The Last Jedi & Steven Seagal, Coming To Terms With Okay Sequels
Must Star Wars fans be okay with the new movies being sort of “blah”?
The Last Jedi is a film that has surprised everyone. Critics seem to like it. Fans either hate it or love it… or are kinda sorta okay with it. Much has been written, some of which I really agree with, or at least understand. It takes some wonderful risks on casting the core roles, which work out. Its story is fairly straightforward: Resistance soldiers escaping the First Order. That is a welcome relief. What comes after is a series of contradictions that, like with The Force Awakens, will take time to unravel. As I’ve written before, the problem with “wait for the next one” is that every film should stand on its own, meaning someone with no knowledge of the series should be able to sit down for one movie and enjoy it without needing to know other things. Also, serials that rely on “wait for the next one” are rarely satisfying. That’s how movies are supposed to work. This one does stand on its own, a bit. That’s a good thing.
Before going any further, an observation about Star Wars fandom: It always defends the last Star Wars film as one of the best, until that film becomes the second to last one, and then they admit how awful it was. Hearing friends saying they think The Force Awakens was great, and then saying it was just okay after the most recent one reminds me of friends saying they thought the prequels were good when they came out. It also reminds me of how kids talk about cookies. I used to be a very devoted fan, until I worked for the Star Wars money engine, and learned to spot less than stellar elements. As someone who writes for a living and works in film, I know a thing or two about good storytelling, and I want the best for the Star Wars movies, since they got me to fall in love with the medium when I was a kid. I criticize only because I want the best, and the sort of people who are big enough to be put in charge of a franchise like this are the kind of people no one ever says “no” to. I’m here to say “no.”
Like only a couple of the Star Wars films, this one was the work of a single film maker who wrote and directed it. For fans of Looper, recognizing Rian Johnson’s authorial voice isn’t hard, but unlike Looper, this film’s ending doesn’t feel quite so inevitable. Also, like in Looper, the jokes tend to distract from the story.
The movie has a lot of plot holes (see separate section below) but it accomplishes an evolution of the old guard characters The Force Awakens couldn’t muster. In this film, Luke changes, Leia Changes, even Chewbacca changes. This is a huge relief after many Star Wars films that left audiences in the doldrums, pretending we were happy with double-bladed light sabers, and child Sith Lords substituting for plot. Are we really free of either though? Isn’t Kylo Ren just another child Dark Side Master with yet another blade added to his sword? I’m not really convinced the new film is really a new recipe.
In a good story, the hero or heroes must undergo a change to their essence between the first and final acts. In The Force Awakens, the only hero who undergoes a change is Finn. This is why he is so compelling. The only major film to sustain itself while having a protagonist who resets every telling is James Bond, and Star Wars isn’t that kind of story.
In TFA, every other character ends the story the way they started it, except maybe for Rey, who had no qualities in act I and lots of squinting by act III, and Han Solo, who is dead. By the end of the film you feel like you’ve just watched a two plus hour trailer for the next sequel, like a Marvel movie except those usually work well in isolation. The same feeling came over me by the end of The Last Jedi. These films feature more famous-actor-cameos than you can shake a stick at, but for the most part they are actually a distraction. People I saw the movie with actually missed sections because they were whispering about who they think they just saw. More importantly, Sidney Lumet warns in Making Movies that using a star is like using a nuclear weapon: there will be collateral damage. Normally that’s limited to Tom Cruise always being Maverick from Top Gun, but in this case, it’s the constant turning away from the screen that’s the problem.
What is great about The Last Jedi is that it is clearly intended to set up a new Star Wars paradigm, the same aspiration of the prequel films, only now with the warning of the prequel films.
This introduces one major problem: wasn’t that what The Force Awakens was supposed to do? The Force Awakens was hours of exposition meant to launch the new generation. If that task has fallen to The Last Jedi, is it an implicit admission that The Force Awakens failed at its one job?
This doesn’t mean The Last Jedi is a bad story just because its predecessor was awful. The Last Jedi was fine, for a movie that cost $60 Million (it cost $200 Million). It was just a bit disappointing. It’s like visiting a Michelin Star restaurant after the chef has had a stroke. It’s just not going to be quite up to par.
Watching The Last Jedi put me in mind of watching every Steven Seagal movie since Under Siege.
Under Siege was a benchmark for action movies. It had a guy who couldn’t act playing exactly the only hero he is capable of playing. It had some pretty talented actors picking up the slack. The hero goes through a change, albeit a small one. It had the right blend of jingoistic violence, high stakes, style, and setting. Its pitch was one of those perfect “elevator” pitches: Die Hard on a battleship. It was not a “great film” the way The Searchers was a great film. It was perfection on its own terms.
The Last Jedi wasn’t great, but it was okay “on its own terms”. If the early Star Wars trilogy was Enter the Dragon, and Battlestar Galactica was Under Siege, The Last Jedi was The Glimmer Man. I saw The Glimmer Man. It was okay.
So where does that leave The Force Awakens?
If you look at the events that take place in The Force Awakens, you quickly see that the whole film could be condensed down to the first act of a movie. The only plot events in TFA that need to happen for The Last Jedi to happen are Rey, Finn, and Poe meeting, Han Solo getting killed by Kylo Ren, and the discovery of Luke’s light saber (and map to him), all of which could be accomplished within 30 minutes, and would be more satisfying than the lumbering mess that was TFA. Where that leaves us is with The Last Jedi as a second act. Of course, that would be fine if it stood totally on its own, but it doesn’t do that particularly well, which is my major criticism of the Post-Lucas films, but let’s play with this idea anyway.
If The Last Jedi is act two, the question becomes “Does it suffer from Act II sag?”
This is hard to say without seeing Episode IX. It’s possible to assess it though, guessing where Episode IX goes. Let’s play What If…?
- DJ (Benicio Del Toro) had better come back as a Solo-esque shape-shifter, or else he’s just yet another fan service cameo, spitting in the face of Chekhov’s Gun, and he is act II sag.
- Poe’s ridiculous, moronic, unbelievable errors (see below) and towering insubordination must result in some sort of personal loss, or else he’s just another man whose terrible mistakes need to be cleaned up by a woman, whose sacrifice informs his emotional development. If he did what he did in the real military, he’d be shot, or imprisoned for life. If he doesn’t get his comeuppance, act II sag.
- If Rey goes to the dark side and needs Finn to rescue her, then she becomes a damsel in distress, and is not a hero. Finn then becomes the hero, and her return to the Jedi traditions is his accomplishment, not hers. If she isn’t the hero, setting her up as the hero is act II sag.
- If the paradigm shift of the film results in either the resurrection of the empire/rebel paradigm or the creation of the gray Jedi, then the films have gone nowhere, and done nothing. You can’t tell a story about changing the paradigm and then not change the paradigm, and if you can’t come up with a better idea than the people writing bad fan fiction, you have no business being in charge of a franchise. Dark Empire addressed the relationship with the Jedi and the Dark Side intelligently: that to be a master you must taste the Dark Side and return. This is in line with the dramatic tradition of death and resurrection, like Siegfried drinking the blood of the dragon in The Ring Cycle. It also explains why so many Jedi could go to the Dark Side at some point. Saying “wouldn’t it be cool if you could use both” (the premise of the Gray Jedi) is like saying “wouldn’t it be cool if there was a boy Slayer on Buffy?” It’s gutless fan service. The theme of the whole series is about how there is such a thing as absolute evil and that is must be resisted at all costs, so breaking with that renders all previous films in the series meaningless; if Darth Vader could just calmly float some rocks and come back to the Jedi, then his death, the Emperor’s death, and indeed all deaths that result from the struggles of the films are pointless. This is worse than act II sag, it’s an contradiction of all other films in the series.
- Kylo Ren is a blot on the plot. He just seems out of place through the whole thing. Kylo Ren is a bad villain and a worse hero. He has nothing appealing to recommend him as a hero, and he isn’t scary or threatening as a villain. Despite being emo, he isn’t scary like the Columbine Shooters (I got the feeling that was the intent) and has the name of a celebrity hair stylist. I see no way of accepting him as heroic after all he has done, unless he’s a rehash of everything Darth Vader (though he’s already killed Snoke, aka Diet Emperor, so there’s nowhere for him to go). Literally everything is wrong with him in terms of backstory, costume, place in the story, and casting (Really? That’s Harrison Ford’s son?). I don’t know how his part of the story is fixed, but I can say for sure everything about him is story sag. If only he were not in the movies and all else were the same, the movies would be much better. Every moment he is on screen is story sag.
This brings us to the plot holes.
I’ll list them here, without much commentary. I pose a lot of these as “whys” because I think with an explanation, just about any plot element is acceptable. It’s just that in this, there’s no explanation. Many other lists have been written about them, but I think a lot of the stuff people got hung up on as plot holes really weren’t that big of a deal.
- If kamikaze hyperspace ships will tear giant holes in other ships, why doesn’t The First Order have missiles or “fire ships” that use this tactic? Why haven’t they been doing this for decades? Why didn’t they just do that with large hyperdrives attached to asteroids, rather than building the Death Star? More importantly, why don’t they have a defense for this?
- There’s also the problem of the whole movie only happening because a hero causes the bad thing that the heroes oppose to happen. It would be as if Luke Skywalker had come up with the idea for the Death Star back in A New Hope. This is terrible writing. The way stories have worked since the dawn of language is that the plot happens, and the hero is thrust into conflict against their will. This is basic Aristotle. If Poe and company hadn’t tried to get the code breaker and disable the Dreadnought's tracker, then the Resistance would have escaped. Because the heroes acted, they caused the problem. This is backwards, lazy writing that thinks it is clever. Even if you accept the plot events as perfectly okay, they bring up other problems. Why is it that Vice Admiral Holdo doesn’t tell Poe what she plans to do because he will obviously act on his own, or just throw him in the brig for insubordination? Either would prevent him from fucking it up through his unforgivable stupidity and arrogance. If the Vice Admiral had no way to expect his actions, then how did she become a Vice Admiral? Even if she didn’t tell Poe, there would be some way of finding out from a third party, surely. Either way, the whole thing is just stupid. If the only reason a writer can come up with is “because I need plot to happen” then that’s a lazy writer. This feels like lazy writing.
- Why does the First Order just send some ships through hyperspace to get around the Resistance ships, rather than pursuing them for several hours? Why doesn’t the giant, invincible Dreadnought cut off the Resistance ships instead of appearing behind them? I thought the whole point of a large military was to be able to flank an enemy.
- Why does Yoda wait all this time to council Luke? Why not jump in when he’s about to kill Ben Solo? Or abandon the Republic? Or any number of other countless times his advice would have had more of an impact? There should be a good reason, or any reason at all, but there isn’t. Strangely, Luke doesn’t seem bothered by this. Also, if Yoda can call down lightning, where has he been all this time when hitting a villain with a good bolt of lightning would do the job? Where was he when The Emperor was about to kill Luke? This is ridiculous, and it should have been an easy fix.
- Why does Luke die because an illusion of him dies? There’s one line thrown into the beginning, when Kylo sees Rey, and he says she can’t be doing this on her own because the effort would kill her. Then we find out it is Snoke doing it, but Snoke didn’t die from the effort, so the rule isn’t clear. If you want to introduce rules for this phenomenon beforehand that’s fine, but you can’t just throw something in like that and expect everything to make sense after the fact.
- Why does the First Order bother pulling back their fighters just because the capital ships are out of range? This hasn’t ever been a concern in any other Star Wars film, and it’s not like they take great care to protect their TIE fighters under any other circumstances. Again, this happens because it advances the plot, not the other way around.
- Why do Finn and Rose just accept the word of DJ when they’ve gone to quite a lot of trouble to get the help of “the only man in the galaxy” who can help them? There isn’t a good justification for this, and it would be an easy one line fix, making the ship DJ steals the ship of the Master Codebreaker, meaning he is the Master Codebreaker’s superior. Either that or Finn and Rose should change the plan.
Those are the major plot problems. Reams could be written about all of them. I’ll leave it there for the time being. Meanwhile, I’ve got to get my tickets purchased, because I’m going to see it again. See? I said it was okay.
