The Last Jedi: It Could Have Been Better

It was about 6 p.m. when Mark and I, very naively, went to buy tickets for a 7:15 showing of The Last Jedi. It was sold out. So were the next three showings. We deliberated and decided, what the heck, who needs sleep? and bought tickets for a 10:45 showing that night. Having got it in our heads that we were going to see the newest Star Wars movie that day, we weren't about to postpone the experience any more than necessary.

That was a week ago. It's taken me a while to be sure what I think.

So yep, I've seen it. It's hard to be at all concise about my thoughts and feelings and reactions, which were and still are multitudinous. There will be a few minor spoilers, but the big reveals aren't really what I'm here to talk about.

I'll start by saying that it's not a bad movie. It has its strengths and weaknesses. But I'm not sure if it's a great Star Wars movie. If The Force Awakens felt like Star Wars ripping off Star Wars, this felt . . . well, at times, nothing like Star Wars at all.

All the familiar elements are there: lightsabers, space battles, droids and the Force, and all the characters (who survived TFA, which is to say, all but one) are present. But The Last Jedi also contained a lot that is unfamiliar, and not always to its benefit.

The story is new and original, for which I'm grateful. Broad story arcs may have been inspired by The Empire Strikes Back, but there is no plot rehashing here. (I was also glad, though it's a trifling detail, to learn that Supreme Leader Snoke is a pretty normal-sized person; his previous enormous holographic projections had me worried.) I have no gripes with the plot, no disappointment about any reveals or lack thereof -- I came to the movie ready to entertain any new plot that emerged. For the most part the plot didn't disappoint me.

But execution is important, and it's what separates a good movie from a great one. And some of the execution of The Last Jedi wasn't great.

Most glaring of all in my mind, this movie has a sense of humor that doesn't feel authentic to the Star Wars universe. There have always been humorous quips and amusing banter in this galaxy, and even extended comical sequences (Yoda is hilarious and absurd when Luke first meets him on Dagobah, until he's ready to reveal his true identity), but there was a certain sophistication to the jokes because they relied on interpersonal dynamics and character quirks, not on contriving situations to get a laugh from the audience.

Rian Johnson fishes for laughs when Rey asks Kylo Ren to put a shirt on in a scene where she should have much bigger things on her mind; with a slapstick moment where the efforts of several very earnest (if ridiculous-looking) aliens are foiled (I just felt bad for them); and when BB-8 tells a very confused Poe that Finn is naked and leaking, prompting Poe to ask, basically, "are you drunk, bro?" The desired chuckles will be elicited, but these moments are tonally awkward in a movie that is willing, in some scenes, to commit to being dark and emotional. I like some light moments to even out the darkness, but this movie wants to go both very light and very dark (and while I wish I was talking about the Force, I'm not). The dry wit that has always been a Star Wars hallmark has been traded in for the broad comedy popularized by the Marvel movies. I am an ardent fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but I'm not excited to see its sense of humor sneaking into the galaxy far away.

Visually, The Last Jedi veers off in its own direction. The original trilogy was made in the seventies and early eighties, and is visually very much of that time. The prequel trilogy incorporated elements of that visual style while introducing more color and some of the aesthetics of its own time. Episode seven, which wore its love for the original trilogy on its sleeve, had a seventies throwback feel, and that more gritty look (made ever so slightly smoother by modern cinematography and special effects) was one of my favorite things about that movie. The story may not have been fresh, but the look didn't have to be, and it put me instantly back into the Star Wars universe.

The Last Jedi looks a lot slicker, a lot shinier. There are a lot of creatures and sequences that rely heavily on CGI. The color red is huge in this movie (to paraphrase Rey in TFA, I didn't know there was so much red in the whole Star Wars galaxy) except with one character who's more into purple -- as a hair color, that is -- and looks like she might have sneaked in from Guardians of the Galaxy or the capitol of The Hunger Games. And the camera loves to get close to the characters' faces. If those faces weren't the ones that populated the last movie, the two movies wouldn't look alike at all.

This movie doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's the eighth in a much-loved series, and its main problem is that it doesn't feel like it belongs in that series. The case could be made that this new trilogy should be judged apart from the other two and considered its own entity, and I'd be perfectly willing to accept that premise, but it doesn't make The Last Jedi seem any less of an anomaly. The Force Awakens was a love letter to the original trilogy, and this sequel looks, sounds and moves like an entirely different beast. 

So this is the other side of that coin, if not a different coin altogether. J. J. Abrams gave us something so much like A New Hope that it seemed all originality was lost. Rian Johnson has given us something so off the rails that it's hard to see the Star Wars under all the . . . well . . . whatever that was.

At first I came away from this movie feeling jaded; I'd found the straw that broke the camel's back. I would swear off new movies built on the backs of old favorites. And it truly may be time to recognize that sequels, prequels and reboots, while they feed our nostalgia and give us what we think we want (and can make metric crap tons of money, a large if lurking motivation), aren't truly the path to great cinema. But with some time to reflect, I have to admit that it's unfair to pin all of that on one Star Wars movie.

After buying our tickets to that late (but by no means the latest) showing, Mark and I went home to fill the intervening time by watching The Force Awakens again, for the first time since it was in theaters. If we hadn't literally finished the one and gone directly to the other, maybe I wouldn't have reacted so strongly. It is disappointing to come away feeling that The Last Jedi doesn't fit seamlessly into the puzzle, but I have lots of biases and emotion (and fifteen years of Star Wars fandom) coloring my view (red, in this case).

Ultimately, it's time that will tell how episode eight holds up. I'll have to see it again myself before I'm sure of anything.

Whose Is It Really? Some Star Wars Thoughts

I mentioned here that I'm collecting my thoughts on the world of Marvel movies -- and truly, I am. That post will come eventually. Marvel and I have been through a lot together, so I've got a lot to say.

But as you've possibly heard mentioned, The Last Jedi was officially released today. So I've got Star Wars on the brain.

What got me thinking in a different direction (something besides the powerful primitive wave of emotion that must necessarily accompany the arrival of a new Star Wars movie, that is) was this review of The Force Awakens. It's from two years ago, from when TFA was newly released, and reading it now, as opposed to in the exhilaration of that time, I'm able to evaluate its thesis with (somewhat) less emotion attached.

The question raised there is a fair one: has appealing to the fans become more important than creating something strong and original?

Make no mistake -- I am one of "the fans." If Marvel and I can be said to go way back, Star Wars and I go way way back. I began my relationship with that world something like fifteen years ago, as a kid watching the original trilogy in spellbound awe. The prequels were also fun to watch, although I haven't felt moved to return to them as I have (repeatedly) to the trilogy that started it all. They were flashy, but the magic wasn't there.

It's become popular to the point of cliche to revile George Lucas for "ruining" Star Wars with episodes 1-3, and I have at times been one of those people. It's strange: we who love the stories Lucas told have hated him for doing as he chose to do with something that we perceived as our own. It's a beautiful property of storytelling that the people who hear a story can claim a certain kind of ownership of it; I interact actively with stories that I find meaningful, instead of passively experiencing them and moving on with my life (as I do with stories that just don't excite me). But just because I find meaning in a story doesn't actually mean that I have the power to choose its path.

Or does it? Literary criticism (which, despite its official title, applies to far more than literature) has been moving toward reader-created meaning for a long time. That trend has its detractors (I know several personally who are vehement in their dislike) but the movement is strong. The idea is that when I experience a story, I create meaning within the framework the story presents to me. George Lucas may have intended Princess Leia to fulfill a certain function within the story (Macguffin, sex symbol, and who knows what else) but I can choose to see her in a different light -- and if you are on board with modern critical thinking, not only can I choose to do so, but I should.

I have some ambivalence on this point.

On the one hand, I have never admired Orson Scott Card more than when he wrote, in the introduction to Speaker for the Dead,

". . . in the pages of this book, you and I will meet one-on-one, my mind and yours, and you will enter a world of my making and dwell there, not as a character that I control, but as a person with a mind of your own. You will make of my story what you need it to be, if you can. I hope my tale is true enough and flexible enough that you can make it into a world worth living in."

Card gets it: his readers want what he can give them, but they also want to participate in the story, and that may involve going outside the bounds of what he imagined. We can't help doing this. Every individual is going to react and interpret a story differently. He's also explicitly giving me permission -- if I want to read something into the character of Ender Wiggin that Card did not foresee, I can do so with Card's blessing.

But I also frequently want to know what the writer meant, apart from what I might guess or want them to mean. This is why I love biographies of writers: I want to know what was going on in the lives and minds of my favorite storytellers, because I'm hoping I'll be clued in to meaning in their work. Stephen King is one of my favorite writers, and I've read only one of his gazillion novels. What I love is his nonfiction, his writing about writing; he is willing to give candid explanations of the thoughts or events or stories that inspire his own storytelling, and the insight is enthralling. With regards to King, what he means to communicate intrigues me even more than what he does communicate (so much so that I've hardly interacted with the actual books at all).

Star Wars fans who reject George Lucas' prequel trilogy are, whether or not they realize it, buying completely into the modern theory of criticism: that the reader is king. It's not what George Lucas intended, but what they want Star Wars to be, that takes precedence. So it is that J. J. Abrams, himself a rabid Star Wars fan (and, we can assume, a prequel-rejecter), was able to deliver to millions of diehard fans what they wanted where Lucas did not.

It's not a bad thing. I enjoyed The Force Awakens because I, too, love the original trilogy. The look is the same, the feeling is the same, and the story progresses through such similar beats that the first report I heard (from my mother, no less) was that episode seven was episode four all over again. Having now seen TFA a few times, and with the added perspective of a couple years, my opinion is that the story is not really the same, but there is certainly a lack of originality. The appeal is that of a familiar pair of jeans, not of a fancy new dress. Abrams didn't set out to blow our minds but to make us feel at home, and he succeeded abundantly.

Still, I wish there had been more. I would have liked to see someone give the fans that feeling of comfort as well as a sense of discovery. (When we saw TFA in the theater with family, my six-year-old niece said loudly at Harrison Ford's first appearance, "Wow, he got old!" That's not exactly the sort of discovery I was thinking of.) There could have been a movie that felt as warm and familiar that didn't also retread old story ground. It would have been a fine line to tread, but I think it was possible, and still is. Maybe that's what we'll get, belatedly, in episode eight (I've been zealously avoiding all details, so although I could probably know the entire plot already, I've remained blissfully, willfully ignorant thus far).

If you wanted to see something firmly, deeply rooted in the world of the original Star Wars movies that nevertheless told a new, completely original story, your best shot is Rogue One. That movie had its problem areas to be sure, but what is does offer is the nostalgic feel that fans (by and large) seem to crave, without retreading any old ground. The story, characters, and tone are completely new, but it doesn't betray its roots. It's still Star Wars (and importantly, with the OT flavor).

Maybe episodes eight and nine will give us more of that. Maybe they won't retread old ground anymore. I'm hoping that The Force Awakens was just a jumping-off point to bold new story frontiers.

I probably won't get to see The Last Jedi until next week, but when I do, you can bet I'll have things to say.

(In the meantime, I might just finish up that post about Marvel.)