These Are not The Droids You Are Looking For
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Marketing as misdirection? It feels like the movie was about unpacking a series of broken promises that the marketing and fan theories put out there, and not so much in terms of choosing this direction over that direction, but more in terms of saying, what you supposed to be significant isn’t, but not really replacing the emptiness that disappointment of expectations leaves with anything remotely equal to the task of satisfying the audience.
Force Awakens picked up an audience that were underwhelmed by the prequel trilogy, and gave them something that recaptured the chemistry of the original three films — too much so for some people — but there was something about it that felt more genuinely like a Star Wars film than anything the prequel trilogy did.
I was excited for this movie because of what Force Awakens did — now I find myself curious about what the closing film in this new trilogy will do with what is left after everything got broken.
Something beyond daring pilots blowing up badly designed weapons would be nice.
Kylo Ren went through some real growth. Luke, likewise, was given room to explain his disappearance, and to bring resolution to his story. But what of Finn and Rey? I don’t feel that they got the chance to develop as much, and the same can be said of Poe Dameron.
Chewie and the Porgs? Ha ha, but nothing that added to the forward momentum of the film. Laura Dern? For all the build up, was it worth it? Informed attributes do not mean that the proof is included in the pudding. The same goes for DJ, Benicio Del Toro’s character — there needed to be more rope let out for this character to hang himself.
Rogue One, as an ensemble cast, gave each character and their stories enough room to breathe, but here it felt like too many of the main players did the equivalent of narrative thumb twiddling. Rogue One also had me believing, more than any other movie in the military ability of both sides of the conflict — Last Jedi doesn’t sustain that.
The Rebels seem incredibly bad at running an army, and you have to suspect that the only reason they are still alive in this movie is because their enemies are equally incompetent. Tacticians really do not abound in this movie, and the only real tension on display was in the Rey, Kylo, Luke story.
Is it because it is a middle film in a trilogy? If anyone really argues that it would be a disappointing excuse. Some of the cinematography is amazing — some of the storytelling is really well done — there is just too much flat footedness and heavy handedness there for it to be as shiny as The Force Awakens.
There were points watching it where I felt sad — it’s not a terrible film by any means, but the whimsy and the filler should have been on the cutting floor, and we should have had some of the muscular and lean storytelling that Rogue One displayed.
Some of the comedy I liked, but in a year that gave us a great Bladerunner sequel that showed how to hand over the reins from one generation of story characters to another in a stylistic manner, this hit a flat note. Does burning it all to the ground really ring true as the best way to build on what went before?
My favorite thing about the original trilogy was the used future aesthetic of it — something that was polished up but still present for the prequel trilogy, and definitely there for Force Awakens. A sense of deep time that you can dig back into. Sure, you still have everything that went before, but when we hit the ground running with the next movie we won’t have Luke, Leia, Ackbar, most of the Rebel Alliance, or a lot of landmarks we used to navigate by.
I don’t think I fall into that category of fans who had problems with this movie because it is too different or too much the same to the originals, I just don’t understand some of the story making decisions which hit at some of the fundamentals of what the story is about, coupled with the shallow inching forward of characters who, given what they are going through, should be dug into more deeply.
What will be the hooks they cast out there on the rumor lines for the next movie? It has a working title of Black Diamond, but this may mean little. We know J.J. Abrams is back in the driving seat, and it looks to be Rey’s last outing. How do they wrap up Leia convincingly? A lot of people will watch it because it is Star Wars, but unless the second film grows on me more in the meantime, I may be seeing it for a sense of completion and closure more than anything.
