Film critic Steven Greydanus reviews The Last Jedi for The National Catholic Register.
Before we dig in, a reminder: You were warned.
Greydanus begins conventionally enough with the sorts of bland compliments you’d expect from any film reviewer who wants to keep his job under the ever-expanding Mouse Monopoly.
In the Disney age of Star Wars, J.J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens tried, too derivatively, to recapitulate the flavor of the original trilogy. By contrast, Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One jettisoned the mythopoeic and even partially deconstructed the traditional heroism of prior films.
The Last Jedi, from writer-director Rian Johnson, continues that trajectory, though in a more entertaining and crowd-pleasing vein than Rogue One.
The Last Jedi offers humor, excitement and spectacle, with space battles and lightsaber duels. The Force Awakens had all those things, but The Last Jedi also has fresh story beats and new ideas.
What, pray tell, are these “new ideas”?
…an increasingly diverse portrait of the Resistance, from an ingenuous maintenance worker named Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran, of Vietnamese descent), who’s briefly starstruck by John Boyega’s runaway stormtrooper Finn, to the pink-haired Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo (Laura Dern), a character reminiscent of Mon Mothma, but with a more pivotal role.
More diversity! Which isn’t a new idea; just more of the same idea that’s been present in the Star Wars franchise since the introduction of Mace Windu, and it could be argued, Lando Calrissian.
I suppose that The Last Jedi takes a new approach to diversity by pushing it to the forefront of the narrative. Bold move. Time will tell if cramming diversity down the audience’s throat works as well for Star Wars as it has for Disney’s other once-iconic acquisition Marvel Comics.
After burning his pinch of incense to the diversity gods, Greydanus spends the rest of his review attempting an even-handed critique of the movie’s flaws while fighting a losing battle to hide his thinly veiled disappointment and contempt.
Daisy Ridley’s Rey is back, of course, and it turns out that her key relationship in this film is with neither Finn nor Luke, but Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren — a dynamic that gives both their characters what interest they have. Oscar Isaac’s hotshot pilot Poe Dameron would be the film’s swashbuckling hero, if there were one.
Is this enough? I’m sure it will be for many fans. Yet as the complicated, messy plot unfolds, the lack of a larger vision in this new trilogy becomes more glaring. The Force Awakens wasn’t a great film, but The Last Jedi makes it worse in its failure to pay off or follow up on the first film’s mysteries and promises. (I’ll try to avoid overt spoilers, but if you care deeply about remaining totally unspoiled, stop reading now.)
I’ll second Greydanus’ SPOILER ALERT, but honestly, if you skim over this warning, and I end up spoiling The Last Jedi for you, at least I’ll have saved you ten bucks and three hours of your life.
Start with Supreme Leader Snoke, the mysterious computer-generated leader of the First Order played by Andy Serkis. Introduced in The Force Awakens as a giant hologram, he returns to this film as a sort of amalgam of the Emperor and Darth Vader — except he’s ultimately a zero. To the extent that The Last Jedi has a villain, and to the extent that Snoke is that villain, it’s a close call whether The Last Jedi or Justice League has the year’s dullest, least consequential villain.
Then there’s the question of Rey’s origins, her extraordinary raw capacity for the Force, and her apparent connection to Luke, whose lightsaber called to her from Maz Kanata’s cellar and showed her troubling visions of Luke and Kylo Ren.
“I’ve seen this raw strength only once before,” Luke tells Rey in this film, referring to Ren. “It didn’t scare me enough then. It does now.” Indeed, Rey’s power may be greater than Ren’s; she’s a match for him, despite her lack of training and his training by Snoke.
Ren, aka Ben Solo, is the grandson of Anakin Skywalker himself, the chosen one apparently conceived by the Force. Force sensitivity runs in families, which is why Vader’s offspring Luke and Leia have it and why Ren has it. What, then, of Rey’s missing family, for whom she waited so tenaciously on Jakku in The Force Awakens? What is her connection to Luke? Suffice to say, The Last Jedi dispatches these questions in something like the least satisfying way possible.
Analysis: Disney has turned the Star Wars franchise over to cargo cultists who haven’t the faintest clue how storytelling works. They’re dimly aware that A New Hope is the franchise’s most iconic movie and that it presents a series of compelling mysteries. They know that The Empire Strikes Back is the best film in the series and that it has a notorious plot twist.
That’s as deep as their understanding goes. Empire manged to consummate the first film’s mysteries in spectacular and eminently satisfying style because Leigh Brackett and Irvin Kershner were geniuses who understood the fundamentals of Western storytelling and the visual language of film.
By contrast, Abrams and his ilk lack even basic competence in either field. Their approach to the current trilogy amounted to: “Let’s throw a bunch of incoherent shit onto the screen and dangle the promise of nonexistent answers in front of the audience’s face.” Anybody who’s suffered through Lost should’ve seen this coming.
One of my main beefs with The Force Awakens was that I knew none of those tantalizing mysteries could have internally consistent resolutions. The underlying story structure they’d set up just didn’t hang together. Hand-waving was their only way out. Now here we are.
While playing like a rousing continuation and extension of the Star Wars saga, The Last Jedi is also a deconstruction and even a critique. When Luke bitterly remarks that the legacy of the Jedi is failure, hypocrisy and hubris, it’s hard to argue the point.
Rather than maturing into Kenobi-like venerable authority, Luke has all too plausibly aged from a sometimes petulant young novice into a morose, disillusioned failed teacher. Like Obi-Wan before him, he trained a promising student — in this case Ben Solo — who went to the Dark Side, destroying the next generation of Jedi.
Hey, remember when Mark Hamill said he disagreed with every choice Rian Johnson made for his character in The Last Jedi script?
The Last Jedi could even be called a critique of heroism itself, at least in the swashbuckling mode of past movies.
The dramatic action in Star Wars has generally been structured around various heroic challenges calling for bold action and derring-do: rescuing the princess, confronting the villain and blowing up or shutting down the bad guys’ stuff (Death Stars, tractor beams, shield generators, droid control ships, etc.).
Hence the Wars part, which can be boiled down to “killing the enemy and breaking his stuff”.
The Last Jedi subverts this by repeatedly making such heroic gambits the wrong move — especially when male characters are in favor of bold action and female characters aren’t.
Poe Dameron’s heroics in any other Star Wars film would win accolades and promotion, but here he’s demoted for disobeying Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo’s orders. Poe is always looking for chinks in the enemy’s armor; Amilyn’s priority is strategic retreat. She considers Poe a reckless risk-taker; he considers her timid and passive. It’s a provocative complication that Poe is in the wrong.
“Provocative complication” might be the most overwrought synonym I’ve ever seen for “bullshit”.
It’s not just defying Amilyn’s rank that makes Poe wrong. At one point Finn sets himself a desperate task, but is thwarted by a female character who is not his superior.
“I saved your life,” she tells him. Yet we’ve already seen just this kind of self-sacrificial gambit successfully realized — by a woman. Why is Finn’s effort unworthy? I’m glad not to see him die, but it’s a problem that Johnson can’t find anything else significant for Finn to do either. Of all the major characters, he’s the most useless here.
Greydanus is playing coy, but he clearly discerns the total feminization of Star Wars begun in The Force Awakens that The Last Jedi makes explicit. If you don’t see a problem there, ask yourself : a) What is Star Wars’ core demographic? and b) Which is more fun–seeing daredevil fighting men take big risks and succeeding; sometimes against orders (there was a whole genre of cop movies based on that premise alone), or seeing the nail that stands up get hammered down so everyone meekly goes along with the planned strategic retreat?
Finally comes an apparent exception: a showdown perhaps more dramatic than anything since Luke first crossed lightsabers with Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back. This is by far the most effective and consequential sequence of any of the Disney Star Wars films. Yet there’s a twist that is both brilliant and at the same time undercuts the apparent celebration of derring-do.
Doubtless the Resistance will not always be retreating, and traditional swashbuckling will probably return to the Star Wars universe. There’s certainly a case for one movie in which bold gambits to blow up the bad guys’ stuff aren’t the way to go. In the long run I’m less concerned about Poe’s heroic cred than I am the still-underdeveloped characters of Rey and especially poor Finn.
This review reads disturbingly like a letter from a POW that’s been edited by enemy censors. The body of the message is all about how nice conditions in the camp are. They even have volleyball!
But you look under the stamp, and there’s a crudely scrawled message that says THEY CUT OFF MY THUMBS
Oh, and what about the “first Jedi temple” we heard about? We see it, and the original Jedi texts. The movie puts even less stock in them than in Snoke. A voice wiser than Luke’s declares that the Jedi texts contain nothing that Rey doesn’t already have. Really? Then the Jedi religion is a con.
Who needs the accumulated wisdom of a thousand generations-long tradition when you’ve got ovaries and an epic case of fish lip?
In case cognitive dissonance still blinds you to the blatant feminist agitprop that infests The Last Jedi, we have it from Luke Skywalker himself that Rey and Ben have equal raw potential. Yet despite being trained by a Jedi Master and a Sith Lord, Ben loses to a total neophyte with zero training for the suspension of disbelief-shattering reason that she’s a girl and the writers want her to win.
Greydanus is wrong. The Jedi religion isn’t a con. The Last Jedi is.
If you’re interested in getting a solid fix of mil-SF/space opera action while retaining a shred of dignity, check out Galaxy’s Edge by best selling authors Nick Cole and Jason Anspach.
Because the galaxy is a dumpster fire, and sometimes the best way to put out a fire is with gasoline.
