Revisiting The Last Jedi

I remember it like it was yesterday, feeling so uncomfortably torn as my father and I silently exited the theater after watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi for the very first time. I was barely fifteen years old, and I had just watched a movie that had challenged everything I loved about a franchise I had grown up practically worshipping. My mind was racing, and my heart was pounding. I knew this movie had shredded my nerves, flipped my assumptions about Star Wars on their head, and simply been an all-around unpleasant experience; I was just unsure whether that had been the very point of the movie. It was then that my dad broke the silence.

"That was a fantastic movie."

That's when it hit me. All of the feelings crashed over me like a wave, somehow both violent and reassuring. The joy, the sorrow, the fear, the uncertainty, the love, the hate, the light, the dark, the pain of seeing my favorite franchise so fundamentally challenged, and the beautiful emotional sunrise of seeing it survive and evolve into something new. I knew I loved The Last Jedi. I just didn't know why.

Nevertheless, it didn't take long for me to find out that not everyone shared my sentiment, not by a long shot. Growing up, I had been largely unaware of the wider Star Wars fanbase, and watching the reaction to this movie was like having someone drop me into a painfully hot, oily kettle of popcorn and set the burner to high heat. I didn't know that people would sometimes vote-brigade to lower the score of a movie online, that they would sometimes harass actors with no say over a movie's direction, who were simply working for a paycheck, with insults and words that would make me blush if I heard them in real life, that they would even send death threats to a director who had simply created a movie. A movie. I loved The Last Jedi, but it was nevertheless the beginning of the end of my long tenure as a Star Wars superfan.

I expected the vitriol surrounding it to die down with time, for some who had initially hated it to see what I had seen and change their minds, even if I wasn't sure how to put my experience into words. Instead, watching the conversation evolve was like going through the seven stages of grief. Never have I seen a movie evoke a reaction quite like The Last Jedi did. I noted the high critic score - an impressive 91% on Rotten Tomatoes with an average score of 8.1 out of 10 - and even though I wasn't exactly sure how movie critics did what they did, I trusted them, figuring that they watch tenfold the movies we as audience members do, and that they had their reasons for rating it as highly as they did. After all, I figured, I remembered the emotional reaction I had to the movie, and even if not everyone shared it, I trusted my gut.

Of course, time changes your perception of things. Though I never turned into one of those slightly overweight Star Wars zealots who kiss their Padme Amidala action figure before bed every night, I did begin to question my initially positive assessment of the film. At the time, I was mercifully ignorant of the wider critic-audience divide, and though I had moved on from exclusive Star Wars fandom and begun experimenting with other franchises, the thought bugged me: what if I was wrong about The Last Jedi? So many people had hated it. What if they had a point?

This movie is likely the most significant reason I wanted to become a movie critic in the first place. This controversy was emotional for me, and I wanted to both love this movie and hopefully prove the points of those who thought otherwise wrong. And of course, the subtleties of The Last Jedi will fly under the radar of most, though it's these subtleties that either make or break any movie, and not just this one. The critics aren't imagining it; this is a great movie that had the misfortune of being released in a franchise full of fans that don't prize subtle, academic movie criticism. The Last Jedi was doomed from the start for the crime of being dangerously innovative in a world that demands reiteration of what came before.

I've written about this movie on my blog in the past, about a year and a half ago. My review was positive, yet a small, near-subconscious part of me also wanted to appease people who didn't like it, and so I ended up subtracting two points from my overall assessment for things that, quite frankly, didn't matter. Rewatching this movie last night, I realized two things: the first was that The Last Jedi is among the best films in its franchise, and the second was that not only does Rian Johnson flip the myth of Star Wars on its head, but he also uses this movie to recognize the broader history of cinema. Star Wars fans live in a bubble, and I would know because I used to be one. The Last Jedi is the least self-referential of the films in its franchise, and the gap between first and second place is monstrously large.

It is a long-overdue reinvention of Star Wars that had the guts to make the hard choice to push the franchise beyond what we'd come to expect of it. It's a brave and risky movie, and it was unleashed upon a fanbase that doesn't appreciate bravery or riskiness. If you want proof of this, fast-forward only a year later and look at their universal praise for a second season of The Mandalorian that was little more than a tastelessly artificial assembly line of cameos. The Last Jedi recognizes that Star Wars itself wouldn't exist without its influences, and it is a rich tribute to these inspirations that also chooses to strip them down to their bare bones.

On the most basic audio-visual level, The Last Jedi looks like a rich concoction of sinister industrialism, nearly-Nordic mythicism, bomber ships straight out of Twelve O'clock High, and even Oriental pieces that wouldn't look entirely out of place in Three Outlaw Samurai. The movies that preceded it blended these elements, and while this episode does so to some extent, it also introduces them in more primal forms. Each moving visual part is more readily comparable to the movies that inspired it, and all The Last Jedi does is cook a new dish with familiar ingredients. Of course, John Williams's score complementing all of this is fantastic, and this time around, it contains an almost-serene hint of tragedy not familiar or even comfortable for Star Wars. The cues in it are simply beautiful, and I will never not feel a chill at the quiet musical note following Finn's million-dollar question: where's Rey?

Speaking of which, I'm aware that many fans were up in arms about some contentious characterization choices, but I believe the only fair way to engage a movie is on its own terms, and the acting in The Last Jedi is quite good. It's a movie that cares less about spectacle and more about our characters' perceptions of it, and it touches refreshingly on some of the fundamental original ideas of the franchise, ideas about how nobodies can be somebody, and nowhere is this theme more appropriate than with the much maligned but perfectly appropriate Rose. I take zero issue with her character, and in fact, the reasons I like her are numerous. However, I was most drawn to this movie's exploration of Rey and Kylo Ren's relationship. They are two characters with many insecurities, and watching their volatile connection evolve into something more complex is an unusually intimate experience for a Star Wars movie.

The rest of the cast is just as good, with Benicio Del Toro's DJ being one of my favorite characters in all of Star Wars. His acting is fantastically subtle, and his character has so many unexplained ticks to everything including his voice, ticks that made me wonder why is he the way that he is? And whether you love or hate what was done to him, Luke Skywalker is a more complex character here than he has ever been before, a man dealing with a tragic failure, a demon more potent than any Sith Lord or Imperial legion he's ever faced before. Luke bears the thematic weight of this movie on his shoulders, and love it or hate it, Mark Hamill's inspired acting is but one part of a cast that is a worthy ensemble to his journey.

The deconstruction of Luke's character is only one part of a broader vision on the part of The Last Jedi, a vision that the villainous, conflicted Kylo Ren perfectly represents when he says, Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. That's the only way to become who you're meant to be. This is a movie about change, whereas almost every Star Wars movie before it was an ode to the past that couldn't stand on its own two legs without it. I can understand being resistant to change, but judging a movie on the execution of its own intentions, whether you agree with them or not, is the only fair way to judge it.

The Last Jedi challenges everything you took for granted about this franchise, shining a spotlight on things that were always there but that we were too afraid to mention, like the possibility that the Jedi's fundamental legacy is one of failure. It's also a movie about different characters who all want to do the right thing but have conflicting ideas about what that would mean. It's about the well-intentioned choices of characters who want to be righteous, with dire consequences. It's also about change. Time it is for you to look past a pile of old books; Johnson's screenplay has Master Yoda practically break the fourth wall when he says that.

This movie is even about failure, something Star Wars has treated as an asset to be used for good rather than the good itself in the past. It allows characters we've come to love to experience actual, tragic failure, and there is a soul-crushing sadness to be found here because of it, a sadness that is an appropriate twin to the refusal of this movie to affirm our initial assumptions about it. Both thematically and narratively, The Last Jedi tears down the expectations we developed for it after the release of The Force Awakens two years prior, and does so in a way that exposes how shallow those expectations really were. After all, there is much more to a good sequel than which fan-favorite character our new protagonist is related to.

They say that if you've never seen the sun, you'll be impressed by a streetlamp, and I have seen enough overcomplicated charts about why the pacing of The Last Jedi is awful to last me a lifetime. The quality of a movie, pacing included, is not wrapped up in what it does so much as how it does it, and contrary to everything these people believe, this movie is a lean, mean, and efficient machine. The prequel trilogy found itself too wrapped up in complex politics for its own good, and even the best of them, The Revenge of the Sith, contains a first half that is almost entirely irrelevant to anything that happens in the second. In addition, the visual storytelling of Episode Eight is fantastic, far more so than any Star Wars movie that came before. The Last Jedi doesn't tell you everything out loud, and it trusts that you're intelligent enough to figure some of what it's trying to do out on your own.

Except maybe we weren't. The overarching plot line of The Last Jedi is effective and time-bound, the former of which you always want your movie to be, and the latter of which is a really reliable way to get there. It's a race against time until either the Resistance can figure out a way to escape the First Order in their beleaguered starcruiser, or until their ship runs out of fuel and is blasted out of the sky by the overwhelmingly superior firepower of their enemies. It's an interesting throughline that grounds every subplot in subservience to it; if either Rey can't get Luke to help, or if Finn and Rose can't find a codebreaker to hack their way through the problem, the Resistance dies. It's said that good movies move, and The Last Jedi is constantly moving, and moving towards something inevitable.

Yet, it never outruns this intimacy I wasn't used to in a Star Wars movie. Not intimacy as in words or poorly-written romances we'd been conditioned to accept and even love by the Prequels. Real intimacy, the type supported by fantastic and radically different technical aspects that feel almost taboo for this franchise. Rey isn't the deepest main protagonist, but The Last Jedi works in spite of it because this isn't her movie. She's nevertheless an effective vessel for shaping other characters, and this movie smartly places the weight of its radical themes on the shoulders of a Luke who is now more conflicted than ever.

Once again, it hurt seeing Luke, a childhood hero who even shared my name, lower than he ever had been before. But on the most basic of levels, we haven't seen this man in thirty years, and I think it's unfair to expect him to be the same man he was before. On a more artistic level, Mark Hamill's acting is fantastic, and this movie makes Luke a more complex character than he's ever been. When in doubt, always give your character more layers, and The Last Jedi turns Luke into a fantastically acted and very well-written figure with far more to him than being Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight, a legend. If you want to be taken seriously by the academic criticism community, you need to be fair to movies, and that starts with critiquing movies not for what they don't do, but only for what they do; the biggest disservice you can do to a movie, even a sequel, is to walk into it with an idea already made up in your mind of what it should and shouldn't be.

I wish Rian Johnson had directed Episode Nine, because The Last Jedi introduces so many interesting ideas that were discarded in the name of damage control that wasn't even needed in the first place. This movie steps radically outside the bounds of comfort-food Star Wars, reinventing the myth while also paying beautiful homage to all the inspirations that made it possible in the first place. If you do hate this movie with a passion, my prescription to you would be to watch more movies so you can realize you exist in a cinematic context far broader than your own good memories of the Original Trilogy, as good as they may be. This is rich filmmaking with the most abundant arsenal of influences in a Star Wars movie since A New Hope blasted onto the scene in 1977. Good art will evoke a reaction, either positive or negative, and whether you love or hate The Last Jedi, it succeeds as art either way.

This movie divided critics and audiences more cleanly down the middle than any other movie I can think of, and when I was younger and not a movie critic, I knew I loved this movie, even though everyone else seemed to hate it, and I couldn't put my finger on why. Now, I can. The craft of The Last Jedi is immaculate by a standard far wider and more comprehensive than that of a Star Wars movie, and its spirit is as pioneering as that of George Lucas's all those years ago, just in a different way. Ultimately, I will always love it for its intrepid willingness to be artistic in the face of a franchise even contemptuously defined by its demand for repetition.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - 10/10

Proverbs 29:11