Star Wars: The Last Jedi is Exactly the Reset the Franchise Needed
This movie is a profound and badly-needed course correction and de-mythologization of the Star Wars universe, attacking the series' own most troublesome conceits and continually refusing to take the easy, obvious choice in how it plays out.
By Ryan McGreal.
1143 words. Approximately a 3 to 7 minute read.
Posted December 27, 2017 in Blog.
(Last Updated December 27, 2018)
SPOILER WARNING: STAR WARS THE LAST JEDI SPOILERS TO FOLLOW IN THIS POST
If you are planning to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi and have not yet done so, read no further!
Here be dragons!
Last chance to turn away - Star Wars spoilers will abound in this post.
Okay, now that it's just us folks who have already seen the movie, here are some thoughts that have been banging around my head since I watched it last Thursday. (Seriously, though, if you haven't seen it yet, turn away now!)
Let me start by laying my cards on the table: I thoroughly enjoyed The Last Jedi. It was fast-paced, funny, exciting, harrowing and charming.
The climactic scene in which Vice-Admiral Holdo crashes her ship into Supreme Leader Snoke's ship at lightspeed is easily the most gorgeous, cinematic and visually arresting moment in any Star Wars movie.
Writer and director Rian Johnson made some bold, controversial choices in this story, and I support them entirely. This movie is a profound and badly-needed course correction and de-mythologization of the Star Wars universe, attacking the series' own most troublesome conceits and continually refusing to take the easy, obvious choice in how it plays out.
The movie finally confronts the central absurdity of the prequels, in which a temple of super-smart, super-connected Jedi masters are so utterly clueless that they don't notice the Sith Lord right there in front of them, or the conspiracy unfolding to destroy them and overturn the Galactic Republic, or indeed the unstable young Jedi among their own number who is leading a secret life and has become so emotionally compromised that he will betray them all.
After Luke himself fails until too late to notice that his nephew and trainee has turned to the Dark Side, he retreats to Ahch-To (Gesundheit!), the site of the first Jedi Temple, to do some hard thinking about his - and the Jedi's - tragic flaws.
What he realizes is that the Jedi are the Technocrats of their age: too smart and smug for their own good and perpetually creating more problems than they know how to manage. (I found myself wondering if Rian Johnson has read John Ralston Saul's landmark book Voltaire's Bastards.)
Meanwhile, Luke provides Rey with a new and deeper way of thinking about the Force that dispels the silly mechanistic view of the prequels (srsly, midichlorians?) without actually breaking continuity.
Through Rey's journey to learn about herself, the movie also dispels the elitist mythology of the family dynasty. Rey is not powerful because she's really the scion and heir to some Great Family (e.g. Luke's long-lost daughter), she's powerful because the Force has awakened in her and she was open to it.
This anti-elitist sentiment is reinforced in the closing scene with the young boy labouring for the Casino city, nonchalantly using the Force to sweep the stable and stroking his Resistance pin.
Another sacred cow the movie confronts is the myth of the reckless hero, rushing into danger with nothing more than moxie and pulling off an improbable victory.
When Poe disobeys his orders and tries to take out a First Order dreadnought, the result is a pyrrhic victory in which a great many of his resistance colleagues are killed and their battleships destroyed without really changing the balance of power.
Poe's next attempt at heroism - sending Rose and Finn on a wild-goose chase to find someone who can hack into Snoke's ship and destroy the warp tracking system - results in the First Order learning about Holdo's plan to sneak the remaining Resistance members off the ship to a nearby abandoned Rebel base and picking off the escape shuttles one by one.
Yet while this movie peels back some of the in-world cruft that has adhered to its central conceits and confused its sentiments across the previous seven movies, it simultaneously serves to reveal and burnish the true moral centre of the Force worldview.
As Rose says to Finn after she stops him from sacrificing himself to destroy the First Order cannon, "This is how we win: not by fighting what we hate, but by saving what we love."
This was how Luke won in Return of the Jedi when he saved his father. It's also how Rey hopes to win: by saving Kylo Ren, who has killed Snoke in the manner of a Sith apprentice rising up to seize power from the Master.
Kylo, of course, wishes to make Rey his new apprentice. They obviously have a strong emotional connection, and Rey is curiously unafraid of the Dark Side. It will be interesting to see how the next movie resolves this dynamic.
The peeling back of cruft happens literally when ghost Yoda appears and burns down the ancient tree housing the founding Jedi texts.
Luke, who had considered destroying them but hesitated, is horrified, but Yoda understands that the map is not the territory. "Read them, did you?" Yoda asks, knowing the answer. "Not exactly page-turners, are they?" (This was one of my favourite moments in a Star Wars movie with a lot of self-deprecating humour.)
Another powerful theme is the ceremonial passing of the torch to the new generation, which began in The Force Awakens. It's hard to watch The Last Jedi without thinking about the tired, much-abused planet earth that the Baby Boomer generation is now reluctantly passing down to the Millennials, who will be left to clean up the mess.
Albert Einstein famously warned, "We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them," and this movie exemplifies that sentiment in spades.
For fans complaining that this movie broke the rules of Star Wars, I urge you: dig deeper. This movie needed to happen.
The Force Awakens did a good job of feeling like a Star Wars movie again after the awful prequels, and we probably needed that palate cleanser to set the series back on course, but it really was just a remixed retread of the original movie (a "soft reboot", as my son calls it).
Continuing to play it this safe with Episode 8 would not do the story - or the fans - justice.
We need to be challenged as well as soothed by the stories that define our culture, and at this The Last Jedi delivers admirably. It's also a smart, funny, exciting, well-crafted film. (Yes, it's probably about 20 minutes too long but this is at best a quibble.)
A lot of people were worried when Disney took over the franchise that Star Wars would turn into a soulless money machine.
Of course, Star Wars has always been a money machine - it was George Lucas' foresight in retaining licencing rights for the original movie that created the huge monster of merchandising and cross-promotion - but The Last Jedi suggests that the folks in charge of this franchise are also determined to be responsible caretakers of its soul.