Star Wars: The Last Jedi mind-tricked its audience. As if in homage to the galaxy in which the film is set—divided as it is between the Dark Side and the Light—Rian Johnson’s 2017 installment in the saga sparked the most preposterously binary set of responses to a franchise film in recent memory. Read about this continuation of the Disney-owned sequel trilogy (begun and soon to be ended by J.J. Abrams) and you’ll quickly feel the pull of two opposing Forces, demanding allegiance. Broadly speaking: Is it a heartbreaking work of staggering genius that redeems the Star Wars concept by having the courage to toss it aside, or is it a million childhoods suddenly crying out in terror and then suddenly silenced…by incipient white genocide?
I say it’s neither, and man am I tired of having to say it, but before I see Solo I’ll give it one last shot. The Last Jedi is my least favorite Star Wars movie by far, but not for any of the reasons most of its detractors cite, nor for those against which its champions array their defenses. The misogynistic bigots whose response to the film is essentially “Why isn’t there a White History Month” will have to settle for running all three branches of government; they won’t get me to agree that a story driven by vivid and charismatic characters played by natural-born movie stars Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, and Domnhall Gleeson—the best things either TLJ or its immediate predecessor The Force Awakens have going for them—represent the collapse of the West. Nor am I going to agree to their terms of debate the way so many proponents of the film have, acting as though hidebound nostalgia at best and bald-faced reactionary fury at worst are the only reasons to take issue with this movie. The Last Jedi has its moments, but its faults are many—and too often obscured by the Sith vs. Jedi nature of the debate surrounding it.
Right up front, let’s forget the idea that TLJ represents some bold act of iconoclasm—a creatively courageous attempt to unmoor the franchise from nostalgia. There’s a substratum of angry nerds who think believe this and hate it, and a separate group of critics and critic-adjacent people online who believe this and love it. I really don’t know how either group comes to this conclusion about what is, after all, the ninth Star Wars movie. It’s got dark lords and chosen ones, lightsabers and Star Destroyers, cute aliens and cute droids, you name it. Rey’s parentage may have been rendered a non-issue (in a desultory rip-off of the mirror sequence from The Never-ending Story, but whatever), but Kylo Ren is still the biological descendent of the main characters from both of the previous trilogies. And this is the guy—the bad guy, might I add—who utters the “let the past die” mantra so many critics and detractors alike seem to have taken to heart as the film’s mission statement. Again, this is the ninth Star Wars movie. If you want to let the past die, go watch or make a film that doesn’t co-star characters who debuted 40 years earlier.
To the extent that writer-director Rian Johnson did wipe the slate clean, the effect was not a healthy one. Dispensing with the pattern established by all the other movies, Johnson resumes the action right where The Force Awakens leaves off. Leia, Poe, Finn, C-3PO, BB-8, and the rest of the Resistance core are still on their home base from the previous film; so little time has elapsed that they’re still waiting for the First Order to show up and chase them out of there when the movie begins. Elsewhere, Rey and Luke’s storyline resumes mid-conversation. Because of this, our first images of our heroes take place in places we’ve already seen, rather than dropping us head-first into new ones—not even the familiar desert/forest/ice archetypes of The Force Awakens, which were at least different planets than the ones from the original trilogy, if not different types of planets.
The bulk of the story takes place on Luke’s island, a couple of spaceships, and finally a single patch of a desert planet that simply substitutes salt for sand and adds a little red dust for flair. The plot concerns Rey trying and failing to convince Luke to get up off his ass and Kylo Ren and General Hux picking off Resistance ships one by one, Battlestar Galactica–style (to put the resemblance kindly, though if you called it a knockoff I wouldn’t object). Mysteries aren’t so much solved as canceled: Rey’s parents are nobodies (a theoretically interesting idea delivered in perfunctory fashion) and the mysterious Supreme Leader Snoke gets jobbed out before displaying a single interesting characteristic except being unusually tall and having cool red wallpaper. The film ends with the characters hiding in an abandoned garage some guy’s trying to break into, pretty much.
In short, this is the first Star Wars movie in which the world feels smaller at the end of the movie than it did at the beginning. It’s an attritional film, one that whittles away until only a tiny fragment remains. The manic thrill of discovery and creation that made the original trilogy so culture-changingly compelling—and which makes the much-maligned prequel trilogy, which you can read persuasive defenses of here and here, a gloriously weird work of art on the Speed Racer level if nothing else—is almost entirely absent. (Almost: the trip made by Finn and his new ally Rose to that casino planet has that wild and woolly feeling to it, which paradoxically may be why people dislike it; Leia’s Force-enabled spacewalk is a poor substitute for getting to see her with a lightsaber in her hand but it’s still good audience-rousing fun; the Porgs, of course, are perfection. But that’s thin gruel to spread across two and a half hours of running time.)
This is the first half of my lengthy essay for Decider on why I don’t like The Last Jedi. I just got so sick of seeing the debate, both pro and con sides, framed entirely in terms set by bigots or “my childhood!!!” types, and wanted to open up other lines of criticism and inquiry. Click here to read the rest.
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