Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a wonderful, yet hindered experience
A spoiler free assessment of the latest Star Wars installment.
My fear of the future and present days of Star Wars partially hindered my enjoyment of a really great Star Wars movie, but before I get into that, in case you live under a rock, a movie was released this week.
That movie is another Star Wars movie, titled The Last Jedi. It’s a movie that discusses and encompasses love, fear, hope, hate, dope cinematography, and a plethora of other things.
What I’ve found is that to really understand where a Star Wars movie fits into things, it should be seen three-four times and sit for at least six months. So, I’m not going to fly out of the gates and say this is the greatest or worst Star Wars movie ever.
(By the way, I ranked all the Star Wars movies.)
But instead I just want to capture my thoughts from just seeing this movie for the first time. These thoughts will change after I see it again in theaters, and once again after its on Blu-Ray (4K please).
So, at first I’m going to talk about this movie without spoilers, and then I’ll make an obvious transition into the spoiler section. Very obvious.
What I want to say about this movie is hard to really put into words, because I walked out of this movie not so much feeling strange regarding The Last Jedi in a vacuum, but more so feeling strange about the state of Star Wars.
To be very up front, the movie itself is fantastic. It hit everything that it needed to in attempting to further resolve and move forward both old and new plot lines. It did a pretty good job at handling the multiple new characters and old characters at the same time, and didn’t copy the Empire Strikes Back blueprint like I was expecting to see.
I would also praise this movie for what it avoided. Rian Johnson was very aware of the story potholes that could potentially derail the movie, and he avoided them in such clever ways.
This movie did plenty to excite me for the possibilities of what Johnson’s future trilogy could look like. It excited me in that I have no idea the story angles Johnson could take. That’s a fun place to be.
Apart from Disney pushing itself into this movie from time to time (hello you stupid Porgs), it felt like they let Rian Johnson do his thing. Which is another great sign for the new trilogy.
My biggest concern for the new trilogy after watching this movie is that Disney inserts slight homages to the Skywalker trilogy into his movie for that little advertising boost, but that’s a concern for another time.
This next part will INCLUDE SPOILERS. I’ll now put another photo so that you don’t accidentally see something below.
So Rian Johnson did a couple really smart things in this movie to avoid having to deal with tough topics that couldn't have had a good enough payoff to risk what messing them up would do.
- He straight up killed off Snoke, which was a great choice in my opinion. Dealing with him, who he is, and if he has connection/is either Palpatin or someone else relevant would have been tough. Killing him eliminates having to deal with the implications of dealing with his backstory at all, which I didn’t care about and could have been a massive rabbit hole that would have wasted time.
- Making Rey’s parents nobodies, thankfully, saved us of some unneeded family dynamics in a franchise partially defined by family dynamics.
So far, when I think about this movie the biggest takeaways were probably these in some order:
Benicio del Toro was fantastic, and I was left wanting way more of his character. Hopefully that comes in the near future.
I found myself wanting much more of Luke and Rey throughout this movie, not necessarily together, but their characters. That’s a good thing, what’s bad is that I don’t really care about Finn or Poe all that much in a movie that is generally close to getting crowded. Maybe it’s that I’m trying to hold characters like Jedi equal in my head with really just solid fighter pilots and ex-stormtroopers. I’ll likely have to re-evaluate that aspect as the movie ages.
Kylo Ren was dope once again. For some reason I dig the whole dark side thing with him so much more then I have with just about every other Sith Lord or apprentice, with the exception of Darth Vader.
The scenes between Ren and Rey were the best parts of the movie. Both were well cast from the beginning of Episode VII and this movie highlights those choices and allows both to shine.
The directorial direction and writing in this movie were clean from the first moments. The movie felt cinematic and large, and there were scenes where you could feel Star Wars and its wonderful magic return.
There’s a scene when Luke and Rey are walking up a hill on his little island, and in the background there was just like a dragon tail diving back down into the ocean. In that moment I felt like Star Wars was a massive universe and didn’t have the need to explain itself to me. That was awesome, and there are other moments like that which make me excited to see a Rian Johnson trilogy outside of what we currently know as Star Wars.
My thoughts are all over the place with this movie and the direction of Star Wars in general. I believe it’s important to separate the two. In terms of this movie I think it was a great piece of work, somewhere in the lines of an 8.5 out of 10 for me at the moment, after one viewing. Like I’ve said before, I cannot properly judge a single Star Wars movie after one viewing. So my overall opinion about the film will likely vary as I see it again this week, and then when it’s released to the public.
What I’ve been struggling to properly compartmentalize is how having a Star Wars movie each year impacts my opinion of individual properties, but also the franchise as a whole. Over-saturation hasn’t impacted the movies yet, because so far Disney is three for three in my book. But it worries me how I felt coming out of The Last Jedi. It felt different then I’d felt leaving every other Star Wars movie I’d seen for the first time. It had nothing to do with the movie, director, or characters itself, but things felt different.
After seeing the movie with Unprofessionals co-founder Nathan Page, we talked through the movie and its implications for how we would feel about Star Wars in the near future. In trying to understand what I was feeling he described what happens when you go to a really good restaurant with a niche food style to it. At some point, having that food more than once or twice a year you’ll become not necessarily numb to it, or enjoy it any less, but it’ll feel different.
What he described is in the ballpark of what over-saturation feels like to some people, and I don’t think I’m feeling over-saturated by Star Wars yet. Nor am I confident that I’ll feel that way anytime in the next five years.
What I do know is that in seven or eight years whenever my son finally gets interested in Star Wars, hopefully, he’ll be very aware that since 2015 there have been eight (VII, VII, IX, Rogue One, Han Solo, and the new trilogy) Star Wars movies released in a short period of time. I have no idea how that will feel for any new Star Wars fans that are coming along in the years to come.
Perhaps most of this “angst” is simply overstated because I’m seeing this expansive yet controlled intellectual property blossom in ways that never seemed feasible 10 years ago. Star Wars was this thing that was mostly complete, certainly complete from the movie side. Now, it’s being made every year, and what that’ll do to how I feel about the franchise as a whole isn’t clear to me yet. What I do know is that for the current generation of TV and Movie watchers, having Star Wars every year will feel normal, and perhaps having something that special, that often, is what made me feel so strange walking out of an otherwise wonderfully made Star Wars film.
