{"id":6494,"date":"2018-03-30T11:05:09","date_gmt":"2018-03-30T15:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=6494"},"modified":"2018-03-30T11:06:47","modified_gmt":"2018-03-30T15:06:47","slug":"star-wars-the-last-jedi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2018\/03\/30\/star-wars-the-last-jedi\/","title":{"rendered":"Star Wars: The Last Jedi."},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m a bit late to the Star Wars party, but I finally watched The Last Jedi<\/em> (now available to rent\/buy on amazon<\/a> or iTunes<\/a>) on Thursday evening, which I believe makes me the last person in the United States to see this movie. I have seen The Force Awakens<\/em> and would agree with what I think is the consensus that this movie is better than that one was; if TFA<\/em> was the greatest hits album, TLJ<\/em> is the album after that where the band tries to recapture the sound of its best output, and intermittently succeeds.<\/p>\n

I imagine most of you have seen this already, so here\u2019s a briefer than usual plot summary. The movie picks up right at the end of TFA<\/em>; Kylo Ren is still Mad in Space, Rey is still with Luke Skywalker on the island planet, Finn is still boring, Leia still kicks ass, and the Rebels are still lucky to exist given the firepower and numbers the First Order brings to the fight. After a Pyrhhic victory to open the film, the Rebels find themselves chased even through lightspeed travel, which we\u2019re told is impossible (the tracking through lightspeed, not the lightspeed part, which is actually impossible), and must thus find a way to disable the First Order\u2019s tracking capability so they can escape to a safe hiding spot to regroup. Meanwhile, Rey wants to grow up to be a Jedi and find out who her parents were, and Poe Dameron still has problems with authority and is a poor judge of what constitutes acceptable losses in battle.<\/p>\n

The women absolutely carry this film, and I don\u2019t think that\u2019s entirely by design. Daisy Ridley stole the first film in this trilogy as Rey, apparently to the surprise of the studio, and she remains a riveting, central figure in this film. Kelly Marie Tran debuts as Rose, another character like Rey – it\u2019s hard to imagine these films without them – and just underscores the point that casting more women even in roles that studios would historically have handed to men adds something, rather than just avoiding negative PR. Creating female characters who are tough and resourceful, who can fight but who also think well on their feet, isn\u2019t any harder than creating male characters who are or do these things, and it\u2019s no less credible. If anything, The Last Jedi<\/em> gives Rose short shrift by dropping her into the film without much character development, but it\u2019s possible she\u2019ll play a larger role in the next installment, too. Carrie Fisher\u2019s final turn as Leia may come across as even more powerful because we lost her before the movie was even released, but the increased role the writers of these last two films gave her character has also helped put them above The Phantom Menace<\/em> trilogy. Laura Dern also appears as Admiral Hodor … er, Holdo, another Resistance leader who takes over when Leia ends up in a coma, and while Holdo\u2019s plan is kind of terrible, Dern, a generally tremendous actress in any role, does a superb job of threading the needle between stern by-the-book authority to contrast with Poe and presenting herself as a thoughtful, strong leader willing to do whatever it takes to keep the Rebels alive.<\/p>\n

This was also the funniest Star Wars movie by a wide margin, with some dopey physical comedy (that still made me laugh because inside I am just a 12-year-old boy who laughs when people in movies fall down), a good bit more sarcasm than I\u2019m used to from these films, and an utterly brilliant nod to the now ancient Star Wars parody short \u201cHardware Wars.\u201d Johnson is absolutely playing with viewers\u2019 expectations throughout the film, and where TFA<\/em> gave viewers the answers they wanted, The Last Jedi<\/em> goes in the other direction, setting up an obvious answer and then responding to it with sarcasm or a twist. Given the reverence afforded to this saga, a little nose-tweaking here is warranted and does help avoid the self-seriousness that permeated both TFA<\/em> and especially The Phantom Menace<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Force Awakens<\/em> was a perfectly cromulent film – entertaining, but nothing new beyond the special effects. We got our cantina scene, our flying through narrow passages battle scene, our light saber fights, Jedi mind tricks, a Kessel Run joke, and too many other allusions to the original trilogy. It worked, but it felt too much like a nostalgia play, and perhaps a plea to forget the intervening trilogy of films. The Last Jedi<\/em> is less derivative of the series, but now we\u2019re devolving into this pattern of \u201clet\u2019s put the heroes in extreme jeopardy, kill off a bunch of redshirts, and save the characters with names\u201d over and over in the films, and that becomes a bit tiresome. It invokes adrenaline fatigue and tends to come at the expense of story and\/or character development. There\u2019s a real lost opportunity here when Rey is with Luke Skywalker and, in theory, learning about the Jedi religion and traditions; the biggest revelation she gets about her character comes not from Luke, but from Kylo \u201cmy parents didn\u2019t love me enough\u201d Ren.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s the other aspect of both of these new films I haven\u2019t really bought. I\u2019m all for changing up the archetype of a villain in space epics, but \u201cgoth kid\u201d isn\u2019t all that compelling, and Driver\u2019s mopey delivery comes across as depressed, not depraved. This script does a better job than its predecessor in explaining Ren\u2019s backstory, and how the son of Han and Leia could become the most dangerous person in the known universe, so I\u2019m holding out hope we\u2019ll get more of his character development in the third film. This film was replete with plots and subplots and probably more named characters than it could really handle in 150 or so minutes, but there were still arcs that could have used more exploration.<\/p>\n

They also could have cut Finn\u2019s story substantially to make room for further depth in the narratives around Rey or Kylo. I know Finn is a popular character and John Boyega is likable, but I don\u2019t think he has any charisma at all in this role – certainly not next to Oscar Isaak\u2019s Poe, who is drawn with some very sharp lines but that at least let Isaak tear up the proverbial fucking dance floor. I\u2019m still unclear on what Finn\u2019s role in the greater story arc of these two new movies is, and the side plot where he and Rose go off to the gambling planet to find a master codebreaker (master … breaker?), played in fine scene-chewing fashion by Benicio del Toro, is the weakest part of the film by 12 parsecs.<\/p>\n

This movie looks incredible, as you\u2019d expect given the studios behind it and the money invested in it, but Rian Johnson has also clearly given consideration to how he can use things like color or establishing shots to contribute to the feel of the story. There\u2019s a lot of red in the film, including Supreme Leader Snoke\u2019s henchpersons and the tracks left in the salt on the rebels\u2019 disused hiding planet. (I know we\u2019re supposed to think \u2018blood,\u2019 but it kept making me think of Australia\u2019s Simpson Desert, where iron oxide in the sand turns the entire landscape a deep red.) There\u2019s also a lot of moving water in the film, including some stunning waterfall shots, designed to give you the sense of descent and to feel several characters fighting the current, especially Rey as she resists the dark aspects of the Force within her and the pull of Kylo\u2019s own darkness. Such small, subtle additions to a script that often feels bombastic and certainly doesn\u2019t shy away from huge battle sequences or grand gestures by its characters may be lost on viewers caught up in the extensive plot, but they do help set the tone and, I think, establish a more complex worldview than any of the preceding films offered.<\/p>\n

At 153 minutes, The Last Jedi<\/em> is probably both too long and too short; Johnson had enough thematic material to go three-plus hours, but the repetitive nature of some of the plot details wore on me by the end, and there really isn\u2019t much doubt who\u2019s going to live to see the end of the film and who\u2019s not, so the question becomes \u201chow will Johnson write them out of trouble this time,\u201d rather than the more intense question of \u201cwho\u2019s going to survive?\u201d Unfortunately, Johnson isn\u2019t involved in the as-yet untitled Episode IX, which will be written and directed by JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio, which I don\u2019t interpret as a positive sign given some of their recent projects (The Cloverfield Paradox<\/em>, Batman vs. Superman<\/em>) and the wealth of material bequeathed upon them by The Last Jedi<\/em>. With principal photography set to begin in just four months, it\u2019s probably vain to hope that they\u2019ll get another voice in the room to help give these arcs the resolution they might deserve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m a bit late to the Star Wars party, but I finally watched The Last Jedi (now available to rent\/buy on amazon or iTunes) on Thursday evening, which I believe makes me the last person in the United States to see this movie. I have seen The Force Awakens and would agree with what I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[925,215,524,990],"class_list":["post-6494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2017-movies","tag-movies","tag-science-fiction","tag-star-wars","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6494"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6496,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6494\/revisions\/6496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}