1 1/2 or 2 or 2 1/2 out of 5 (I don’t know)
I know that it’s been a year and a half since this film released and that this is very late. More than a review this is me trying to grasp this film and how it’s impacted the entire franchise.
Pre-Last Jedi we had Disney plotting out Star Wars films infinitely. This trilogy would wrap, more anthology films would release, and then after a break Episodes 10 through 12 would come out. Conceivably, the Star Wars brand would chug along into infinity.
And then The Last Jedi and Solo happened.
I’m not going to rehash the same gripes we’ve all heard. To me this movie is a mix of the highest highs and lowest lows. It’s the best looking film in the entire series; it’s absolutely gorgeous to look at with amazing cinematography and composition as well as with its color palette. The story, plotting, and characters are a shambles, though. More than those issue the second biggest sin this movie commits is being fucking boring, possibly more so than “The Phantom Menace” which had almost ninety minutes of bureaucratic grumbling. There are some great set pieces, namely the throne room scene and the hyper-drive kamikaze, they just don’t absorb enough of the runtime to offset the grueling slog that makes up the rest of the film.
The biggest sin and ultimately the one that kills the film is that it reneges on all of the themes it labors over in the third act. The entire film we’re told to “kill the past” or that “the Jedi must end” and everything we’ve honestly seen in the prior eight films stands as evidence of that. The Jedi Order were stodgy child abducters who were played by the Sith and destroyed because of their own bullshit, the Empire fell only to beget the First Order.... time and time again all of the suffering in the galaxy comes down to this eternal battle between Good Vs. Evil or Light Vs. Dark. To truly bring peace or balance to existence you need a middle path and this movie spends the majority of the time building an argument for that. When Kylo Ren asks Rey to join him I was the most excited I’d been in a Star Wars film since I was a child. All I could think was “holy shit they’re gonna upend the whole thing”, which would’ve been bold and set up the franchise to explore further ideas and concepts. At some point though someone put the kibosh on that and the second Rey refuses the offer the whole film (and possibly the franchise) tanks quicker than the Titanic did as soon as it broke in two.
Everything that’d been set up is quickly dismantled: Ren is still bad, Rey is still good, Luke declares that the good will always fight the bad forever, we’re shown a dramatic self-sacrifice one minute then told self-sacrifice is wrong the next. By the time credits roll we’re right back to where we began when the original Star Wars started.
I don’t speak for the fandom, only myself, but “The Last Jedi” is a major disappointment. The abundance of non-white and female characters are given short shrift. For all the declarations that this film contains woke feminism all I see are characters with great potential for interesting development running in circles doing nothing of value. Laura Dern plays Vice Admiral Holdo, a character who’s alluded to backstory sounds pretty neat, but she’s only directed to sneer and snark before exploding. Amy Tran’s Rose Tico could’ve been the first meaningful ground-level female character and only gets to deliver vague Tumblr ready slogans about animal cruelty during the most pointless scene in the series. Finn, who we’ve spent two films getting to know has only progressed a little as a character at the end. In fact what could’ve been his shining character moment is totally undercut so him and Rose can kiss.
When the film was finally over I felt fatigued and finished. “The Last Jedi” doesn’t tie up every lose plot thread but there’s something in its very essence that says “The End”. It’s Empire and Jedi rolled into one and as a viewer I have no nagging questions that need an Episode 9 to answer. That feeling seems to have been universal because Solo: A Star Wars Story bombed. It didn’t fail solely because of bad blood from TLJ but that definitely didn’t help.
At some point someone at Disney realized that Star Wars wasn’t building into a new Marvel and they pulled the plug on the anthology films before giving the big ultimatum: Episode 9 has to close the loop. Whatever films come next will not continue the story that started in 1977. If TLJ was supposed to pave the way for the story to continue into eternity then this kind of finality is surprising. Now Disney and JJ Abrams (back after relaunching Star Wars only four years ago) have to conclude the trilogy in a functional way that unifies the drastically different “Force Awakens” and “Last Jedi”, but also has to close up and unify the Prequels, the Originals, and the Sequels. That’s a lot to do and quite honestly I’m not sure if anything that happens in Episode 9 will really matter. JJ isn’t a risk taker but he’ll have to go back to that throne room scene and what it could’ve done and wrestle with that. If these nine core films and two anthology films gotta be wrapped up then it needs to do what it’s promised to do for forty years and balance the fucking Force already.
The only reason I started writing this is because I still can’t rank this film. Every Star Wars fan has their list of best to worst and I’m no different. If I’m focused on the visuals alone than this goes above the Prequels, but if I rank it according to entertainment it goes below them. It’s ambitions and one writer/director auteur attitude are admirable but it highlights how little planning has gone into this new trilogy. Ultimately I don’t know where it goes and that’s irritating. As it currently is my ranking goes V, IV, VI/VII, R1, III, S, I, and II with VIII out in no-mans-land.
My hope as a fan is that Episode 9 marries the tones of the last two installments and delivers something new before Star Wars as a cinematic experience takes a break.
“The Last Jedi” confuses the lack of excitement and an excess of boring sub-plots as bold risk taking. It tries in vain to add complexity and nuance to the franchises aging morality and almost does something transcendent only to pull away at the last second. For that reason TLJ will always be the biggest “shit the bed” moment since Jar Jar Binks took a face full of space camel farts on Tattooine.
No comments:
Post a Comment