CW: contains spoilers for the films Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace, Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope, Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and Blade Runner 2049.
My favourite moment in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) is during the opening scene in the village on Jakku. First Order stormtroopers raid the village and, intercut with Poe and BB-8’s escape, the camera shows panicking background villagers trying to escape the fascist invaders. As in previous Star Wars films, the stormtroopers are framed at the periphery of shots blasting villagers and running into positions. But then the camera lingers on a single stormtrooper. For the first time in a Star Wars film, the camera is focused on one of the anonymous background troopers as if they are the protagonist. The camera continues to follow this stormtrooper and we see them express emotions — fear and regret — even with their helmet on. Watching The Force Awakens in 2015, this single moment of the camera’s shifting focus in a way that I didn’t expect served to expand the narrative universe of Star Wars. Suddenly the stormtroopers weren’t all anonymous cannon fodder: they’re people too and they have stories to tell.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) embraces and expands upon this subversion of Star Wars tropes. In doing so, it joins Blade Runner 2049 (2017) as franchise blockbusters which subvert audience expectations while telling an effective story in a continuing, consistent universe. I want to focus on one particular theme shared by both films which starkly differentiates The Last Jedi from other Star Wars films while also returning it to its origins.
After Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) kills Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis) and his guards, he dramatically tells Rey (Daisy Ridley) that he knows the truth about her parents and that she’s always known it too. “ They were filthy junk traders… You come from nothing. You’re nothing…” Rey isn’t a Skywalker, a Solo, a Kenobi, or even a Palpatine. She’s just an orphan abandoned by her parents like millions of other children across the galaxy. Similarly, the other main characters in the new Star Wars trilogy are not ‘special’: Leia (Carrie Fisher) tells Poe (Oscar Isaac) that he’s just “another hothead fly-boy”; Phasma (Gwendoline Christie) tells Finn (John Boyega) that he’s nothing more than “a bug in the system.” They’re just ordinary people caught up in a galactic conflict. They’re significant not because of their lineage as with other Star Wars characters but simply because they are our protagonists.
Contrast this with the approach of Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace (1999) where we learn that C-3PO was built by the young Anakin Skywalker (later to become Darth Vader). C-3PO’s character is shifted from an ordinary protocol droid similar to thousands of others created by the same corporation to a special one-of-a-kind droid created by a significant player in galactic events. It necessitates a chain of implausible coincidences (and a convenient last-minute memory wipe at the end of the prequel trilogy) to bring C-3PO to where we meet him in Star Wars (1977) being sold to, it turns out, the son of his creator. This serves to make the Star Wars universe feel smaller. It gives C-3PO an artificial significance that doesn’t add anything to his character or his character arc.
The anti-revelation of Rey’s mundane origins parallels a similar plot beat in Blade Runner 2049. Replicant Blade Runner, K, discovers that he isn’t, as he and the audience have been led to believe, the hidden child of Deckard and Rachel. He’s not the miracle child born of a replicant. He’s not the last hope of the replicant freedom movement. He’s not the chosen one. He’s just another replicant like thousands of others across the galaxy. The film plays with the audience’s expectations of this kind of blockbuster genre film and neatly shifts away from the expected trope of the protagonist-as-chosen-one. Mainstream cinema audiences have reached a level of understanding of narrative tropes such that the real revelation is now the revelation of insignificance.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi not only plays with the idea of the insignificant protagonist but is built upon it. From the opening scene of Poe Dameron taking on a First Order Dreadnought singlehandedly to the closing scene of an anonymous little boy gazing at the stars and dreaming of making a difference, The Last Jedi is about the idea that one person — any ordinary person — can make a difference. They don’t have to be the chosen one or a Skywalker-Solo to have significance. This theme actually brings Star Wars back to the basis of the original film. Before Lucas decided to connect all his characters in a single family starting in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Luke was nothing more than an ordinary farm-boy who bravely faced the Empire and destroyed the Death Star (albeit a farm-boy who is the son of a dead Jedi Knight). We don’t have to have special parents or magic blood to watch twin suns in the sky and think about how we can make a better world.
As Abigail Nussbaum has said, The Last Jedi is a Star Wars film about Star Wars films. Subverting the audience’s expectations is not the flaw but the aim of the film. It’s about metatextually commenting on the tropes and expectations around Star Wars films — in my example, the trope of the ‘chosen one’ narrative — and stripping away this baggage to return to the basic premise of the original Star Wars. “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.” The Last Jedi and Blade Runner 2049 are a new kind of franchise blockbuster created by filmmakers who are aware of the medium’s conventions and confident enough to deliberately subvert them. It would be hyperbolic to suggest that these represent a postmodern shift in blockbuster filmmaking but they do perhaps point to a new approach to genre narrative in blockbuster films.
