Let's Talk About The Last Jedi

Yeah, I'm really going there.

I don't think I've ever seen any piece of media, to say nothing of any piece of filmmaking, stir up as contentious a conversation as Rian Johnson's entry in the Star Wars franchise, 2018's Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. Not even an ongoing culture war in American politics has quite matched the vitriol I saw thrown back and forth by some Star Wars fans, In a lot of ways, this is the article I've been wanting to write for a long time. In others, it's the one I've been dreading because I know that it's going to stir up some strong opinions among the four people who read this blog and because, in a lot of ways, it's going to make me relive the most unpleasant, vitriolic, and almost-personal discourse I've ever seen surrounding a film. Now, if you think this is going to be just another blog post simply bashing the film or simply defending it, you'd be wrong. This is going to be just another critical assessment that I hope sheds light on the mysteries of filmmaking while also discussing the things this film does well, as well as its shortcomings. In a lot of ways, I think that The Last Jedi was something of a flashpoint for where how a critic views a film and how an audience member views a film splits, and when you consider the sheer size of the Star Wars fanbase and their sheer dedication to their own interpretations of the franchise, that flashpoint is going to be a particularly bright and violent one. And because I think like a movie critic, in a lot of ways, I can understand the high critical scores for this film. On Rotten Tomatoes, 91% of critical reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.1/10. If you're familiar with how the rating system on Rotten Tomatoes works, you'd know that an average of 8.1/10 is a very impressive feat. On Metacritic, which is probably the most heavily weighted mainstream rating system, the film has an even more impressive score of 84 out of 100, which is the same score the universally loved The Dark Knight received. Now, I must say that I do think The Last Jedi is a good film. I do. Do I think it's perfect? No. Does it have some odd narrative choices? Absolutely. However, even if it isn't perfect, this film is an absolute masterclass in pacing, combining cinematography and visual effects work, and at the end of the day, I think the good outweighs the bad, even if the bad in the film can sometimes be very noticeable. But enough of my trying to make this article longer than it needs to be. Let's bullet-point this film. Obviously, this particular article is going to delve into some deep spoilers, so if you haven't seen the film for some reason, you've been warned

It's probably not needed if you're reading this article, but Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi is a 2017 science fiction film that is the seventh entry in the main storyline of the world-famous Star Wars franchise, and it follows several different members of the Resistance as they all fight their own personal battles to make sure that the cause they've put so much into isn't snuffed out courtesy of an unforeseen offensive by the evil First Order.

First, I want to address something that almost never gets brought up in this conversation by even the most staunch Star Wars fan: the pacing of this film. Given that the pacing is, in my own experience, the hardest part of a film to understand and get right, I'm not going to be too harsh against people who might overlook it. Looking at the pacing of this film from an objective stance, the inciting incident was poorly handled, but in a lot of ways, everything that comes after the First Order catches up with the Resistance is actually very well-paced. In fact, it could be the best pacing in any Star Wars film ever. Why is that? Well, it balances not one, not two, but three different story arcs and paces them perfectly to the point where they all end at exactly the same time and are then reborn into one singular storyline which, regardless of how you feel about the film, is objectively really super-duper impressive. I found one chart on Reddit (relax, I don't have an account) where one guy tried to pick apart the pacing of the film and make the opposite argument that I am making here. However, it doesn't really prove anything, and people kind of let him know it in the comments section. In fact, looking at the graph more, I realize that the guy isn't taking the relative independence of the subplots into account at all, which was actually the most impressive part of the film for me and was seemingly making an argument that they interfered with the pacing of fellow subplots, which they actually don't, given that some of these subplots are in a symbiotic relationship with others. I'll paste the link at the bottom of this article so you can see for yourself. One thing that really kind of stood out to me on his chart was one section labeled "timelines converge." I'm not going to nitpick this to death, but this film's pacing was excellent, and respectfully as someone who has dabbled in screenwriting, if this film's ability to more or less seamlessly merge three timelines at the same point isn't ample proof of that to someone, I don't know if their mind can ever be changed. Furthermore, these subplots all function like their own individual films, and while this is unusual, it kind of worked for me, especially because everything was anchored around the long space-chase where the First Order was trying to chase down that Resistance Cruiser. We have the "anchor plot" with Poe Dameron and Vice Admiral Holdo aboard this cruiser. We have the subplot with Rey trying to get a disillusioned Luke to help everyone aboard the cruiser. And lastly, we have the second subplot where Finn and Rose are trying to disable the tracker on-board the First Order ships so that they can help everyone aboard the cruiser. Long story short, everything is anchored to the Resistance cruiser, and its survival, which was a smart move and reminded me in some ways of The Empire Strikes Back and some of that film's tendencies. Sure, I don't like everything about The Last Jedi, but its pacing is actually some of the best in the history of the franchise, and I still have distinct memories of going to watch it for the first time and knowing that there was something different to the way it carried itself. Now today, I know what that is.

I'm going to make a statement here. Think about this: the only reason this film garnered as much hate as it did was because of its portrayal of Luke Skywalker and nearly every non-syndicated critique leveled at this film was done so not out of legitimate critical analysis but rather because "I hated the movie because I hated how they portrayed Luke Skywalker" doesn't sound professional, official, or intellectual enough. Now, that's not to say that there haven't been legitimate critiques leveled at The Last Jedi. I'm under no illusion that this film is perfect and in fact, I will be raising some of my own critiques of it later, despite actually having enjoyed it. Now, regardless of whether or not you like what the film did with Luke Skywalker, narratively, it makes a lot of sense, not just as a follow-up to The Force Awakens but also as a relatively logical next step for the franchise. Luke Skywalker had more or less hit his peak following Return of the Jedi. Trying to keep his character going in a purely heroic direction would have been redundant, and as uncomfortable as it was to see him strip down the mythos surrounding his name, it really is the only way to go with a character like this. I understand that Star Wars fans love illusion and that The Last Jedi is a movie about disillusion. I understand that this wouldn't sit well with longtime fans of the franchise. But just because it doesn't vibe with what you've come to expect from a franchise film doesn't make the film in question a bad one, and it's sad but true that what Rian Johnson did with the franchise makes a lot of narrative sense when you consider that The Force Awakens had opened up a door to a straight incline where our characters would have faced very little opposition had Johnson not gone the way he did. And when you consider that the final shooting script for The Last Jedi was narratively similar in a lot of ways to one of George Lucas's drafts for a proposed Episode VIII, I think that should take a lot of the wind out of the sails of the argument that what Rian Johnson did with the film, and particularly with Luke Skywalker, was too different from what Lucas would have wanted for its own sake.

On a more cosmetic level, I felt like The Last Jedi dug far more into the samurai film source material of the franchise than it did the franchise's well-documented Flash Gordon aspects, and I really loved that this film tried to, in a lot of ways, strip Star Wars back down to its basics. This film clearly digs further into the roots of far-east cinema than other entries in the franchise, and I sensed that it had a lot more in common with films like 2002's Hero and older films like Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, the latter of which notably inspired Lucas when he was first bringing this franchise to life back in the 70s. Putting more of an emphasis on the mythos of the saga and less of an emphasis on the technological side of the galaxy gave this movie a far-heavier air of fantasy than is normal in a Star Wars film, and in a lot of ways, that's really fitting for a movie titled The Last Jedi. In a lot of ways, this movie subverts the core ideas of the franchise, and sets the mood for us by taking us back to its simplistic core tenets, and the visual style of the film reflects this goal really well. Now, maybe Johnson and Co. should have taken their foot off the gas just a tad. This film is indeed a subversion of the core ideas of Star Wars, and while a film like this was honestly a long time coming, I have mixed feelings about how aggressive Johnson was with this subversion. Now don't get me wrong, Star Wars fans are easily offended, but I can't help but feel that Johnson, while maybe not downright disrespectful, was poking the bear. A lot of the subversion we see in this movie is really intense and really on the nose, and though I respect a film that is trying to be different, my opinion on the intensity of the subversion at play here goes back and forth.

Now, the film isn't perfect. I'm not the biggest fan of the Canto Bight sequence set smack-dab in the middle of the film, whose largely self-contained story arc threw the film's otherwise stellar pacing off for a good twenty minutes or so once it became less about the larger goals of the Resistance and more about "let's commit excessive property damage." It made for a heck of a memorable setpiece, but it really offset the pacing of this film for longer than I would have liked and left a lot to be desired because, on its own, it's a pretty great little moment, but it should have had more to do with the big picture of the film than it actually did. The Last Jedi would have been smart to completely do away with the jail sequence here at Canto Bight and would have benefited more from involving itself with the Master Codebreaker, whom finding had been the entire goal of Rose and Finn all along. It's like the writers had a really great concept and a really great finale in mind for the film, had to figure out a way to plug that last, nagging gap to get their story from point A to point B, and didn't entirely know how to, so they worked with what they had and gave us what they came up with, problems and all. In addition, this movie has some moments in it that I can only describe as weird. You probably know what I'm going to talk about before I even start this section. Yep, I'm going there. We're going to talk about Leia's Mary Poppins maneuver. I get that it's Leia finally revealing her connection to the force. I get that flight in zero gravity needs almost no propulsion. I still don't like it. This film has a lot of guts, and this is one moment where it seems like the film just chickened out. Frankly, the filmmakers would have been better off killing her, as cold as that may sound. Speaking of characters, writing-wise, I think the characters in this film are something of a mixed bag. To be completely fair to the film, character depth has been a problem with Star Wars since day one, so this isn't a problem indigenous to The Last Jedi, but apart from Kylo Ren and Luke, most of the characters in this film felt relegated to their role in the plot, and nowhere is this felt more than with Rey. She's the main protagonist of the film, and while she's nowhere near as bad a character as a lot of people make her out to be, I couldn't help but wish that I had been given more reasons to care about her than the survival of the Resistance because even if Daisy Ridley's acting is perfectly serviceable, the character of Rey itself doesn't have enough depth to be the main player. Thankfully, the same can't be said about Kylo Ren, who is an appropriately manipulative and layered villain that has rightfully evaded a lot of the ire directed at the sequel trilogy.

Obviously, I don't want to address every last bit of the criticism leveled at this film, given that a lot of it is kind of subjective (case in point: stuff like criticism of Kelly Marie Tran's portrayal of Rose Tico). All in all, I think of The Last Jedi as a good film with some weird plotting decisions. For every beautiful narrative stride it takes, it stumbles a little bit, and I admit that I go back and forth on the movie: this article just happened to catch me on a good day. Now, the film isn't the awful mess that a lot of longtime fans of the Star Wars franchise have made it out to be, and the one-two-three punch of the fanbase's response to this film, the fanbase's flip-flopping reaction to a less-than-stellar Prequel Trilogy, and the fanbase's inflated, ill-informed, and over-enthusiastic reaction to a lackluster season 2 of The Mandalorian has just kind of made me realize that maybe Star Wars fans aren't the greatest authority when it comes to determining the quality of an artistic work, and I sincerely say that as a former Star Wars mega-fan. But yeah, that's my rambling for today, and I hope that you were able to get something from it. After all, it has been 7 years coming.

And rest easy, all you nerds and geeks. If you think I'm just defending Disney or something, I can assure you that if I was talking about The Rise of Skywalker, this would be a very different article.

Here's the faulty chart I was talking about earlier:

https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/7wef9h/a_visual_graph_of_the_last_jedis_poor_pacing/

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - 8/10

Proverbs 11:16-17