What else could I possibly still have to say about The Last Jedi? Baby, I'm just getting started! Part Two
No, I'm not being this thorough because I so thoroughly hated it. The movie had plenty of redeeming qualities that just didn't add up to me. It isn't a Zero out of Ten. It's a solid Four in my book with glimmers of 7. It's just not a mediocre Four, where you walk out and shrug. It's an In-Your-Face Four that precipitates strong opinions and deep discourse. So with that in mind, where was I.....? Finn's secret mission. While the First Order very slowly and boringly chases after the remaining Resistance ships, Finn meets a girl. Rose. Her sister died on the bombing run at the beginning and since then she's been hanging around the escape pods, stunning anyone who tries to abandon their post in the midst of certain doom. And the doom sure looks certain. Of course this is how she meets Finn, who in keeping with his habits from The Force Awakens, always runs away before reluctantly standing his ground (and in real-time, that was like yesterday). Turns out it wasn't what it looked like and he was trying to protect Rey who he thinks will come back with Skywalker to save the day, as long as she doesn't fall into the same trap they're in. I like Rose. She's the Resistance equivalent of a plumber or something (and Finn was a First Order janitor) so putting them together makes sense. And she never gives up or wavers in her convictions because her sister fought the good fight right up to the end, so she can do her part too. They brainstorm a ridiculous and nonsensical solution to the situation and bring it to Poe. In 18 hours they must sneak away, infiltrate the rich and famous, recruit a hacker, infiltrate the First Order, and shut down their trackers for something like six minutes so the Resistance can escape and not be followed. Six minutes?! Really? Even within this convoluted story, it sounds like it's probably not good enough to actually work. But Poe goes for it because... Poe Dameron is an idiot now. What happened to this guy? It's one thing to ignore orders to stand down because you're tough and you never give up. It's another to commit mutiny and treason because you think you know more than the Generals. Not only does he help them steal a ship and escape in secret, he then spends the rest of his subplot carrying out a failed coup against Admiral Holdo, played convincingly ambiguous and condescending by Laura Dern (of Jurassic Park fame). Everything from her outfit to her purple hair and even the fact we've never heard of her makes her seem unlikely to be competent. I'll give Director Rian Johnson credit for how he depicted her. She isn't likable, but that's how she has to be for us to believe Poe might be justified. Nonetheless, Princess Leia makes her return and retakes command and Poe learns a very valuable Sunday school lesson about trusting your superior officers who might not have included you in every detail of their plans because they're not idiots and lately, you kind of are. Its sole purpose is to buy time for Finn and Rose to hack the First order, but that ends up being a dead end, too, so its sole narrative purpose devolves into mere misdirection and ultimately just wastes time. As far as Poe's character arc of learning to be a leader, it makes sense logically that he has to screw up along the way, but blah, blah, blah. It's a little heavy handed. I'll concede that he does use the lesson to make a difficult-leader-decision when he calls for retreat later, but that payoff simply isn't as climactic or impactful as other great mutineer movies like Crimson Tide. The entire so-called chase suffers the same problem of bogging down Act Two. When three Imperial Star Destroyers chased the Millennium Falcon in Empire Strikes Back (have you heard of that really old movie?) everyone is fast-moving and dynamic and intense, enhanced by awe-inspiring John Williams background music. In this loosely related distant-cousin of a sequel, everyone is stuck in molasses. Frozen still in the void of space. I get that it's "realistic" but weren't we watching Star Wars? Show someone zipping past the camera already! Casino Royale. Meanwhile Rose makes a comment about Canto Bight reminiscent of the Mos Eisley space cantina, "You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy..." except instead of cutting to lowlifes and criminals, we cut to the wealthiest aristocrats of the galaxy gambling away their war profits. It's clever. I'll accept it. But I wouldn't mind seeing less cliche examples of opulence than mere nice suits and slot machines. The only people I've ever seen gamble like that are the middle to lower class. And the best examples of implied oppression they can give us are stable boys and alien racing horses? One, we never see the stable boys (and girls) directly abused. I realize you can't show much in a "kid's movie" but it's not what you show, it's how you show it, and Johnson just doesn't sell me on the oppression. Two, the racing animals are not memorable or empathetic. Horses with flat faces and pointy ears? Had they been tauntauns I would've been furious at their plight, because that's an unforgettable creature we all came to love. These, not so much. So it's not the idea of the war profiteers living in luxury on the shoulders of the oppressed that bothers me, but it's socially savvy inspiration also isn't enough to blind me to the bland production value of the entire sequence. It wavers too clumsily between slapstick comedy and ham-fisted social commentary. Why make such a big stink about the high-rolling hacker with the purple palm-bloom lapel -- the only one who can pull off a job like this! -- when we're just gonna end up with a different hacker anyway, who's just as good afterall. Benicio Del Toro is great, by the way. Greasy, suspicious and idiosyncratic to a T. He's the only one not phoning it in, in this film (besides .Hamill). But his sudden and inevitable betrayal (anyone? anyone?) doesn't have nearly the intensity of Lando Calrissian before him. Because it was sudden. And we didn't get enough time with him as a character to see how inevitable it was or wasn't. I understand how he's an anti-Lando because of the fact he lacks a subsequent redemption arc, but really he's just short-shrifted. But not as short-shrifted as... Captain Phasma. Oh how we loved you in the marketing material. If only they'd include you in the movies one day. Did they really give her less screen time than before? Don't even get me started on the [insert confrontation]-ness of her scenes with Finn. So tiring. And then she's dead. What a waste. What's that you say? "But it was just like Boba Fett in the originals!" Bull$#*&! Even George Lucas admitted if he'd realized how popular Boba Fett would be, he'd have written him more into the plot. Boba Fett was a throwaway character mistakenly cut short of his potential, not a role model to emulate 34 years later by inept writers. This confrontation also boasts the film's worst dialogue. I think Finn actually calls her "chrome-dome" at one point?! After an explosion wrecks the hangar deck, Phasma manages to line up with her stormtroopers in order to march out of the smoke from the other side of the hangar. Who staged this? BB-8 rides an AT-ST walker in a moment straight outa the prequels (remember R2-D2's jet rockets?). There's just too much action-movie garbage to take this scene seriously and it could've so easily been cut. When Finn and Rose wake up from the explosion and she says, "There's a shuttle!" they could skip straight to their escape in it and not only would all the worst parts be removed, it would leave Phasma's fate ambiguous, to fight another day. [Head canon accepted.] Admiral Holdo's last stand. This is a beautiful moment and the decision to cut the sound and flip the light negative was shocking as a visual. It's a powerful and unforgettable moment in the film timed perfectly with Rey and Kylo Ren's struggle over the Skywalker lightsaber. It's shortcomings lie in it's lack of setup or internal consistency. Her ship wasn't the first with lightspeed capability to go down to the First Order, even in this movie. Could none of the other ships make such an attempt? Is there no missile that can be developed to achieve a similar effect? Why has no one ever done this before? Surely the rebels have been in more dire straights before. Why didn't anyone lightspeed into the Death Star? That was a suicide run to begin with, and doesn't every X-Wing have hyperdrive? You see now how logic undercuts what inevitably turns out to be little more than high-drama and superficial special-effects. And this is one of the three best parts of the movie! Ah... Who am I kidding. Shut up brain, it was still awesome. Plus this guy on YouTube sorta figured out it actually makes perfect sense afterall, so... Luke's low-point is to burn the Jedi tree of life and all its six books (was this the extent of the first Jedi temple?) and sulk on his island. Except Rey secretly took the books with her, supposedly. And who should arrive to elbow him in his grief? But baby-doll Yoda! That's right, Yoda is a puppet again even though he's glowing with the Force. Also, his cheeks seemed kinda shiny for some reason. Someone in the audience behind me literally said, "That CGI is the worst!" Laugh out loud! I hope he figured it out. I would've been okay with a CGI Yoda to be honest, he looked better than the puppet... Or at least equally as good. Or at least better than the last time they tried to recreate the puppet (Episode I before the BluRay). And this time is acceptable, but still doesn't look any more like "real" Yoda than the CGI. So once again they got the right idea, but the execution is, "meh." Nonetheless, I like Yoda being playful like he used to be, giving Luke a hard time for being a whiner, which he totally was! A lot of people are saying Luke's characterization in this movie was inconsistent with his previous appearances. It wasn't what I expected exactly, no, and it wasn't consistent with the expanded universe novels all us fans read in the 90's (since redacted from the canon) but whoever said it had to be? I'm on the fence about Luke, here until I see it again, but I do know one thing, Mark Hamill acted his heart out. Take it or leave it, this was his career best performance (outside voicing the Joker, of course!). Yoda then delivers a line comparably as profound as his unforgettable quotes from Empire, something about failure being the greatest teacher. It convinces Luke to get off his bum and get back in the fight and we know where that leads. The AT-AT attack at the end of the film is a mirror to the ground assault on Hoth in that other vaguely similar War in the Stars, circa 1980. The difference is that scene had weight and tension as the Rebels fought an uphill battle to buy time for a retreat and because it's the beginning of the film, we don't yet realize how hopeless it may or may not be. In this scene they fly speeders that are made of junk and have no hope of surviving in what is essentially an entire second climax to the film. This is why the film feels so long, because we already had a climax! And I'm the kind of viewer who actually likes when there's a double-climax in a movie but it's a real bear to edit and the pacing has to be perfect for it to work. The Dark Knight comes to mind as an example, and that only works because they split the ending between the plot climax and the thematic climax. This has two of each. And why? They are buying time to... nothing. No amount of time will save them because there are no allies rushing to their aid. Why not? I have no idea, there should be thousands of leftover warships and Republic military fleets to join them. But there aren't and they don't realize this yet. They just need to endure the assault by destroying the battering ram device, and thank God it has nothing to do with the Death Star for a change. Except that of course it does. It's got a thing in it. They all end up getting shot down until no one is left but main characters. And Poe issues a retreat (that hypocritical #^%*!) and then the worse thing happens. Finn goes suicidal. Why? I don't know. He's just sick of it all, as are we. Benicio Del Toro got under his skin about the good guys and bad guys going back and forth all the time. Oh well, it doesn't look like it was gonna work anyway as he flies into the battering ram device and there is a sense of futility about it all, until Rose saves him at the last second. She says, "I love you!" Or wait... What did she say? Something about remembering not to fight against what you hate but fight for what you love. Same difference. And then she kisses him and passes out in his arms. The idea of this is reasonable for a war movie, as far as themes go. But this nail could not be hit any more on the head than if I was writing it myself. Which... please God! Let me help these people write better movies! It's just sappy, is all I'm saying. Trite. Just as trite as when Del Toro tells Finn the same people who make the TIE fighters make the X-Wings. Too trite. True. But way too trite. I noticed a lot of sappy viewers love this moment, between Rose and Finn, so hey, don't let me rain on their parade. Mileage may very and there's no accounting for taste. If it works for you, then enjoy. I'm not saying I don't get it. Maybe there's even a part of me that likes it too. But it is a little thick. Rey saves the day by moving rocks. This was lame. Yes, I remember that Luke said the Force isn't about moving rocks and he was wrong because he was a curmudgeon and he stifled her hope and "rebellions are built on hope," (~Jyn Erso, RIP). So Rian Johnson gets credit for properly setting up at least one of his plot points, but not a very important one. They could've just discovered a secret crystal-fox tunnel. It was pretty underwhelming considering she's the most powerful Jedi in the galaxy -- without training! -- and her big climax thus far is to move the rocks and save, what? eight people? to continue the Rebellion on the Millennium Falcon. Now that I liked. I like that the Rebellion hangs on such a small yet iconic ship, that the Falcon now becomes synonymous with the Rebellion. Especially in light of it's fateful and fortuitous presence at the first Death Star run, rescuing Luke just in time. It represents that one last chance, that last hope, that one unlikely decision to stick around and fight when you could've ran and hid. I also like that no one comes to the aid of the Resistance when Leia puts out the call, if only because it's a cliche action movie trope that all the Eagles will rescue you in Act Three if the straights are dire enough. Besides, we already saw Dunkirk this year, so I'm good for a while. Finn tucks Rose in while she heals up for the sequel. Poe introduces himself to Rey, "Hey, good looking!" and I sense a double love triangle pending: Kylo Ren "is the only one that cares" about Rey. Rey loves Finn because he "came back" for her in Force Awakens. Finn now loves Rose because she "fights for what she loves". And Poe Dameron now, well, let's just say I got my eyes on him and BB-8. That's all I can comment on that besides #Reylo in Episode IX! Conclusion: The Last Jedi goes down with other famously floppy sequels throughout cinema history: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull while we're at it); Alien Resurrection; Terminator Rise of the Machines (remember that one?); Matrix Revolutions; X-Men The Last Stand; Spider-Man 3; The Dark Knight Rises (don't even deny it!); Star Trek 1, 5, 7, 10 and Into Darkness (12); Prometheus; and most comedy sequels like Dumb and Dumber and Zoolander. Movies that utterly failed to understand the franchise they were part of and deliver on the basic premise of their predecessors without jumping the shark or just plain phoning it in. Ultimately The Last Jedi is a cheap twisted clone of The Empire Strikes Back (everything people hated about The Force Awakens) but the plot is more convoluted, less developed, and all the "moments" it copies from Empire Strikes Back are less compelling then their original counterparts. A few cool visuals and some creative thematic social undertones are a welcome addition but not nearly enough to carry an overly-long slog of prequel-quality storytelling. That's right I said it, and it's what I thought the whole time I was watching: The Last Jedi is just like the prequels. Hokey. On the nose. At times brilliant and other times bonkers. No better. No worse. Defenders are trying to remind everyone that Empire had negative reactions too, when it came out, and now it's a masterpiece. Fair enough, but so did the prequels. And they're still... prequels. And ya know what? Some people like the prequels (like me, I guess), so maybe it's not all so bad! Without the prequels we wouldn't have the pod races, Darth Maul lightsaber duel, the gladiatorial games on Geonosis, Jango Fett, Darth Plagueis or Order 66! So with that in mind... I kinda want to go watch The Phantom Menace... Anyone care to join me?
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