“The Last Jedi” — MacGuffin for nuthin

Let’s act like it’s just a regular movie for one minute and analyze it

This post contains spoilers for The Last Jedi.

One reason we Star Wars fans are the way we are is that, for 30 years, we could hold those three movies in our minds as a canon. We had a closed set of sacred texts. (Wildly overrating the third one in order to feel good about it, but anyway.)

That’s also why the prequels hurt us so deeply: they broke that seal, and just colossally soiled the contents.

So we are not naive, or we shouldn’t be. We know not to let ourselves get too hurt. Especially since this third trilogy-in-progress can’t, structurally, feel necessary because the story has already resolved.

And especially since Disney, seemingly overnight, has moved Star Wars stories from something rare to something ubiquitous. With infinite trilogies and spin-offs, the age of the closed set is over. Star Wars is James Bond now, or Star Trek, or comics. It won’t end.

Which means, statistically, some of the installments will suck, and some will be lame with good parts, and some will be great with lame parts. For our own health, we are going to have to take each movie for what it is. Create our own canons.

Do what Rian Johnson is screaming at us to do: let go.

And as for The Last Jedi, even as I wince at things that disappoint, I’m at least happy to be reflecting, with the characters, on change, and loss, and trusting the next generation to make their own mistakes, instead of breaking my head trying to rationalize midichlorians.

So, let’s pretend this is just a regular movie, and I’ll tell you what I liked and didn’t like!

Ilove a lot about The Last Jedi. An aggressive focus on gender and race in casting finally gives us a galaxy less segregated than our own. Planets, creatures, and action sequences feel new, and not just revised versions of old favorites. Many sequences exhilarated and moved me.

And the charisma of our new stars continues to shine: Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, John Boyega, and now Kelly Marie Tran charm us, and each other. And every inanimate and computer-generated object around them.

As for the story:

I’m frankly surprised that the movie is coherent at all, given that it follows a first chapter that did such a poor job explaining what was even at stake. Between Episodes VI and VII, we evidently went from a Rebellion victorious over an Empire, to a Resistance (that is actually the Republic) struggling against a First Order (of what? Are they planning a Second Order?). Yet this totally unforeshadowed transition isn’t even referred to in the opening crawl of The Force Awakens. Rudimentary backstory about our new heroes and villains — information known to the characters themselves, like Rey’s parentage and Snoke’s identity — is perversely withheld from the audience, in the name of J.J. Abrams’ “mystery box” theory of storytelling.

I’m frankly surprised that “The Last Jedi” is coherent at all, given that it follows a first chapter that did such a poor job explaining what was even at stake.

But The Last Jedi does an impressive job of cleaning up this world-building mess. Rian Johnson: thank you for explaining both Rey’s origins and why she acted so cagey about them. And for dispatching Snoke.

We don’t know how we got here, but at least we now understand that we’re basically at Empire vs. Rebellion again.

Most of all, I appreciate the thematic approach, and the risks Johnson and the Lucasfilm story group have taken to dramatize it. They have tackled a very challenging problem — how to launch a hero’s journey in a world where the hero’s journey has already happened. And they’ve come up with a more interesting solution than I thought was possible.

More than interesting. Profound, relevant, and urgent. (More on that here.)

As much of an improvement as it is over The Force Awakens, though, The Last Jedi doesn’t go down as smoothly as it could. I can forgive the wrong notes, but I will take the liberty of listing some of them:

Star Wars movies have never referred to our galaxy’s God. Or to books, or the written word. They have never acknowledged the science of the cold of space; Darth Vader stood in an open hangar in Rogue One just last year without being sucked out and frozen. They have never used slow motion or stylized rapid cuts or dramatized flashbacks, let alone subjective ones that change when replayed. There were too few Kurosawa-style wipes. Nobody said “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” (At least not in English.)

But these style and tone mistakes just take points off. The prequels broke far more serious rules, several of which The Last Jedi retcons.

Something more serious is wrong, though, when my kids are disappointed with a Star Wars movie. And not because characters die (well, my 9-year-old is mad about Admiral Ackbar) — but because they literally didn’t follow what was happening.

Where the original trilogy’s plotting shoots from point to point like a diagram of a constellation (and The Force Awakens plays connect-the-dots), The Last Jedi’s points feel smudged. It drags and confuses, especially throughout the many reversals in the second act.

The film is widely felt to be overlong, but I have seen some 180-minute epics that felt tight. (And some 12-hour epics too. There and back again, Lord of the Rings!)

What was it with all those subplots? Why did they not satisfy? Here’s what I think.

Second act trouble

Johnson has said that his approach to the screenplay was to put the characters through extreme tests. Very smart. After The Force Awakens’ lazy story, in which the events felt either arbitrary (“R2 had the map all along, and just woke up!”) or overly familiar (um, pick anything), Johnson was right in wanting more and better MacGuffins.

But putting them through losses isn’t the same as giving them struggles.

A characteristic pattern dominates the middle section of The Last Jedi. A dire situation is contrived, characters try to resolve it, and their hopes are crushed. They are rescued, and the pattern repeats: the characters devise and explain a strategy to change their situation, and they are thwarted. Over and over.

Problem. Plan. Start! Foiled! That plan might as well have never happened. It’s okay though, because here’s a rescue.

Johnson adds a level of complexity by sandwiching these dead-end quests inside each other, like HTML tags:

Tucking MacGuffins inside each other can be lots of fun for an audience, though it demands a lot of our concentration. (It also requires the characters to maintain an urgency throughout. Johnson struggles with this in directing Boyega and Tran; they seem to lose focus or give up at a couple points during the Canto Bight adventures. I felt like yelling at them: don’t you remember they are picking off the Resistance ships one by one? Stop analyzing class structure and get going!)

But the bigger problem is this: they never successfully execute any of the steps they’ve laid out. What frustrates is not that the characters don’t succeed. It’s that they don’t complete.

In the third act of The Empire Strikes Back, Han, Luke, and Leia lose badly. But we experience it as tragic, rather than frustrating, because they follow through on their plans and the consequences are bad. They make their choices: Han and Leia trust a scoundrel acquaintance, Lando sells out his friends to the Empire, Luke ignores Yoda’s advice. These decisions reveal character, and they change the outcome of the story. When the dust settles, Han has been kidnapped, Luke knows the truth about his father, and Leia has committed to a relationship outside of the Rebellion.

It’s a bummer ending, but it’s satisfying. Their actions changed their situation…mostly for the worse. The tags are closed.

But Finn, Rose, and Poe’s plans in The Last Jedi don’t develop them as characters, because they are stopped by script contrivances before they learn whether they made good decisions or not.

Laugh it up, subplots

Nothing that Poe, Finn, or Rose do in the midsection of the film yields anything — not success, not partial success, not indirect consequences that might pay off later. Not even lessons learned. They could have stayed on the ship and played with BB-8. The third act would be exactly the same.

If Finn and Rose stayed on the ship with Poe and played with BB-8, the third act would be exactly the same.

So, even though we may love Finn and Rose’s radicalization among the one-percent, and we may love watching Poe in a power struggle with a powerful female leader, and we may love…um…Benicio Del Toro, these sequences leave us feeling unfulfilled. The audience begins to suffer from MacGuffin Interruptus.

The other half of the movie, meanwhile, is free from this pattern — and, consequently, it seems to be resonating more consistently with audiences. The interactions between Luke, Rey, and Kylo do have consequences. The characters grow, they learn from each other, and they take actions together that leave them and the world different at the end than when it started.

The throne room scene and the Luke vs. Kylo fight are especially popular, and I think it’s not just the excellent staging. In these sequences, the characters successfully achieve goals through the actions they take. It’s not that the characters “win” — their fates are bittersweet — but they are able to fully execute their plans and learn something from what happens.

By the end of The Last Jedi, the forward movement of these three characters has brought the rest of the ensemble to a new status quo. Here’s hoping J.J. Abrams and Chris Terrio give them all worthy challenges to pursue in Episode whatever-this-is — and the chance to see how they pan out.

After all, stories are more than just trials. Characters must not only try to act on the world; they must do things, and learn from the results.

Do, you might say, or do not. There is no try.