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Very early in the excellent Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi comes the moment an entire planet has been waiting for. It does not go the way you think.
Episode VII: The Force Awakens ended with a scene that was, like much of the movie, a little too on-the-nose. It was a cliffhanger on a literal cliff: Desert planet orphan Rey (Daisy Ridley) crosses the galaxy to track down Jedi Master Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), hidden like a hermit on a green, craggy island. She presents him with his original blue lightsaber.
As if in a chain-story game you might have played as a kid, Force Awakens writer-director J.J. Abrams folded over the paper at this sentence and handed the pen to Last Jedi writer-director Rian Johnson. And for two years we were left to wonder: What would Luke say next? Would his seeing her clear up the mystery of who Rey's parents were, perhaps?
I'm not going to spoil Luke's exact reaction, but I will say this: the more obsessive a fan you are, the less likely you are to have predicted it. The moment is hilarious, almost transgressive; Johnson's big booming laugh in the face of anyone who took a two-year cliffhanger too seriously.
This confidence, this fearlessness, is exactly why The Last Jedi succeeds
This is The Last Jedi in a nutshell. It is Rian Johnson signaling loud and clear that he doesn't particularly care what J.J. Abrams wrote before or will write after. His segment of the chain story is going to tell the Star Wars tale he wants to tell, at the full-throttle speed he wants to tell it, Episode IX be damned. It is going to contain more jokes than you expected from the dark middle chapter of a trilogy. It is genuinely shocking.
And it is not going to treat this storied global franchise with kid gloves. It will not be afraid of stirring up controversy among its biggest fans. This confidence, this fearlessness, is exactly why The Last Jedi succeeds better than any Star Wars movie since at least Return of the Jedi in 1983, if not Empire Strikes Back in 1980.
As in Game of Thrones, no character on either side is safe
For as good as The Force Awakens was, in retrospect it feels a little too respectful, as if Abrams was playing with Star Wars action figures stuck in pristine packaging. He had to reboot a four-billion-dollar franchise, and he had legendary Star Wars scribe Lawrence Kasdan around at all times, so no wonder. Still, even Han Solo's death seemed perfectly packaged -- a present to Harrison Ford, who always wanted out.
With The Last Jedi, we are now entirely in the hands of a supremely visual filmmaker and a story craftsman at the height of his powers. He has mapped out an extremely emotional rollercoaster ride for you. He makes it clear early on that, as in Game of Thrones, no character on either side of the war is safe. Death is everywhere. Even if you're normally immune to crying at a Star Wars film, you may choke up; I certainly did.
By the end of this 2.5 hour movie (which honestly feels like less than half of that), you'll be begging -- for an intermission, for a pause button, for more porgs (yes, even you porg haters), for anything that will halt the relentless danger to characters we've come to love. Not in front of the kids, you want to say, but really you don't want it to happen in front of you.
Please, Rian, don't hurt 'em!
Battle-Star Wars Galactica
Before we even get to that pivotal Luke-Rey scene, Johnson wastes no time in giving us the first space battle in a movie that is unexpectedly full of such high-octane thrills. General Leia Organa has just minutes to evacuate the Resistance from the planet on which we last saw them; their victory over Starkiller Base was a pyrrhic one, because it alerted the First Order to their location.
(This opening evacuation scene also feels a lot like the end of last year's Rogue One; I don't know if that's going to help or confuse the casual viewer who doesn't recall the difference between spin-off tales like that and saga episodes like this.)
Newly-promoted Commander Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) has a plan to delay the enemy. It begins with a single X-Wing fighter facing off against a Star Destroyer, and a direct line to the First Order's General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) -- the film's first and one of its funniest comedy moments.
Poe and Hux were barely even one-note characters in The Force Awakens. With more screen time, The Last Jedi makes both feel significantly more real. Johnson doesn't so much flesh out their characters as simply take their essential cliches -- hotshot pilot and hapless control-freak, respectively -- and dial them up to 11.
Poe's plan ends in both triumph and disaster, the first of many for the incredible shrinking Resistance. To a surprising extent, The Last Jedi is the tale of a ragtag fleet trying its damnedest to get a moment's rest from the First Order, which has found unknown means of tracking them.
If you're a fan of the Battlestar Galactica franchise -- which, ironically, started life as a Star Wars knock-off -- you'll be on very familiar ground here. Particularly as the numbers of our heroes dwindle and their losses become more than we can bear.
Rose, and many other names
There are standout performances from a couple of newcomers to the Resistance. They stand out precisely because they don't take any crap from The Force Awakens' old guard.
Laura Dern's Vice-Admiral Holdo somehow manages to flirt with Poe even as she sternly, effortlessly puts the "dangerous flyboy" in his place. (It's kind of a surprisingly sexy Star Wars movie all round, if still very much PG -- the momentary shirtlessness of another hot male character becomes a plot point.)
Kelly Marie Tran is a revelation as Rose Tico, a mechanic who goes on a key mission for the fleet with Finn. In one scene alone, Rose pivots from grief-stricken woman to Finn fangirl to fearsome enforcer with whom you do not mess. And with the hugely expressive Tran, none of it feels contrived.
Rose has criminally little to do in this script; she pierces our hearts nonetheless.
DJ (Benicio Del Toro), a sort of Dickensian computer hacker whom Finn and Rose meet on their all-too-short mission on the casino world of Canto Bight, is another character with not enough to do. And yet he too lodges in the brain beautifully, partly thanks to Del Toro's affectations, which may remind you a little of Brad Pitt's psycho turn in Twelve Monkeys.
There are a lot of classic callbacks like that; Rian Johnson clearly loves his movie history as much as he loves Star Wars and Battlestar. You might spot less-than-subtle references to Doctor Strangelove and Rashomon, for example -- the latter delivered in Star Wars' first ever true flashback scenes.
Again: Master craftsman, no f*cks given.
Those who hope to prove The Last Jedi is a retread of Empire Strikes Back will find plenty of callbacks to help with that theory. But here's the thing: they'll also find just as many parallels to Return of the Jedi. And Star Wars, for that matter. And even the prequels. This movie is jam-packed with thieved elements, and yet it all comes together to feel entirely new and alive.
Never has the quote attributed to Picasso -- "good artists copy, great artists steal" -- seemed so appropriate. It's no wonder Johnson was given his own Star Wars trilogy, the way he left it all on the field with this one. This was literally my first reaction walking out of the world premiere:
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The cuteness, it burns
Porgs. Caretakers. Crystal foxes. Giant-breasted aquatic mammals. Heart-rendingly mistreated space horses. A tiny drunken alien aristocrat, complete with monocle. BB-8. R2-D2.
Star Wars has always sought both empathetic depth and comic relief in its alien races and droids, with mixed results. (Ahem, Jar Jar.) But The Last Jedi finds success in this area at every turn. No creature, not even the famous porgs, get enough screen time; thus they do not outstay their welcome.
Every second of their presence seems delightful and necessary. Ewoks they are not.
Reach out with your feelings
Observant readers will notice I haven't said much about Luke, Rey, Kylo Ren and his boss Supreme Leader Snoke. That's because it's hard to say anything about any of them without it feeling like too much of a spoiler. Suffice to say that they are essentially players in a game of four-dimensional (or Force-dimensional, geddit?) chess, whether they know it or not.
I don't want to give away any of the chess moves -- least of all the surprise extra player or the shocking multiple endgames.
Yes, the Dark Side and its opposite Force are both here, and the battle between them afflicts everyone in the game in a way they don't expect. "Darkness rises, and the light to meet it," says Snoke, sneeringly but correctly; he doesn't know the half of it.
And no, as much interplay as there is between the two, there is still no such thing as Gray Jedi. Sorry, nerds.
Yes, Mark Hamill gives the performance of a lifetime. There is much nuance to Luke: here is a man who has been beaten down by life but can still crack a good joke. He really does believe the Jedi must end, and he is also the greatest inspiration in the galaxy. Several times he is named as the personification of hope, and soon enough it feels like no exaggeration.
Yes, Rey goes to dark places, as she must. Yes, she confronts Kylo Ren again, as was inevitable, and in a manner that is going to cause a stir. Yes, she finds out who her parents were, as Rian Johnson told us she would. And whole new realms of Force mythology are casually created along the way.
Here, in the question of exactly what the Force can do, is where the greatest fan controversy will churn for years. If you worry that the Force turns its practitioners into something too close to superheroes, you may not love this film. Regardless, I can't wait to get into it with you all.
Oh, and as for Carrie Fisher? She's the best. She's royalty. But you knew that already. I would not presume to spoil a single second of this, the final leg of General Leia Organa's on-screen journey, except to note that one rebuke will rank among her finest, sauciest lines of all time: "get your head out of your cockpit."
The Force will be with her, always.
Topics Star Wars
