The Last Jedi is the Inevitable Deconstruction of Star Wars

and that’s not necessarily a bad thing

In an attempt to be honest with one another, I’m going to preface this with a few disclaimers. The first, and maybe most divisive, is this: I loved The Last Jedi. I realize that many don’t. In fact, I was surprised to see how much some of my closest friends didn’t like it — people who have been, like me, fans of this groundbreaking space opera since childhood.

That said, I am not writing this for anyone other than me. Although there were many things I didn’t like about the film, I’m probably not going to cover most of them since they’ve been talked about enough. I started this whole project because I genuinely wanted to understand why people didn’t like the movie. While writing, I’ve watched over hours of videos and read thousands of arguments on why it’s the worst Star Wars movie, or why it’s literally ruined and betrayed what Star Wars means.

I’m not saying I’m blind to its faults. I do think the film was fairly messy in places. But I can’t see what makes it the worst. I and II ruined more for me than VIII ever did, and I still really like all three of those films. In fact, the more I think about The Last Jedi, the more I appreciate how it’s revitalized the entire saga for me. So me writing this is largely me trying to figure out how to express my enjoyment of this film without insulting a big part of the fan-base.

If you liked the movie, I hope I am able to provide you with a little peace of mind; if you didn’t, I hope I am able to at least provide little specks of light in what is nothing but a black hole to you. But, again, I am not writing this for you. I’m writing it for the seven-year-old who first fell in love with IV, and for the twenty-three-year-old whose love was rekindled after VIII.

The next few disclaimers are quick ones: This is a very long piece of writing — it’s likely going to be a living document because, for all I know, I might have more edits to make two years from now. If you still haven’t seen The Last Jedi, you should stop reading. There isn’t a single spoiler in this movie I’m shying away from.

(Me from the future: there are lots of typos. So many.)

My last warning before you pass the guardian’s threshold and engage with the forthcoming unknown: This is structured like a narrative, hopefully with more peaks than valleys. It’s going to be split into a lot of parts. What I want to say is that you’ll find at least a few parts that resonate with you, and that you’re free to skip the ones that don’t, but I can’t really guarantee that. For all I know, there may be nothing in here that resonates with anyone but me.

I’m okay with that. Because this is just one of a thousand Star Wars stories. You have yours, and I know it must be beautiful to you. I won’t ask you to find find mine beautiful too.

A Brief Time Ago in a Galaxy Not That Away

I first saw Star Wars (A New Hope) when I was six or seven years old. It was one of those old VHS tapes where Han Solo shot first and Jabba was present in name only. I have this old, fuzzy memory hidden away somewhere of a young kid sitting on an inflatable mattress in the middle of a living room floor. A giant plastic bowl of popcorn sat in front of him as yellow text crawled up the screen of a tiny CRT television set.

Later on, this kid picked up the extension to a vacuum tube. He wrapped himself in a giant, brown blanket and pretended that tube was his lightsaber. While living with a close family of friends, he played a Star Wars racing game on their N64. Any time someone needed to scratch their nose, that player would shout “PODRACER ITCH” and Player One would pause the game until everyone was ready to go again.

The first DVD he ever owned was Revenge of the Sith. He watched it more than any movie except Spider-Man 2, and then would watch every single one of the accompanying bonus features. Later in middle school, he discovered the world of LEGO forums and found SW-RPG boards. He created a bounty hunter character named Dar Kaenova, and spent his time dealing cards in cantinas and occasionally getting mixed up with Gray Jedi.

These stories formed the basis for his love of writing and he decided to write out a full saga of stories shamelessly patterned after Star Wars, but placed in a medieval fantasy setting. He then learned about Eragon and was forever bitter about it. Over the years, his love for this epic space opera became latent. His approach to stories became a little jaded, a little cynical, but despite all this he still chose to rewatch the old movies and love them in all their tarnished glory. He read Legacy of the Jedi and Secrets of the Jedi many times over, crying over Obi-Wan and Siri Tachi.

In 2017, a young man sits in a theater and sees the familiar yellow font appear. He has small and faint expectations for a movie he wants to want to like. Throughout the movie, he cries, he jumps, he even laughs. At the end of it, he remembers why he used to love Star Wars, and why he’s willing to love it again.

And at the end of the film, he leaves with a very reluctant new hope.

Star Wars Doesn’t Belong to George Lucas

I’d be lying if I said this article belongs to me. Being its author does not mean it belongs to me. Every thought in here, every word, is the culmination of a dozen authors before me and a dozen conversations with friends. It is the end result of 40 years of movies, cartoons, books, and games, all created and interacted with by fans. Everything about Star Wars has been the work of fans making things for other fans and loving it means sharing in a collaborative vision, whether it fits your personal tastes or not.

For better or worse, Star Wars no longer belongs to George Lucas. I might even argue that it never did. When any work, but especially a movie, is given to the audience, it no longer belongs to any one person. It belongs to every person who worked on it, who saw it, who contributes to its continued growth. Storytelling by its very nature is a collaborative process.

When a reader picks up a book, she is just as responsible for creating images in her mind as the writer is for suggesting the images to create. I am a tool to you, providing a service in an industry in which you are the consumer. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t responsible too. You bring in a world of context I will never have access to, and it’s your thoughts that matter in how you interpret any of what I say.

Because of this, no two people see the same movie, and I think there is something inherently beautiful about that. We say “art is subjective” with a thinly veiled bite of bitterness, but I think this is what makes it worth making. This is what adds to the great conversation, the human tapestry of shared experience called life. The story doesn’t belong to one of us; maybe it doesn’t belong to any of us. Perhaps we are just lucky participants in God’s universal sandbox.

I believe it’s easy to give George Lucas too much credit for Star Wars, and blame him for too much its faults. I don’t mean to knock on the man; I am well aware of the meticulous detail with which he crafted the first six films, and how he continued to make tweaks well into the special editions. And I am always wary to divorce any work of art from the artist, because I think authorial intent does matter and carry weight — especially when it comes to social or moral issues.

It’s no secret that Star Wars exists only because of Lucas’s unique vision, and the tenacity with which he pushed to have this story in his head realized. He has repeatedly said that his favorite room is the editing room, and one can see Lucas’s fingerprints on everything — every lighting detail, every facial morph, every puppet, and, yes, every CGI replacement. To this day, the new films still have Lucas in them. We will never be able to fully remove Lucas from the Star Wars universe, nor am I arguing that we should.

But I do think that we have made him more giant than man in a great number of things. The original Star Wars trilogy wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Irvin Kershner and Richard Marquand, the directors of V and VI. We have John Williams to thank for an instantly memorable score, as well as the orchestra that made that soundtrack a reality. Leigh Brackett, the “Queen of Space Opera” and the first woman ever shortlisted for the Hugo award, helped write the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back — arguably the best movie in the franchise. Daniels and Baker brought droids to life, Oz gave Yoda a voice. On an even broader scope, Star Wars wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Joseph Campbell’s seminal work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

For a moment, I want to focus on one specific team: the editors of the very first film. Their names are Marcia Lucas, Richard Chew, and Paul Hirsch. When IV was first screened, it was generally agreed to be a large, incoherent mess. In fact, the entire climactic scene was one of the greatest offenders and the first thing Marcia needed to take apart. The team restructured the beginning so that Leia’s arc of space battles and politics coincided with Luke’s farm boy antics. Certain scenes were removed entirely, and a single shot of R2 was used as a way to transition from one filmed take of dialog to another. For all their work, they were given the Academy Award and Saturn Award for Best Editing.

In short, the fact that the original trilogy went on to become a revolutionary, cultural touchstone is nothing short of a production miracle. A lot of this is thanks to George Lucas, the man, while a lot of it isn’t. Yet we still continue to attribute to George Lucas, the legend, almost all of Star Wars strengths and flaws. Much of that is likely thanks to how he autonomously worked on the prequel trilogy. As Lucas himself said after the first screening of The Phantom Menace, “[he] may have gone too far.”

Responsibilities of Being a Living Myth

Star Wars, comic books, westerns, and the constitutional founding fathers might be the closest things the United States have to true mythology. By its nature, mythology demands to be approached as the result of many contributors, not one. It demands to be appreciated, developed, and scrutinized on an interactive, collaborative field.

Quick commercial break. If you’re not familiar with any of the following, I highly recommend watching Orson Welle’s F for Fake, reading Roland Barthes’s The Death of the Author, or even just listening to Bo Burnham’s Art is Dead.

Unless one’s name happens to be Jesus Middle Name Christ, the art usually precedes the artist. If you’re an artist, you should never think higher of yourself than the people you are writing for or the people you writing to. It’s human hubris that makes us think we are the center-point of every story, and I think this is our greatest sin. Pride won’t help us when we pass away. Our art, however, continues on. Sometimes in ripples and sometimes — if we’re unlucky — in waves.

We live at a point in pop culture where something like Star Wars is never “just a movie.” For better or worse, this is a universe that as permeated every layer of media, from TV references to your local toy store’s merchandise. There’s an odd sort of responsibility that comes with this level of fame. It’s still hard, even all these years later, to separate the Stormtroopers of the Death Star from the Sturmabteilung of the Nazi Party.

It’s because of all this that I believe The Last Jedi provides a deconstruction of what Star Wars means, both to the characters within its self-contained universe and to the viewers who have grown up with it. Because of how ingrained into our culture Star Wars is, I argue that this deconstruction was both necessary and inevitable.

And here, I think, is where I differ with those who disliked the film.

Through the Looking Glass of Metamodernism

Rather than being, as a couple friends of mine have called it, a “middle finger” to hardcore fans or previous installments, The Last Jedi puts Star Wars through deconstruction in order to sincerely grow it. Some see this movie as the destruction of what Star Wars means, for understandable reasons, but I want to argue that it takes apart these pieces in order to present a less-inflated, intimate display of what Star Wars means. And it does all this by first making us question our own intents.

I don’t think the movie’s purpose is to destroy all that’s come before or to subvert expectations merely for the sake of an engaging story. Obviously, I can’t presume to know Johnson’s intent. However, I think that, independently of his intentions, the end product is something essential to the sequel trilogy if Star Wars wants to continue to grow. I believe this would have happened with or without The Last Jedi. And that it would have hurt no matter how it happened or who led the project.

As a movement, metamodernism was a generation of artists responding to postmodernism, which itself was a direct response to modernism. Modernism first arose as a nihilistic and fatalistic culture dealing with the ramifications of two world wars. It was a pessimistic approach to art, full of people distraught by the destructive capabilities of every individual’s actions. It sought to criticize any over-romanticized notions, and remove from society the idyllic fantasies of artists come before. Postmodernism is sometimes described as modernism with a smile. It too sees the futility of everything, but decides to react with absurdism, jokes, maybe even existential internet memes.

Predictably, metamodernism was the response to its predecessors. Really, that’s all art movements are — artists seeing things in previous generations that deserve being praised, criticized, or flat-out removed. What kind of response? Honestly, it’s been a thousand different things that no one really agrees on. The loosest defining aspect I can think of in metamodernism is that it is heavily influenced by the internet age, globalism, and humanitarian ideology. In a weird way, although it wields the same absurd tools, metamodernism has become an effective way for some people to pick apart the cynicism in previous generations in their pursuit of authenticity.

I’ve always been a moderate fan of modernism, and a huge supporter of postmodernism. I have particularly defended their use in poetry. I think the reason so many dislike deconstruction is rooted in this idea that its sole purpose is to take things apart. We live in a culture that likes to throw things away, and we sometimes let this attitude dictate how we approach anything old in art. The innate value of deconstruction, however, isn’t merely in its power to disassemble, but in its power to rebuild, to make new, and to provide fresh meaning.

I don’t believe that The Last Jedi has “ruined Star Wars.”( If anything, that blame could arguably lie with The Phantom Menace — a film which I still can’t help but love for the record — or the Star Wars Holiday Special, or even any of the updated special editions of the original trilogy.) Rather, I firmly believe that The Last Jedi takes Star Wars apart only so that we can find the essential, raw material of what makes Star Wars mean so much to so many people , and hand them back to the audience in the form of something new and hopeful. It deconstructs the saga not just to take it apart, but to build it back up.

Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot?

Here’s an interesting question: what should we do with the past, especially when it is not a past to be proud of? This is a conundrum that haunts us not just in a fictional movie-verse galaxies away, but on planet Earth in the here and now. Do we simply ignore the sins of past generations? Do we pretend not to notice a Confederate flag flying over a neighbor’s house? Do we deny the existence of Neo-Nazis and the rise of fascism in western civilization? Or do we burn it all down and attempt to erase every trace from existence? I’m not convinced any of that is possible.

Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.

These words said by the villain, Kylo Ren, have been a sore spot for some fans, who believe that this line of dialog embodies the spirit of the movie — a hard, visceral “f*ck you” to its predecessors. But doesn’t it imply the opposite? There’s a reason it’s the villain who says this. This is the dark side theme. This is a line not born out of love or peace, but out of fear and hate. Whether or not he has good intentions, Kylo wants to destroy everything because he’s bitter. Luke wants to burn everything down because he’s scared. Rey is holding on to a legend that isn’t completely true — yet she’s the only one who still has hope.

By very intentionally referencing and making parallels with the themes of previous films, the movie is not trying to destroy the past. Rather, the movie forces us to wrestle with it. Just as Luke has to come to terms with the flaws of the Jedi, we have had forty years of rationalizing, justifying, or flat-out disowning anything that doesn’t fit our ideal mold of this space epic. Just as the characters must learn that the answer isn’t to kill the past, we’ve had to learn that even the most embarrassing parts of this universe are still a part of it, or that the sins of our ancestors are a part of us. Everything about Star Wars goes back to a slightly over-whiny farm boy in Tatooine.

The Last Jedi asks us to let go of the past, but it isn’t telling us that the past should be forgotten. Through Rey’s perspective, we are able to view the past as it is — beautiful, flawed, and a little bit cringe-worthy — so that we can also value it for what it means. Rey comes to Ahch-To looking for what she thinks the Jedi and Luke are. But rather than find the perfect ideals of her childhood stories, she sees a broken man who’s made mistakes. Through Rey, we’re offered the chance to move forward not by leaving the past completely behind, but by reconciling it.

Maybe it wasn’t executed as well as it could have been, maybe it makes a lot of time we spent poring over fan theories feel wasted. Maybe it hurts. But I think that’s what growth requires, and I think Star Wars has only been made all the more beautiful for it.

Social Commentaries, and Why We Need Them

We’re going to take a (brief) hard left turn so that I can address a very specific criticism of the new trilogy held by a fairly vocal and, in my view, dangerous minority. You likely don’t fall into this group of people (I hope), but these are the critics who dislike the new trilogy for reasons intrinsically tied to both sexism and racism, whether intentional or not.

One of the most striking thing to me, and many of my friends, about this movie was the strikingly large amount of representation. Poe, one of the main characters, is a Guatemalan-American actor. Finn is the first Stormtrooper (again, a character type whose design is influenced by Nazi symbology) whose face we see in a Star Wars film, and he’s played by a black actor. Not only this, but he and a Vietnamese-American actress are given the chance to headline their very own subplot, a plot which takes up a large amount of screen time.

Honestly, even though I didn’t like the entirety of their adventure, I loved their characters. If I’m willing to watch Luke, Leia, and Han flounder around in a garbage chute, I’m willing to watch Finn and Rose free alien horses. Twelve-year-old me waited forty years to see a non-white man be given this big of a role in Star Wars, and it made me want to cry.

Compared to most Hollywood films, The Last Jedi has a fantastically large female cast. Daisy Ridley, Carrie Fisher, Laura Dern, Kelly Marie Tran, Lupita Nyong’o, and Gwendoline Christie all do beautiful jobs in their roles. Not only does this film feature multiple women, but it features women of diverse ages, races, and roles.

One of the main comments I’ve seen is “why didn’t Holdo just tell Poe her plan?” This is something I need to address and, yes, I’m going to probably sound like a big social justice warrior to you. On this point, I honestly don’t really care. Holdo doesn’t owe Poe anything. She is an appointed commander, being rudely accosted by a subordinate who, might I remind you, was responsible for the slaughter of a significant part of their fleet and demoted by Leia. She has no reason whatsoever to tell him anything she’s doing precisely because he might jeopardize the mission. Authority here is not earned by gender.

This might seem like a small thing, but it’s important for stories to feature characters from as many backgrounds and experiences as possible. Throw historical accuracy out the window. I personally don’t think it’s as important as offering an underrepresented kid out there some form of hero to look up to, and it’s particularly unimportant and irrelevant in a conversation about a world in space. Star Wars has always been fairly good about diversity in its movie — whether it’s aliens or senators — but it’s something new and exciting altogether to see these character being the focus of and central to the story.

The power of a story comes from its ability to encourage and exhort the future generations. That’s a large part of why we started telling stories in the first place. Germanic fairy tales were used to warn children of the dangers in the world. Native American folk tales have been an important part of passing down heritage and tradition. Japanese retellings have been important for the purpose of preserving and nurturing culture. We see the power of story vividly in the last shots of the movie, when a little boy raises his broomstick and it’s lit up like his hero’s lightsaber. We need a thousand stories and a thousand different heroes for a very simple reason: no kid should feel incapable of becoming a hero. Regardless of race, gender, or whatever else they are.

Vampires, Wizards, and Witches in Space

How do you kill a vampire?

Stake through the heart, garlic…

No! You can kill a vampire however the f*ck you want because vampires don’t f*cking exist! You can make up any kind of thing you want!

This is a conversation with his dad that Max Landis (who is a prolific screenwriter, but apparently may or may not be a garbage person) references in his video, The Death and Return of Superman. The very simple, blunt point is that you can do whatever you want in a fictional story. You’re the one writing the story. There are no rules telling you what you can and can’t do so long as — and this is the important part — they fit the in-universe rules you’ve established.

How the force is portrayed in this movie is God-honest one of my favorite parts. I think it helps define The Last Jedi as a Star Wars movie, pushes the saga forward, and also retroactively restores some of the magic we might have been disenfranchised by in the prequels. The force in this film became down-right magical and mystifying again. We don’t know what the force can do and, outside of the Legends, we haven’t seen it used in all its functions.

People keep saying that Rian Johnson doesn’t understand the force, and I kind of think that should be the point. No one knows how the force works; that’s what gives it power. More importantly, that’s what it gives it beauty.

The force presented in this movie is almost primal. It is treated with both fear and reverence, at least by the heroes. It also not treated as totally benevolent. The force has never actively been good; otherwise there wouldn’t be both a light and a dark side. It is stripped down and presented in simpler fashion, much as it was when Ben first met Luke. Lucas is openly Buddhist and, as such, I think it’s worth looking at the real world religion in order to provide context. The force in this movie is fundamentally about balance.

You were to bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness!

It’s also, as Luke said, not something that belongs to the Jedi alone. This might be one of his most scathing criticisms of the past, and provides even more meaning to Anakin being the chosen one who would bring balance to the force — even if he swung much too far in the wrong direction.

I live in the United States, which carries with it a history of skepticism towards eastern philosophies. We tend to view things in a very compartmentalized fashion. But the force, as described in all the movies, is more than just a tool or belief. It unifies. Connects. It’s supposed to be more than a force push or the power to lift rocks; in this universe, it is what connects and brings wholeness. What makes the Jedi unique isn’t that they are part of the force, but that they’ve learned how to use it. Not own it, domesticate it, or wield it for selfish purposes, but to be a living, breathing part of it.

A Spoonful of Skywalkers Helps the Medicine Go Down

Here’s the big one. A lot of people hate the way Jedi Master Luke Skywalker was handled. This is a name practically synonymous with the action-adventure hero. From IV to VI, his story has become the definitive hero’s journey. Many of us have grown up with Luke as a source of inspiration, not only in movies, but in books and shows and games. To say that he has been deified as a legend, both inside and outside of his own universe, is a huge understatement.

The Last Jedi gave us a very different look at Luke than the one most were expecting or wanted. Mark Hamil in particular has been famously used to criticize the movie because it didn’t fit his idea of who Luke Skywalker is. And I do feel terribly for him. Regardless of what I said before, authorial intent does matter; Lucas had a unique vision for who Luke is, and so does Hamil, and so does Johnson.

But I also don’t want to forget the other half of Hamil’s own words. He’s recently been walking back some of his statements, saying that while he was disappointed with his character, he also came to terms with bringing Johnson’s vision to life. He even said that he thought “Johnson was the man needed,” and that was before he apologized for being overly critical.

Much like the characters in the new trilogy, we have deified the character of Luke Skywalker. It’s not entirely our fault. We’ve had forty years to imagine him as we want him to be and there are hundreds of books detailing what happened to him after Return of the Jedi. If you’re a fan of what is now Star Wars Legends (RIP canon Expanded Universe; you didn’t do anything to deserve this), you’ll no doubt be familiar with Luke’s kids, his adventures post-ROTJ, or his rival-then-wife, Mara Jade.

But here’s the thing about characters. There is never only one. Luke Skywalker exists in the realms of our imaginations, a fictional avatar through which we explore and interact with the universe of Star Wars. Storytellers only tell the information necessary to fill in the story they want to tell; everything else is filled in by the audience.

No two people see the same movie. No two people read the same book. No two people believe in the same character.

And yet I don’t want to dismiss all our notions of Luke. There are certain agreed-upon things — ideals he stands for, lessons he’s taught us — that matter. Although Luke Skywalker is not a real person, some of us might know him better than even our next-door neighbors. And when you’re dealing with a character of that size and magnitude, it can be very easy to offend people. Like turning Captain America into a Hydra agent, or retconning the death of Superman, it can be too easy to build upon the work of previous artists by betraying what those characters stood for. They become more than characters; they become ideas.

Nowhere is this disconnect between seen more clearly than in the way we view historical figures and current celebrity icons. I could tell you I know Carrie Fisher; I know she’s a brilliant script doctor, that she was a humorist, kicked her feet up on whatever chair she was on in public interviews, and took life with a clever wit and sneaky smile. But I don’t really know Carrie. I’ve only known her as an icon, as a representation of who I think she is or what I think she stands for.

Even among our closest of friends, how well do we know each other really? Whether through social media or small talk, aren’t we all just wearing masks in the end?

The Burden of All Masters

One of the biggest themes in the entire Star Wars saga is one of identity. The Skywalker name holds weight in this universe. The story, particularly the original trilogy and prequel trilogy, is at its core a soap opera in space. That’s inescapable, and has been part of its long-running charm.

Rey’s arc seemed remarkably strange to me in that her idealistic views of Luke and the Jedi so closely mirrored our own for the past forty years. She journeyed to Ahch-To expecting to find a heroic Luke, a mentor who would show her the ways of the Force, and return as the triumphant answer to Kylo Ren’s destructive force. But the Luke she and we are faced with is something very different.

Our favorite Jedi has become a secluded hermit, full of regret and shame, closed off from everything that he idolized in his own youth. The Luke in this story is not the optimistic farm boy from Tatooine. Rather, he is grizzled and lost; he’s given up. Put simply, he’s lost all hope.

For many of us, this is the Luke we didn’t want to see. But, honestly, I think this is the Luke that we needed to see. This movie loves subverting expectations, and it does this even with current movie trends. This isn’t a Luke who’s been made dark and gritty just for the sake of being dark and gritty (I’m looking at you, DCEU). This is actually a response to that trend. By using language we’ve grown used and calloused to, this movie subverts those expectations because it has something to say. This is a Luke that’s been made dark and gritty because he has a new lesson for us. And, just as before, he can only teach us this lesson by failing. Yoda beautifully sums up that entire lesson in one sentence:

The greatest teacher, failure is.

Like all heroes, Luke Skywalker makes mistakes. In fact, if he is to grow, he has to make mistakes. That’s not to say his character isn’t a bit of a weird one to define in this film. On a surface level, he obviously fulfills many of the expectations of a mentor character, first established by Obi-Wan, and then cemented by Yoda and Qui-Gon. He imparts wisdom, he trains the next generation, and then he passes on — even joining his former masters in the Force. He also plays a bit of an antagonist. Throughout the movie, he plays the main obstacle to Rey’s desires to learn. And his beliefs often parallel Kylo Ren’s.

In many ways, however, Luke plays the role of protagonist as well. Johnson admitted that the title was always referencing Luke Skywalker, and I think when we view him as a protagonist we can piece together certain elements of the movie together a little more clearly. After all, Luke is the character who carries the most emotional weight, has the most personal baggage, and ultimately undergoes the most change. Although he feels like the natural mentor in the film, Rey also fulfills parts of this role for him. Rey does get her climactic scene with Kylo, but Luke’s is the one that defines the theme of the movie.

His struggles primarily have to do with the disillusionment of failing his padawan, Ben Solo, and a realization that the Jedi weren’t the perfect, mythical heroes he always believed in as a young man. With no other Jedi to help him reestablish their order, he’s going at it alone, and he’s discovering a lot of disturbance in the force. We see all this culminate in his blackest moment during the film, when he lets Rey leave without him and conspires to burn down the tree.

It’s soon after, in a conversation with his old Jedi Master Yoda, that we find out Luke is also attached to the past; that for all his talk of destroying it, he still clings to the old. And the reason this is wrong isn’t because them being old is inherently evil (otherwise we have explicitly seen the books on the Falcon with Rey), but because of Luke’s unwillingness to let go. The greatest imbalance of the force in this movie lies within its characters, which is why it led Luke to cut himself off in the first place.

No one’s ever really gone.

We are forced to remember that Luke isn’t just a hero, but a man. Luke Skywalker understood that he had become a living legend, just as the Jedi before. But as opposed to those who wanted him to wield it as a weapon, or those who saw it as a blessing, he bore it as a curse. I don’t think him (very briefly) considering to kill Ben was out of character. We’ve seen him drift close to the dark side before, when he almost killed his own father. We’ve seen face his darkest thoughts in Dagobah. We’ve watched him time and time act out of fear.

Each time, he managed to overcome it in the end. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what Ben saw. Luke ended up becoming so ashamed by his actions that he left civilization to die on Ahch-To alone. He gave up on Ben not just because he’d lost faith in his nephew, but because he’d lost faith in himself. Thus, the reason his climactic scene becomes so effective isn’t just because we finally see Luke Skywalker be the most badass force user in the galaxy. It’s because of Luke’s realization and final sacrifice. He knows that although Skywalker the man failed Ben, Skywalker the legend might stand some chance at reigniting the flames of hope.

It’s not a perfect redemption, and he accepts that he isn’t the right person to save Kylo Ren, but he has finally learned to let go. He’s let go of his bitterness, regrets, fear, and past. With this final sacrifice, he’s able to give the Resistance a weapon in the shape of a new legend; to face his sister and offer one last word of encouragement; to release all his regrets and reunite with the force; and to give one last parting moment of triumph to the next generation.

We are what they grow beyond.

This Luke teaches us how to fail, and how to give the next generation the tools they need to succeed. I like this version of Luke precisely because he’s not the hero with a triumphant return; because this Luke is the one both Rey and we needed to confront our own fears. This Luke forces us to come to recognize how we too have deified the story of Star Wars, and how the failures don’t make the franchise any less itself. The failures are part of it, and part of us. That doesn’t mean we have to disown them, or kill them; we also don’t have to blind ourselves to the bad in order to love something.

Rey can still find hope in the Jedi, Luke can still be a hero despite his flaws, and Star Wars can still be beautiful in its long-running mess. Sometimes we can still love broken things.

Pros and Cons of Wearing a Mask

We see the contrasting side of this theme prevalent in Kylo Ren’s side of the force. As mentioned before, his answer is to kill all that is old. Quite literally. In this mad attempt to fully harness the dark side, he has been systematically destroying all that links him to any form of goodness or empathy — a journey that began with killing his own father in The Force Awakens.

For much of the movie, he is a sympathetic character. I think his arc beautifully mirrors Anakin’s in the prequel trilogy, except kind of in reverse. And this is where I want to address another thing people have criticizing: the destruction of his admittedly cool mask.

You are just a child in a mask.

Ever since Vader himself, masks have held so much meaning in the Star Wars universe. Kylo needs to lose his mask just as Vader needed to lose his, to reveal the human behind the avatar. When both these characters were removed of their masks, a barrier was broken and a vulnerability revealed. The only difference is that when Vader’s mask is removed, we look into the eyes of a man forgiven. When Kylo destroys his, it reveals him to be embracing the dark side of his humanity. Remember when he couldn’t kill Han? Or Leia? Anakin was a man tempted by the dark; Kylo is a man tormented by the light.

Even Phasma’s scenes support this mask symbolism, and Finn’s in The Force Awakens. Towards the end of the film, Finn’s final strike breaks Phasma’s mask and we see her wild, vulnerable eye look out. She is no longer an immortal symbol of terror. She has been stripped of her armor, her mask, and shown to be weak in her humanity.

I think Kylo Ren needed to lose his mask because his arc in this movie was him finding his identity. In a manner which very much parallels Rey’s journey, Kylo is trying to figure out who he is without the mask to hid behind. However, whereas Rey’s journey ends with a story ultimately rooted in love and hope, Kylo’s story is ultimately rooted in hate and fear. Rey’s boundless optimism leads her to believe she can find Ben beneath what she thinks is a mask of Kylo. Kylo’s beliefs lead him to kill Snoke without a second thought, and ask Rey to rule beside him as they destroy all that had come before.

Here’s a controversial idea: It’s good that Snoke dies without any explanation because Snoke doesn’t matter. I don’t mean to be disrespectful to any fan theories, but I like not knowing anything about him and I like him being dead. Unlike the Emperor, whose mysterious background was only later revealed in the prequels and who played puppet master throughout the entire original trilogy, Snoke isn’t an important antagonist in the sequel trilogy. He’s a catalyst.

This particular story ultimately belongs to Kylo Ren (this is, after all, still a space opera started because of one family). In this movie, Snoke dies because he doesn’t matter. He is only one stepping stone in Kylo’s journey to becoming supreme leader and fully embracing the dark side. Not having a backstory is now in of itself what defines him. Also, what is more Star Wars than a sith apprentice masking his intentions and betraying his own master?

Everything Kylo has done has been rooted in either fear or hatred. He has been manipulative and destructive; he’s even got a mean murderous streak. Sidebar, but these are all reasons I absolutely detest any notion of a Reylo ship. There will never be a day I ship an emotionally unhinged space nazi with the boundlessly optimistic and charismatic Rey.

Everyone in this movie operates behind some form of mask in their pursuit of identity, whether it’s Luke wrestling with the responsibility of being a living myth or Rey desperately clinging onto the idea that her parents were somebodies in this vast, uncaring galaxy. Kylo’s just happened to be represented by something more literal.

However, Kylo’s arc doesn’t end with him getting what he wants. In fact, it seems that in spite of all his best efforts to remove any semblance of his own past and weaknesses, Luke showed him that he would never be able to fully escape.

Strike me down in anger and I’ll always be with you. Just like your father.

Rey, a Drop of Golden Sun

When I first saw The Force Awakens, I was among those who thought Rey felt like a Mary Sue. Not a complete one — I loved her opening scenes, and most of her arc until the end — but I think there were a few too many out-of-place moments that gave her the appearance of being one. I definitely didn’t think that about her in The Last Jedi. Although the entire cast of characters have almost complete arcs and get to star in their own subplots, Rey is obviously the main hero of this new trilogy. And the most interesting part of her story to me was how it tied together themes from all the other characters.

Rey is caught in between opposing ideologies. On the one hand, she’s found a strange connection to Kylo Ren and is being allured to his side of the force. She thinks she can still see a glimmer of good in him, much like Luke saw in his father. She’s also told that Luke tried to kill him, and that the new generation can make something better than the last one simply by destroying what came before — how’s that for subversive storytelling?

From my point of view, the Jedi are evil.

On the other hand, she spends the bulk of her time with Luke. A man whose first lines are that the Jedi must come to an end. Despite his refusal, she still wants to learn from Luke and believes that he is the hero they need to save the Resistance. In a way, she is representative of the fans who grew up with the stories of the original trilogy, and has grown up believing in them their whole life. We do, after all, first meet her in a Rebel helmet during The Force Awakens.

In addition to all this, she’s confronted by this notion that, unlike all her heroes, unlike the lies she’s been telling to herself all this time, her parents were nobodies. She is Rey from Nowhere. When she delves into the Stranger Things-esque hole and searches for her parents, she sees only endless reflections of herself. In more than one way throughout this movie, Rey is alone.

This is important because for so long she’s been looking for hope in all the wrong places. (You have no many idea how many times I had to type and delete the pun in that sentence). Snoke’s origin didn’t matter because he was hindering Kylo Ren’s development as a villain. Rey’s origin doesn’t matter because that’s what grows her as a hero. She finds her hope not by looking outward to a broken, romanticized idea of old heroes, but by becoming the hero in her own story.

Most of Rey’s conflict is deeply internal. She realizes that neither Kylo Ren or Luke has the answers, and sets out on a path all her own. Luke teaches her the first two lessons; by taking a risk, she has to teach herself the third.

Ultimately, Rey is the most optimistic character in this movie. Despite everything she discovers, she still continues to believe that hope is worth fighting for, even when it isn’t. As mentioned earlier, failure plays a pivotal role with these characters. Not just with Luke, but with every single character and every single arc.

Poe gets a fleet destroyed and is responsible for the deaths of several comrades. Finn and Rose fail to disable the tracker. Luke has been removed from events for years. No one answers the call when the Resistance calls for help. Arguably, the only one to reach any level of success is the villain, when he kills the former supreme leader, but even he fails at catching the Resistance or at turning Rey.

If there’s an unspoken theme to this movie, I think this is it. To me, the whole movie seemed to be centered around two very powerful ideas: “The greatest teacher, failure is” and that hope is worth fighting for, especially when it isn’t. In that context, I appreciate almost every character’s arc and most of the plot. Because we’re told by Puppet Yoda that failure is the greatest teacher, but what does it teach us? What is Rey’s defining trait?

Simply put, hope.

This isn’t naiveté on her part. It gives her meaning. As ship after ship is destroyed, as heroes fail and people die, every moment makes it abundantly clear that the Resistance’s spark is about to go out. Nevertheless, Rey persists. Nowhere is this clearer than when she faces Kylo and refuses to join him. In that scene, the fundamental difference between hero and villain is displayed. Rey has chosen to learn from failure. Kylo hasn’t.

The force will be with you. Always.

I did end up deleting a lot of what I wanted to cover (“Laughing at Nazis,” “Dangers of the Disney Empire,” “Christ Figures in Star Wars”) and maybe I’ll add them to this article at a later date, but for now this is what you get. If you’ve made this far, wow. I’m impressed, I’m sorry, and I thank you for letting me talk a little too much about a silly space opera. It’s been a fun time, but now my break is over and I need to get back to working on my own novel because deadlines are really important.

Anyway, if nothing here meant anything to you, if nothing can make you appreciate this film, then at least let me list all the other things I shamelessly loved, that made me cry, that really defined what Star Wars is to me.

We’re going to win this war not by fighting what we hate, but saving what we love.

On a visual level, the weighty silence of Holdo’s sacrifice was perhaps one of the most unique experiences I’ve had in the theater this year. It was so unexpected, yet poignant. It was also powerful to watch Rey’s powers develop to point of lifting all the boulders at the end — not only was it foreshadowed well, but it was a nice throwback to the previous films.

Some people may not have liked it, but I appreciated Leia’s definitively canon instances of using the force. It did look awkward, but she (Carrie as a person, Leia as a character) deserved to have that moment. She was this unexpected source of grounding and motherly comfort throughout the movie, and it was fun to see the little moments of lighthearted dialog which Carrie had laid her fingerprints on.

I loved all of Luke’s arc; it was an bittersweet, but ultimately satisfying experience to watch him go through one last arc of redemption, and see him once again become the legend of stories to the next generation — both inside and outside of the story. In a year that’s been marked by so much hurt and pain, it was a literal breath of fresh air to see him sit down and talk with Yoda, and to watch him find some small moment of peace. It was also heartbreaking to see his last on-screen time with Leia since we didn’t get to see Han and Luke reunited, and especially because of Carrie Fisher’s passing. Lastly, the original binary sunset scene from the first movie is one of the most iconic things I’ve seen in cinema, and to see Luke’s arc come full circle in his parting scene was the best way to say goodbye.

I was glad to see this movie not shy away from the hard questions. Although they played relatively small parts in the movie, it did bring up themes of moral ambiguity in a world of war profiteers and con artists. It forced us to look at our heroes in a different light, and asked us to wrestle with tangible themes of identity and disappointment. The Last Jedi couldn’t exist in its current form without the weight of so much history behind it. The way it subverts expectations only works because we’ve had an entire culture’s worth of material to experience. It wasn’t always executed cleanly, but I’m glad this movie took risks and I thought most of them paid off.

In summary, I appreciate it for how I saw it: a deconstruction, not a destruction, of its heritage. It forces us to ask us why we even love Star Wars in the first place. And then it offers the audience these pieces back at the end in order to build something new. We are given a re-mystified understanding of the force, a lesson on the responsibility and vulnerability of being a legend and a man, and a future to look forward to with this next generation of characters.

But most of all, I’m thankful for how its characters failed. We’re accustomed to seeing the hero’s journey in a pretty straightforward manner. When you are a young storyteller, you are often encouraged to make your stories about someone trying to get something. A hero trying to save her home, win a race, get the girl. Usually, it is their success that motivates us to do good and be better. But this movie did something a little different. It doesn’t shy away from the hard questions; it wants us to wrestle with the themes.

And then, challenges us to still cling onto hope.

I think that’s what makes this film so powerful. In the end, this movie is a story fueled by hope, and hope means so much more when we have every reason not to.