"Star Wars: The Last Jedi" - Some Thoughts

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

(Daisy Ridley, John Boyega; PG-13; 152 min; 2017)

YAY! I finally got to watch this! Not in a cool theater like I hoped to do, but hey, WOOT anyway!

This is my least favorite Star Wars movie.

I AM JUST KIDDING!!!!!!!! That's still Rogue One.

I'm actually still processing this one, about 14 hours later. There was so much to take in. One of the most common of the few complaints I saw about The Force Awakens is that it was basically just A New Hope remake, and that's a fair cop. It was a wonderfully done remake that I loved.

The Last Jedi is not a remake of The Empire Strikes Back, which I know was something I thought might happen. Make no mistake; TLJ very much revisits situations and elements from both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, but it takes those elements and twists or subverts them. It very much felt like what Rian Johnson (director, writer) would have liked to have seen in those originals, and it does it extremely well.

Visually, this film is just beautiful. The battle between Kylo, Rey, and the Praetorian Guard was terrific. It was vicious and brutal, while being done in more the style of the Original Trilogy saber fights. Don’t get me wrong, I absolute LOV* the saber fights in the prequels. Those will always be my favorites, but I also understand that those were Jedi who were immediately post-peak of power, so their fights would be different.

Luke, Kylo, Rey, none of these people had the full training of the Jedi Order, so they all had to learn to fight differently. I don’t think any of them ever made the full connection with the Force in melee combat that the Jedi of old had, so the battles in this new trilogy so far are exactly what they should be.

The battle on the salt plains was a brilliant choice. Not just in the vibrant contrast of the red earth against the glaring white salt, but in how the movements of the Rebel forces left delicate, almost artistic streaks and patterns, while the war machine of the First Order left what looked like swaths of smeared blood on the ground.

Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), who I wasn’t super impressed with in TFA, was much improved here. I think with this one, the actor has become a little more comfortable with the character, reflected nicely in the story telling, when he smashed his mask. Both Driver and Ren stopped trying to be Darth Vader 2.0 in this one, and embraced being Kylo Ren, Emo Asshole Supreme.

Young Daisy Ridley continues to impress. She manages to convey the best and worst qualities of the Jedi simultaneously.

The story of Finn and Rose was very compelling. Remember that this movie follows immediately on TFA, and so far, Finn’s not really a hero. Finn doesn’t know who he is yet. Hell, it wasn’t that long ago at all that he was a Stormtrooper. At this point, he’s impulsive and reactionary (a bit like, I don’t know, Luke Skywalker when he was young). And here’s this young fan girl (because, like Luke, Finn’s suddenly a hero to a lot of people), who finds herself suddenly disillusioned, then thrust into an adventure she probably never expected, and unintentionally teaching someone what it means to truly be a hero.

I was not impressed with Laura Dern. They could have put anyone in that part, she brought nothing special to the table.

Anyway. . .

From the time I first watched Star Wars back when I was, like, 4, Luke Skywalker has been my favorite character. And while I know people up to and including Mark Hamill don't necessarily agree with Johnson's choices for Luke in this movie, I thought it made perfect sense for the character's arc. In the original trilogy, we see Luke go from zero to hero, his Hero's Journey. But at the end of the day, he was still only a Jedi Master by default, by being the last of the Jedi. Through three movies, we see that despite his maturation, he still retains the impulsive nature that he has back on the dustball where he grew up.

Luke gained some wisdom over time, but always remained close to that edge, plagued by self-doubt. Recall that in RotJ, he nearly succumbed to the Dark Side, and while he pulled himself back, he couldn’t get the job done; that was Anakin Skywalker.

TLJ touches on the post-RotJ life of Skywalker, in which, as the Jedi who vanquished Vader and ended the Empire, he became a legend. And he essentially admits that he kind of bought into his own press, thinking that he could rebuild the Jedi order. And that makes perfect sense, because look at who trained him initially: Obi-Wan Kenobi. Who thought he had what it took to train Vader.

And we know how that turned out.

We learned that once again, Luke almost succumbed to the Dark Side, but pulled back. Because almost succumbing to the Dark Side is in Luke’s very nature as a person. And him retreating and hiding when everything goes catastrophically wrong is also in Luke’s nature. Because despite the passage of decades, he never stopped being that desert-dwelling angsty, self-pitying teenager who dreamed of something bigger, but had no idea of how to react when those dreams manifested differently.

In the books, Luke meets Mary Sue, I mean Mara Jade blah blah blah, but I never thought the character arc in the novels was appropriate. This arc? This is pretty much exactly what I always pictured for Luke, because Luke was always going to be a tragic hero at best. And in the end, he was still a hero. He pulled himself back one last time to do the right thing. Not the thing that fixed everything and saved the day, but the thing that helped others.

Now, Star Wars has always been the saga of the Skywalker family. So does this change with Ren’s “revelation” that Rey’s parents were nobodies? Certainly, it appears that she’s not a Skywalker, so is this still the saga of the Skywalkers?

Sure. Kylo Ren is a Skywalker.

And he’s also a manipulative, unreliable narrator. We never saw his alleged vision of Rey’s parents. It’s entirely possible that he made it up in order to help sway her to his side. It’s also entirely possible that he didn’t, knowing that she would sense the truth when he spoke it.

I’m not entirely sure that Rey’s parentage or ancestry is terrible important. Given her raw power level, one is inclined to think that she must have some connection to the Skywalker family, but do we need to know what that is? Heck if I know. For all I know, she was incubated from some remnant of Darth Vader’s DNA. We might find out, we might not, we might already have found out.

I enjoyed this so much (and am looking forward to re-watching it to see what I missed the first time around in my mesmerized state; same thing happened with TFA), that I’m disappointed to learn that Rian Johnson isn’t writing and directing the next one. In fact, I have some trepidation about the next one, since it’s being directed by Arbams and written by Abrams and Chris Terrio, co-writer of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (you all know how I feel about that film) and writer of Justice League (which I haven’t seen yet, and haven’t decided if I’m going to even bother with).

On the other hand, Rian Johnson is getting an entire Star Wars trilogy to play with, and after this, I’m pretty jazzed about that.

Overall, Star Wars: The Last Jedi is an excellent ending to the story of Luke Skywalker (and ensures that his legend will live on in universe), and a very solid entry in the American Mythos that is Star Wars.