The last Star Wars film? I wish
The Last Jedi seems to have been made for one reason, and one reason only: to make money. Its artistic value is zero.
THIS plea will completely fall on deaf ears, but I’ll make it anyway: please don’t make any more Star Wars movies.
I went to The Last Jedi on Friday, a day after its release in Australia, in a packed cinema complete with a woman in a Wookie onesie, and walked out two hours later completely underwhelmed.
Should I have expected otherwise?
Well, kind of.
Blade Runner 2049 is a worthy companion piece to one of the most iconic films of the twentieth century, both paying homage to and advancing the original film.
A decade ago, Casino Royale rebooted the James Bond franchise in fine style, even if the collapsing Venetian palazzo in the final action scene was a bit ludicrous.
And even T2, the sequel to Trainspotting, had enough moments of both tear-inducing poignancy and belly-bursting humour to make it worth the effort.
But the Star Wars franchise has truly run out of ideas.
It’s hard to pinpoint what I so dislike about The Last Jedi, but on reflection it shares the same flaws as The Force Awakens, the film that came before it.
Both films are second rate re-treads of the first two of the original Star Wars trilogy.
In The Force Awakens, an orphaned scavenger living on an isolated planet stumbles across a droid who leads her to the rebellion against an evil empire, where she is confronted by a helmeted warrior with a dark past in a climactic battle which ends with the rebellion winning to fight another day.
Sound familiar?
The Last Jedi is basically a re-tread of the Empire Strikes Back. Substitute Rey for Luke, Luke for Obi-Wan/Yoda, BB8 for R2-D2, Poe for Han; the bar scene from A New Hope becomes the casino in The Last Jedi; John Williams composes the soundtrack . . . and so on.
But it’s not just the lack of originality which irks me. That would be forgiveable if the film was actually entertaining.
But it’s not.
The special effects are tired and unimaginative; the plot meanders over two hours of nothing; and the performances are almost uniformly wooden. Carrie Fisher dialed in her final role from a galaxy far, far away, but it still had more life than Laura Dern. The final scene featuring Luke was ridiculous (a hologram, FFS?)
The one half-decent performance was that of Benicio Del Toro, but what was the point of his character anyway? We are led to believe he will reveal some crucial new element to the story, and then he’s gone.
There aren’t even any interesting new aliens.
One thing we know about Hollywood is that it is good at milking every last cent from a successful franchise. It is a business after all, and the return on investment means Disney and Lucasfilm are laughing all the way to the bank.
I only laughed twice over the 131 minutes of this film, and during some of the action sequences I found myself checking my watch.
As an example, Rey’s pursuit of the hermit-like Luke on his secluded island drags on for something like 30 minutes in a scene which could have been completed in half that time.
The first Star Wars films were truly groundbreaking in their day. Their day being the late-1970s.
They took old themes of the battle between good and evil and refreshed them, with wit, mystique and damn good special effects.
And there it should have ended.
Should we expect anything more from Star Wars in this day and age?
The box office takings suggest ($US450 million in the first week) The Last Jedi has delivered exactly what the Star Wars diehards wanted, especially those too young to have been around when the first trilogy was originally released.
But for the rest of us, it is symptomatic of everything that is flawed about Hollywood. There was no reason for this film to be made, except to make a bunch of people a lot of money. It serves no artistic or cultural purpose whatsoever.
One thing we know about Hollywood is that it is good at milking every last cent from a successful franchise. It is a business after all, and the return on investment means Disney and Lucasfilm are laughing all the way to the bank.
These problems of commerce versus art are as old as Hollywood itself, and perhaps you could excuse them if the end product was watchable.
The counter argument is that we may have been expecting too much, that Star Wars films exist for entertainment and escapism, not as higher art. If it’s art you are seeking, look elsewhere.
To which I answer, I wanted to be entertained by The Last Jedi, but I wasn’t. But I did want to escape the cinema where I was watching it.
Still we have one thing to be thankful for about The Last Jedi. At least it wasn’t The Phantom Menace.
