and he is played very well (with a great stutter!) by Benicio Del Toro. Then when caught he betrays not only Rose and Finn, but also that he has somehow (how exactly?) discovered that the Resistance is escaping in cloaked ships. That leads to most of those ships being destroyed. 

So the decision on the part of Poe, Finn, and Rose to disobey orders not only doesn’t work, it leads directly to the destruction of what remains of the Resistance. Such self destructiveness on the part of our heroes really falls flat in a SW movie. It’s supposed to be about the heroes making mistakes, of course, but not in ways that foolishly destroy their own cause. In a just world, Finn, Poe, Rose, and their coconspirators would be executed for their disastrous betrayal of their comrades. They certainly shouldn’t be trusted with anything ever again.

Meanwhile, Admiral Holdo is also an idiot. Leia trusts her despite her utter lack of leadership skills. She pushes Poe into mutiny for no reason. This is what ruins the escape plan and destroys almost all of what remains of the Resistance. Her stupidity sticks out as something that clearly happens only because writer needs to move the plot along in a particular way.

The battle on Crait is cool and well shot, but once again our heroes are stupid. They attack, lose a bunch of people they need, then  give up when they realize what should have been clear from the beginning. Finn can sacrifice himself to stop the First Order from cracking their defenses, but Poe calls him off. I get that they want to show character development in both Poe and Finn. Poe is supposedly learning not to sacrifice his people unnecessarily, but this would have been a sensible tradeoff—losing one man to defeat the First Order’s ability to crack their defenses and kill everyone. If that’s not the time to make a sacrifice, what is? I guess Poe has learned to be OK with sending endless nameless minions to their deaths, but not his personal friends. Maybe he will learn more in the next movie.

They also want to show Finn’s development from the bumbling coward he was through acts 1 and 2 of TFA to a loyal  friend in act 3 ofTFA and act 1 of TLJ to a self-sacrificing hero at the end of this movie. Fair enough. But they don’t want him to actually die. So Rose saves him. That leads to the dumbest line in the movie (the second dumbest, already discussed, is also uttered by Rose on Canto Bight). Rose tells Finn that he is a dummy for not realizing that the First Order won’t be defeated by attacking them, but through the power of Love or something. That’s not an exact quote, but the line really is that vapid. This is a galaxy spanning, planet destroying war. It’s going to have to be won by actually fighting the First Order, not by getting nice people together to sing Kumbaya. That’s what led to victory against the Empire (with lots of sacrifice by thousands of unnamed Rebels). There isn’t any way that there won’t be more big battles like that in the last movie of this trilogy.

Finally, there is the Holdo Maneuver (which was filmed stunningly). Let me get this straight. As it turns out, a small ship can use its hyperspace engines to smash a vast super dreadnought. So…why hasn’t that happened in every space battle for the last 10,000 years? Why bother with lasers and torpedoes? Why are there any capital ships? Why didn’t they smash the Death Star with a couple of cruisers? Why aren’t all space battles dominated by hyperspace missiles? Because bad writing, that’s why.

(Also, no one says, “I have a bad feeling about this” in TLJ. How can you call it a SW movie without that?)

Overall

I have been there for all of these movies; I’m old enough to have seen the original Star Wars in the theatres (seven times). I’ve seen all of the others within a few days of theatrical release. I want to like any SW movie, and I do like this one.

The Last Jedi is divisive. The audience approval scores are low; as low as those for The Phantom Menace, which is not exactly beloved. I have seen fan reviews across the scale from “best SW movie since Empire Strikes Back” to “as bad as the worst of the prequels.”

I can understand both reactions. Like the best of Star Wars, we are treated to admirable heroes thrown into heart stopping adventure, villains who are both evil and engaging, beautifully envisioned planets and creatures, big exciting battle scenes, and an operatic plot that pulls us in and keeps things moving. I had a good time watching it.

But there are also ways that this doesn’t feel like the same universe the first two trilogies are set in. All planets are now a 20 minute jump from all other planets. You could understand how the Empire had vast resources through controlling the output of a galaxy; in these movies the First Order has vast fleets and legions solely because the writers want them to. While the Force is clearly space magic, you could find a logic to some people having sensitivity to it that could be developed through arduous training. In these movies Rey is incredibly powerful just because the writers want her to be. In the next movie she will certainly be a “Jedi” despite having no more than a few hours of actual training with Luke. Will Rey’s Super Force Power ever be reconciled with what had been previously established? No, I don’t think they will bother. They just want her to have that power, without having to earn it, so she does. (If it turns out that I’m wrong, and they do present a viable explanation in Episode 9, I will be very happy to admit that.)

Lucas created what felt like a big, lived-in universe, with flawed characters we couldn’t help but fall in love with. He failed with much of the prequel trilogy because it didn’t quite live up to that, and this new trilogy now has some of the same flaws.

I’ve read an interview with Hamill in which he says that this was not the Luke he knew. He had to think of him as a different character in order to play him. He did his best to portray that version of Luke in this movie, but he would never have imagined or written the character that way. (He has since walked back those comments and said that he came to see the legitimacy of this version of Luke.) I’m still thinking about that; people can change a lot in 30 years. But ultimately, to make these new movies the way they wanted, they had to largely disavow the first 6. The Empire was not really defeated. The Force was not balanced. The Republic was not restored. The Rebellion failed. Han and Leia couldn’t be happy together. R2 shut down. Luke failed, gave up, and ran away.

I know they couldn’t make movies without some sort of new peril, but it’s discouraging that the message is that the story we followed for so many years turned out to be largely meaningless. I wonder if better and more respectful writers could have started a new series without that abandonment of previously established plot resolution.