Why I enjoyed but did not love The Last Jedi
(Definite spoilers)
The original trilogy was about a boy who discovers he is one of an ancient order. He is not the only one, but the only one still relevant, still young, and still capable of making a difference.
In the prequels, it is about The One. A boy who is The One. Not just one of an ancient order, but a story centering upon the idea that some prophecy determines The One.
In the new trilogy, the names Skywalker, Han Solo, etc, become sacred, legendary. A whole set of The Ones.
The Last Jedi sets about deconstructing this.
The reason I don’t enjoy this central conceit is that I don’t enjoy media about media. The plot of The Last Jedi promotes and then subvert its own stories of individuals as legendary. I guess it’s all just a reflection on the evolution of the franchise. Everyone knows everyone’s name, and so look at this one girl who is a nobody.
When Kylo tells Rey she’s a nobody, my response was “Thank god!” The past 90 minutes (and the past several films) had been making everyone important, had been everyone standing in awe of everyone else’s name. The “SW expanded universe” of novels and comics and toys as I grew up in the mid 90s was about nobodies. Han was mostly just a general who struggled to fit in with being civilized. Rogue squadron was a band of merry fighters carousing around the galaxy. Luke was off trying to figure out whether he was bad or good, trying to recruit students.
The original trilogy got itself into a strange bind, connecting Luke, Leia, and Vader. But I was okay with it. Their relatedness felt, to me, a fun way to layer in a meaningful tale of familial and personal redemption atop such a grand opera with so diverse and rich a world beyond. Their trio was the magical center.
But then the prequels made Boba Fett the center of the clone army. Clearly a decision because he was a popular franchise character. That was one of the key moments when I decided Star Wars was no longer for me. I liked Boba Fett for him, don’t make him another magical center.
By Force Awakens, everyone “good” is excited to just hear the name Han Solo. And so it is meant to be this big message that Rey is nobody, because Rose knows Finn, because there are all these named heroes.
I was underwhelmed by The Last Jedi because I have never enjoyed anyone’s name being spoken with joy or reverence. I liked Rogue One because it was able to escape this. I never wanted Skywalker to be a name everyone knew, but The Force Awakens pushed hard on “legends”. And The Last Jedi reproached us for this legend-making? It’s not a message I responded to because the legendary status of characters was my least favorite thing about the evolution of the franchise.
Princess Leia was just “a princess” once. Just a princess who got down in the muck and fought to help her people. She wasn’t “The Princess” that floats down as an angel.
I plan to watch it again, so I’m writing these thoughts out now. My initial feelings are not disappointment, just a bit of apathy over the movie as a whole. I do expect I’ll like it more next time, but I grew tired of this central conceit of legend, because it felt more about the medium than the characters inside the medium.
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But here are some more general comments:
Kylo/Rey/Luke was compelling, I did like their tale! Man I wish Rey had gone “bad”. Man I wish I cared about Snoke or had any concept of what he was or meant. Man I had hoped Snoke would kill Kylo and pour all his efforts into Rey.
Poe’s story was good! I really wish it had gotten time to breathe, because it was great, there could have been more depth. Instead it got muddy and fought for time with Finn and Rose and that weird sidequest I didn’t care about, consisting of a lot of overt moralizing and uninspired visual designs (boring horse creatures and boring casino/Monaco).
Rey says she’s from nowhere. Luke says nah, then she says Jakku, and he says “okay, yeah that’s nowhere”. If it’s really nowhere in a galaxy that big, why had he even heard of it? (This is nitpicking, and yeah, he’s a jedi, sure. But it’s just one of numerous examples in episodes 7 and 8 where characters spout a lot of specific names of places, people, and things, and the other character knows the same info. Everyone knows every detail, and it makes the galaxy of the new trilogy feel very small.)
And the central concept of the ship chase. I just don’t know what I think there yet. Maybe one day I’ll think it was an interesting concept, instead of a poor man’s version of that brilliant BSG episode.
