Many thoughts on Star Wars: The Last Jedi — with full spoilers for the entire film, for the benefit of people who’ve already seen it — coming up just as soon as I roast a Porg…
The internet was filled over the weekend with people expressing their disappointment with The Last Jedi for various reasons, many of which we’ll get to in a bit. For me, the most disappointing aspect of the film by far was the tantalizingly brief cameo by Justin Theroux as the Master Codebreaker, who never gets to team up with Finn and Rose because they’re arrested seconds after they spot him gambling at the casino.
Now, I’m not exactly going to complain about the man those two end up using to bypass First Order security, DJ, even if Benicio Del Toro is basically playing Benicio Del Toro (or a variant on the type of characters he so often plays). But when you tease the star of The Leftovers in a setting and costume very much evoking that show’s periodic trips to the afterlife (where Theroux was, alternately, an international assassin and the president of the United States), well, my imagination is going to start figuring out how Star Wars and Leftovers share a fictional universe, realizing that the Master Codebreaker’s method of cracking Hux’s security would probably not be family-friendly, and more. Instead, all Theroux gets to do is look befuddled by the intrusion of these low-class ruffians into this posh joint, and then we’re off to meet DJ, mount a prison break, and on and on.
But seeing the brief intersection between the year’s best TV show and arguably the year’s most anticipated movie got me thinking about some issues I had with The Last Jedi. They’re not any of the ones I’ve been encountering over the last few days about Snoke’s death, or Rey’s parents being nobodies, or the film’s repeated expression of disdain for both the Jedi and the kind of nostalgia that this entire franchise has subsisted on for decades. Rather, it’s the way that Rian Johnson tries to stuff The Last Jedi with so many ideas, so much incident, that at times it feels like four or five movies operating under one title, or like Johnson — who has dabbled in television over the years, including directing the best hour of TV drama ever made — trying to somehow squeeze a season of prestige TV into two and a half hours of cinema. Walking out of the theater on Saturday night, the guy next to me said, a bit befuddled, “Wow, that was a lot of movie,” and I understood where he was coming from, despite having loved nearly every individual piece of said movie.
Now, we all know that a season of TV isn’t really a 10-hour movie (and shouldn’t aspire to be). Nor did television invent the concept of stories featuring multiple arcs for different characters that run in parallel for a while before they intersect. Empire Strikes Back — as clear a model for Last Jedi as the original Star Wars was for The Force Awakens — is a pretty episodic movie, crosscutting between Yoda training Luke on Dagobah, Han and Leia fleeing the Empire, and, to a lesser degree, Darth Vader plotting in the background. But Last Jedi felt like that approach on steroids, juggling Rey’s attempts to get Luke to return to the fight, Poe clashing with Vice Admiral Holdo(*) during the Resistance’s agonizing attempt to escape the First Order, Finn and Rose’s caper to deactivate the First Order’s tracking device, and the ongoing power games between Snoke, Hux, and Kylo Ren.
(*) Between Big Little Lies, Twin Peaks: The Return, and this, Laura Dern is having herself quite a year.
As I said, I enjoyed the hell out of each piece of this, and would have gladly watched an entire movie — or, at least, an entire Leftovers-style POV episode — that was just Luke and Rey, or just Leia and then Holdo doing whatever they could to keep the fleet together in the face of impossible odds(*). And Johnson masterfully ties nearly everything together in the climactic sequence where everything falls apart for the heroes at once: Kylo Ren reveals that he killed Snoke only so he could take his place, Finn and Rose’s gambit fails, and that in turn allows DJ to sell out the entire Resistance plan to Hux and Captain Phasma. But put all together, the movie can be an overwhelming experience, particularly since the story continues for another half hour or so after Rey, Finn, and Rose have separately escaped Snoke’s flagship and made their way down to Crait. Thematically, it all makes sense as part of the same film, where Johnson is interested in deconstructing so much of our assumptions about the franchise, but structurally? Well, it’s a lot of movie, and one where I’ll be very curious to see how it plays on second, third, and fifth viewing.
(*) The original Battlestar Galactica was a shameless and unimaginative Star Wars ripoff. Here, though, the Holdo/Poe corner of the film very much evokes the tone and substance of the Edward James Olmos/Mary McDonnell BSG reboot, the episode “33” in particular. All this has happened before, and it will all happen again…
And I will be watching this one many times over, because whatever qualms I had in the moment about each story trying to elbow the others aside for breathing room, or about individual decisions — Holdo keeps her plan a secret from Poe, which not only encourages him to do his boneheaded mutiny, but results in far greater Resistance losses than if Poe knew what was happening and thus didn’t approve of the Rose/Finn/DJ caper — The Last Jedi features some of the most dazzling filmmaking of the entire franchise. Johnson’s a tremendous visual stylist, and the movie offers one remarkable image after another: Snoke’s throne room and his matching guardsmen, or the sheer devastation Holdo’s kamikaze run wreaks on Snoke’s flagship, or the way the red clay and white salt of Crait mix to create the illusion of far more blood than is actually there, which helps sell Luke’s entire astral projection stunt to both Kylo Ren and us. Johnson gets great performances from everyone — Mark Hamill’s never been better in live action, and Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley top their work in the previous film — and introduces several memorable new characters in Rose (who, despite being something of a Star Wars fangirl, never falls into the Mary Sue trap), Holdo, and even DJ, who helps expand the idea of moral ambiguity in what’s often been a very black-and-white world. It may be that, in time, it’ll be a film where I jump around to particular highlights (the opening bombing raid on the Dreadnought, and Rey and Kylo Ren’s throne room team-up, are two of the very best action set pieces in the entire franchise), rather than watching it straight through, but it also may be that the length and the sheer tonnage of ideas will feel less intimidating now that I know where it’s all going.
Johnson clearly had a vision for his turn at the helm, and it was a very different vision from either George Lucas, who fell more in love with the franchise’s mythology as time went on; and JJ Abrams, whose film (which I also greatly enjoy and have rewatched many times) is awash in the exact kind of nostalgia that Johnson and characters like Luke and Kylo Ren keep urging us to reject. And because The Last Jedi frequently goes to the well of Everything You Thought You Were Supposed To Care About With Star Wars Was Wrong, I can see where much of the negative reaction has come from. Over these two and a half hours, Johnson does the following:
* He dismisses the Jedi as overrated elitists who created more problems than they solved, and brings back Yoda to literally light the last Jedi temple on fire;
* He uses the Poe/Holdo conflict to similarly frame the kind of off-script heroics that Luke and Han Solo were once celebrated for as juvenile and counter-productive;
* He kills off Snoke without bothering to explain anything about his origins, long before anyone is prepared for him to go; and
* After fans have spent two years speculating on which famous Star Wars characters might be Rey’s parents, he instead reveals that they were nobodies, and that her mastery of the Force comes naturally, rather than being inherited from Luke or Palpatine or anyone else.
Johnson was given carte blanche with Snoke and Rey and everything else, and we’ll see if Abrams tries to unbreak any of his toys when he returns for the next film. But where I’ve encountered a lot of angry fans who feel like The Last Jedi is a middle finger to them (“But… my theories!”), to The Force Awakens, or to Star Wars as a whole, to me, The Last Jedi played as a work of deep and abiding love for this whole sweeping saga, even if the things he loves don’t exactly match up with what the angry people care most about.
I found Snoke, for instance, one of the weakest and most derivative parts of The Force Awakens, and was pleasantly surprised Johnson took him off the table so soon. So he doesn’t get an origin story, so what? That’s not Johnson flipping Abrams the bird; it’s Johnson taking the far more superior — with an actual origin story, and one that’s far more closely tied to the Star Wars mythos we all grew up on — villain that Abrams created in Kylo Ren, and pushing him front and center, rather than positioning us for a Return of the Jedi rehash where Kylo turns against Snoke, sacrificing himself to save Rey at the very end.
For that matter, revealing Rey’s parents to be nobodies, rather than Obi-Wan or Palpatine or whatever your theory may have been, works on multiple levels, each one true to the spirit of the whole enterprise. First, Luke Skywalker started out as a nobody himself, even though he (and we) thought his father was a pilot killed by Darth Vader, and the concept of the random kid who goes on to tilt against kings and conquerors fit the tone of the serials and stories Lucas was inspired by in the first place — an egalitarian ethos Johnson’s clearly interested in, as shown not only in Luke’s attitude towards the Jedi religion, but Rose’s disdain for the rich casino folk. Second, think back almost 40 years to how shocking and exciting “I am your father” was at the end of Empire. There was literally no answer Johnson could have given (nor Abrams, if Johnson had kicked that can along to the next movie) that could have equaled the surprise, if only because that line has now conditioned fans of this franchise and many others to look for twists just like it. Making them be anonymous losers comes pretty close, though, because it’s the kind of answer that defies those expectations, while also being just as much of a gut punch to Rey — who has spent her life convincing herself that her parents will one day return to her and help her fulfill a greater destiny than she seemed to have on Jakku — as “I am your father” was to Luke. It’s not as delightful, will never be quoted endlessly, but it’s also not a cheat or a dodge. (And if Abrams is genuinely irked about it because he had a different plan, well, he has the ability to change things in the next movie by revealing that Kylo was either lying or mistaken.)
As to the other choices Johnson makes, they feel in keeping with different flavors of Star Wars we’ve gotten over the last four decades. The franchise has never been any one thing, and it’s had room for both midi-chlorians and Boba Fett, for clear representations of good and evil but also more ambiguous characters like Han Solo, for recklessness but also wisdom, etc. Star Wars has been a lot of things to a lot of people; The Last Jedi is what Star Wars was to Rian Johnson, and so much of it — particularly the sense of unchecked hope that Leia still has as she sits on the Millennium Falcon and ponders having to build a new Rebellion from scratch, even after all the losses she has suffered (including her own brother only moments earlier), followed by the revelation that one of the stable boys is sensitive to the Force himself, and will be part of said Rebellion one day — felt like what Star Wars is to me.
In that sense, I can’t exactly blame Johnson for pouring so much story into the same film. If you’ve been waiting your whole life to play in this world, you want to do as much as you can while you’re in it. And nearly all of what he plays with turns out beautifully, even if I need more time to decide how I feel the pieces all fit together (or don’t).
Some other thoughts:
* I like Finn and the way that John Boyega’s performance brings a lot of the important matter-of-factness to this world that Harrison Ford’s did in the original trilogy (just as Oscar Isaac gets the dashing wiseass part of Han), but I think he probably should have died in that kamikaze run against the battering ram cannon. Yes, it would have been one more bleak death in a movie full of them — the movie has so many that poor Admiral Ackbar’s loss is only briefly remarked upon — but it felt like a natural conclusion to his arc, from cowardly runaway with no conviction about anything beyond his affection for Rey to someone who has found a cause he’s willing to die for. Hopefully, Abrams does something good with him in the ninth film, because that would have been an excellent cinematic death. (For that matter, I hope Rose recovers and is a prominent part of said film.)
* Speaking of Rose, the work Johnson and Veronica Ngo did in making the sacrifice of Rose’s sister Paige feel emotionally resonant, even though we’d never seen her before and she had had no dialogue, was impressive.
* Luke brushing off his shoulder after it appears that Kylo has failed to kill him — before we discover that he’s not there at all — is among the most boss moves of the series.
* Since Force Awakens was the movie where Han mentored Rey, and this one had her trying to get Luke to do the same, it seems natural that the final installment would have been Leia’s turn if not for Carrie Fisher’s death, darn it. As it is, I’m glad she got so much more to do here than in Force Awakens — and that’s even factoring in the long stretch where she’s comatose in the middle of the movie — and that we got to see her demonstrate her own Force capabilities briefly, even if the presentation of her flight through space looked a bit too Harry Potter.
* I love that Johnson wrote Yoda, and Frank Oz played him, as the eccentric chaos-bringer of Empire rather than the more toned-down figure from the prequels.
* Johnson probably could have opted for a more stylized way to present Rey and Kylo Ren’s conversations through the Force — even something as simple as having her appear to be in his room, and vice versa — but this simple approach, leaning on the skill and magnetism of Ridley and Driver, wound up being more effective than if we were paying attention to CGI, I think.
* I was amused by the porgs and didn’t mind the amount of them overall, but my old pal Fienberg makes a good argument for how they could have been featured a bit more.
* We’ll see if Abrams brings back Captain Phasma, or if she’ll continue the Boba Fett tradition: character with cool armor who never really lives up to their rep in one movie, then dies after a brief appearance in the next.
* Maz Kanata and Master Codebreaker spinoff, anyone? Possibly involving Nora Durst?
What did everybody else think?
Alan Sepinwall may be reached at sepinwall@uproxx.com. He discusses television weekly on the TV Avalanche podcast. His new book, Breaking Bad 101, is on sale now.