The Power of Genuine Conflict: Why The Empire Strikes Back is Awesome and The Last Jedi was terrible.
Nothing drives a story forward better than conflict. Even for action movies like the Star Wars saga, storytelling elements such as drama and romance are essential because they involve a sense of mystery and uncertainty.
In other words, conflict.
Without elements such as these to increase the level of conflict, you instantly lose the audience’s interest which is death for any story, no matter how beloved or revered.
I walked out of The Last Jedi not happy, but aside from things like laugh out loud dialogue, hilariously lousy plot lines, out of place political overtones and ridiculous character decisions, it took me a few days to figure out why I genuinely disliked The Last Jedi.
To put it bluntly, The Last Jedi suffered from a plaguing lack of suspense. It is such a weak film in this regard that no matter how good the third movie may be, the trilogy as a whole will not be able to recover. That’s a real shame because I was hoping that The Last Jedi was going to be the film that The Force Awakens should have been.
The Force Awakens suffered from the same faults as The Last Jedi, but had Jedi turned out better, it would have succeeded at negating a host of the problems that Awakens had, but since it didn’t enhance the material, the first film in the series suffered for it.
The fact of the matter is that once again, our fearless heroine, Rey, didn’t grow as a character. There was no real obstacle for her to overcome. There was a cool lightsaber fight scene involving her and Kylo Ren, but in the end when they’re pitted against each other, there’s no reason to feel engaged in the conflict, because there is no actual conflict to begin with.
We’ve already seen Rey defeat Kylo Ren, so that negates the suspense instantaneously. We know that Rey can’t be beaten because she’s a prodigy that doesn’t have to lose a hand like Luke to prove herself. And since Snoke turned out to be a joke of a character, there’s no imposing force for Rey to confront.
Juxtapose that with the duel between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back and there is a jarring emotional difference between the two. In Empire, it honestly felt like Luke was going to lose to Vader, because, why wouldn’t he? Luke wasn’t a trained Jedi, and Vader was an emotionless murderer.
It created a genuine sense of dread for the fate of Luke. In the new Star Wars trilogy, there hasn’t been a single scene where we’ve feared for the future of our intrepid heroes. Everyone always emerges relatively unscathed, except for the villains. And that’s a problem because, without powerful villains, our heroes are weak.
It is unfortunate that Rey is hands down one of the worst heroes ever created, and it has nothing to do with the supposed “revelation” about her parents. Rey is terrible because she doesn’t feel like a true to life struggling individual.
Luke wasn’t a great character to begin with, but he grew more relatable as he struggled and failed time after time. Rey has had two movies to feel like a real person, and I’m more dissatisfied with her now than I was before.
All this is due to a lack of genuine conflict. Rey never struggled to pull a ship out of a swamp and failed, and she never faced death in the face.
I wish I could say that I had hope for the future of Star Wars, but without genuine conflict, there’s nothing to hope for in the first place. And that’s a shame because Star Wars deserved better.
