Star Wars: The Last Jedi is out. Here’s What I Thought.

Warning: SPOILERS. The first section of this article contains enough general plot elements to discuss the film overall. The latter part of the article has more specifics (though none of the really major plot specifics), but I’ll indicate where you should stop reading if you don’t want anything beyond the basics.

Do not scroll down if you have not seen the film and do not want any hints as to what happens in it.

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TL;DR version: Really great Star Wars film that propels the story in smart and unexpected ways. It’s packed with emotional setups and payoffs, has one of the most euphoric moments in any Star Wars film, and has some epic space and land battles to boot. The film drags in the beginning during Finn and Rose’s side quest and some jokes and plot elements fall flat, but Kylo, Rey, Leia, and especially Luke Skywalker thrill us like they never have before. It runs unnecessarily long. With about a half hour’s worth of editing it would be a perfect Star Wars film. As it is it’s a solid A- and I can’t wait to see it a few more times. After this film I’d rank the Star Wars films like this: V, IV, VII, VIII, VI, R1; III, II, I.

“Everything you just said in that sentence is wrong,” Luke Skywalker says in separate instances to Rey and Kylo Ren in the newest film in the Star Wars franchise, Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The line could easily apply to nearly every fan theory or prediction about what the new movie would be like. The plot twists in Star Wars: The Last Jedi are better than anyone ever predicted they’d be. It’s a really fantastic Star Wars film. It has an epic feel while remaining tightly focused on character development. On the surface it bears a resemblance to plot elements from both Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi — an escape from a hidden rebel base while being closely pursued by the Empire (er, First Order), a young apprentice being trained by a Jedi master, a side adventure in a city, and an epic battle that takes place inside and outside a gigantic spaceship. But thematically the film goes where no Star Wars films have gone before and thankfully most (though by no means all) of the risks that director Riann Johnson takes pay off. There’s more humor and more emotional twists here than in any previous films.

Of the four big questions we had — what happened to Luke? Will Rey turn to the dark side? Will Kylo redeem himself? Who were Rey’s parents? — the first three are masterfully revealed piece by piece like a good Sherlock Holmes mystery through the course of the first half of the movie (though even after the very final battle the ultimate fate of Kylo’s soul has yet to be determined). Luke’s character is revealed to be ever more complex through a series of flashbacks. And we feel what Rey feels as she continues on her quest to discover who her family is. Oh, and we’ve got a contender for best lightsaber battle in the series. It hearkens back to those from the original trilogy in terms of the stakes involved and our investment in the characters and outcome. Interestingly, where battles in the original trilogy were tense, typically fought between characters with ongoing beef, the big lightsaber battle in The Last Jedi has an altogether different feeling, charged with a sense of elation. I’ve never heard an audience cheer like they did through the entire battle with Kylo and Rey.

This film has the finest acting in any of the Star Wars films. As usual Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren and Daisy Ridley’s Rey are the best part of the movie and their relationship is what drives the best parts of the plot. Kylo’s transition from petulant teenager to confused young man to resolved villain is fully believable largely because of Driver’s ability to draw empathy even during his vilest moments. Ren is the most complex and human character in the series and it’s great to see a talented actor like Driver pull the role off. In The Force Awakens, Rey was bright-eyed and full of awe and wonder at the largeness of the universe around her. By Last Jedi, she’s seen some sh*t. Ridley’s Rey is fierce, determined, physical, and in an ever-so-precarious position; We as an audience fully believe that she could end up falling to the dark side, and this makes her every decision loaded from the get-go.

This is Mark Hamill’s best performance as Luke Skywalker. Young Luke’s blue eyes are gray, sunken, and sad. His clean face and fine blond hair has given way to a grizzled beard and mane tangled with wind and salt. Before watching the film I tried to think of ways in which the writers could make Luke’s turn against the force and abandonment of the Jedi believable and was coming up blank. This was set up and delivered perfectly in the movie. Luke is clearly hiding a dark secret and as it’s revealed in the film it brings all of Luke’s motivations into clarity. This not only adds depth to this film, but to the events of The Force Awakens as well. Hamill is clearly having fun on camera. He’s intense, energetic, and playful while always having that underlying sadness that makes his character believable.

The supporting cast is also great. Benicio Del Toro is a highlight as a back alley computer hacker who joins John Boyega’s Finn and newcomer Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose on a heist aboard a star destroyer. Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron has a greatly expanded role in this film, and he’s a natural fit for the Star Wars universe, part Han Solo, part Lando, and part Wedge Antilles. Laura Dern’s acting as Resistance Admiral Holdo is fine, though I couldn’t help thinking “oh, there’s Laura Dern in a blue wig” every time she entered the scene. Domhnall Gleeson is as great as he was in Force Awakens, hamming it up as sniveling General Hux.

Carrie Fisher’s final performance as Princess Leia is also exceptional. She’s mature and leader-like, but maintains the sassiness and quick wit of the younger Princess Leia.

Finn and Rose’s plot line is the biggest problem in the film and where most of the film’s dialogue problems arise. Their side quest ultimately amounts to nothing plotwise: They hatch a plan with a rogue Poe Dameron to find a hacker capable of shutting off a Star Destroyer’s tracker for just long enough to allow the Resistance fleet to blast off into hyperspace and escape. But they don’t find the hacker (at least not the right one) and they don’t shut off the tracking device, and ultimately it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, as Admiral Holdo had a different, better plan all along (why didn’t she share it with them?!). There’s no real payoff for their entire side quests other than a few force-fed parables about wealth distribution and war profiteering, themes that feel much more prequel-y than related to ant of the rest of the movie. Their romantic connection also comes completely out of the blue and is delivered with a head-scratchingly on-the-nose line about fighting “to save the ones we love” **kiss**.

The other problem I had with the casino scenes are that they felt a little too much like the real world. We go into the Mos Eisley or Maz’s cantina, or Jabba’s palace, or even a bar on Coruscant and we feel like we’re in a truly alien world. Canto Bight looks like Abu Dhabi on Halloween.

The one bit of payoff we do get is Finn’s fight against Captain Phasma, back from the trash compactor. Gwendoline Christie could have had more screen time here, but who knows, they can always bring her back for the third film.

This early phase of the film drags a bit and it suffers from a certain form of prequelitis: Lots of walking and talking and not enough show don’t tell. But once the film gets going — about an hour in — it really gets going and the emotional and plot beats and the payoffs come at a faster and faster rate. The relationship between the Luke, Kylo, and Rey evolves naturally and compellingly over the course of the film until Kylo and Rey’s triumphant battle, followed by a gut-wrenching carpet-pull, and a riveting final showdown between Master and Apprentice. The space and land battles are as good as they’ve ever been with exciting dog fighting, plenty of nail-biting moments, battle decisions that we actually care about (remember that time Anakin accidentally flew into an enemy ship and destroyed it by pushing the wrong button? Yeah, none of that nonsense here), and some really great camerawork and choreography. The space battles feel personal and the individual ships and characters have true personality. The final battle on Krait, where the Millenium Falon (“they really hate that ship!”) joins a few hundred entrenched soldiers and a small fleet of land speeders against a herd of AT-M6s (and yet another superweapon) is cinematically gorgeous as the speeder’s foils whip up a wake of white salt and bright red soil as they carve through the landscape.

Johnson made a lot of great decisions here. Supreme Leader Snoke, dressed up like Goldmember and played by a deliciously sinister Andy Serkis has been a character of major speculation by the Star Wars nerd base. Is he Darth Plagueis? Did he create Anakin Skywalker? These are all questions that are irrelevant to the main plot of the movie and Johnson spends no time exploring them. The answer as to Rey’s parentage is one of the few answers he could have given that would make everyone happy, while introducing a strong new thematic element to the film and the very concept of the Force. Where Lucas tried to stress the idea that The Force was something certain people are genetically-predisposed to be connected to (remember the midichlorians? We all want to forget the midichlorians), The Last Jedi takes it in a much more democratic direction and does it successfully.

The humor in the script is pervasive and most of the time works. The movie is fun to watch in a way that the prequels never were. A few of the jokes fail to land perfectly. The exchange early on where Poe pretends not to be able to hear Hux over radio connection is mildly funny at first but gets dragged out like a Saturday Night Live sketch that just won’t land. This happens a few times. Chewie eating a Porg is funny, but it would have worked better as a small joke in the background or in passing. Instead we’re hit over the head with it. (For the record, you can throw away all your fears about Porgs being annoying. They’re adorable and not at all stupid.)

As The Last Jedi picks up immediately after the events of The Force Awakens, we first see Luke holding the lightsaber that Rey has just handed him. The music swells then drops comically as Luke tosses the lightsaber over his shoulder and walks away. Though it fits with the “throw away the past” theme of the film, it’s a comic beat that’s inserted into a scene that feels like it should be a little more serious. There’s a training scene between Luke and Rey with a similar joke crowbarred into it later on. It sort of felt like if Obi-Wan had made Luke sit on a whoopie cushion in the middle of his explanation of The Force.

At over two and a half hours long, this is the longest Star Wars film in the series, though it’s the shortest in terms of in-movie time passage; The entirety of the chase between the First Order and the Resistance — from the opening shot in the film to the final scene — takes place over about a day. (Some temporal fudging, a la Empire Strikes Back occurs to give Rey a bit of extra training time with Luke). The excellent movie could have been tightened up by a good 20 to 30 minutes to form a near-perfect movie.

In the end all of these are really just quibbles with an otherwise fantastic film and one that will do well on repeat viewings. The action is well-choreographed and richly layered with motivations, the large-scale battles are satisfying and thrilling, and the plot takes you to places that even the most hardcore fan-theory readers will be shocked by. As Luke says, “this is not going to go the way you think.”

********BIGGER SPOILERS BELOW********

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A few mechanics that Rian Johnson introduced to the film that were new to the series. I’m not sure how I feel about these things yet. In one way they are the kind of things that fans have wanted to see. “Ooh… what would happen if you turned on a lightsaber while it was pointed directly into your torso?” (we find out), but in other cases they seem to break some of the continuity of the greater universe. Maybe that’s OK. Here are some examples I noticed and some things I want to watch out for when I see it a second time:

FORCE PROJECTION

Luke does a force projection that extends to an entirely different solar system and he makes it last for several minutes. Why has this power never been seen or even hinted at in any other Star Wars movie? How come Obi-wan or Qui-gonn or Sidious or Yoda never used that power? Perhaps it’s something that Luke discovered while studying the Book of Whills during his exile, but if Luke could figure it out, why not Yoda who had even more time on Dagobah? Was he too old? Snoke used a similar power, force projecting Kylo and Rey into each others’ presence. Again, this is the first time we see this power.

NEW FORCE GHOST POWERS

Yoda calling lightning from his ghost state. How the heck did this happen? Since when can Force ghosts affect physical objects or the weather in the real world? Again, why did they never use this power before?

SUPERMAN FLIGHT

An early moment in the film where Leia is blasted off of her ship and into outer space by a First Order missile would have been a great send-off for her character (I, and I believe others in the audience were ready to accept that Princess Leia’s final resting place is in the depths of outer space), but, oddly, Leia shows a Force power that we’ve never seen before: Superwoman. She literally uses The Force to fly back to the ship and lives to survive the scene. This was the first indication of some of the minor problems I had with Rian Johnson’s writing, and in particular with his fast and loose treatment of expectations set up in the other films. If Force users can literally fly, why have we never seen any of them use this ability before? I get that she’s in the zero-G environment of outer space so very little force (with a small f) is needed to get her moving, but Leia is untrained in the use of the Force and not particularly strong with it, so how did she suddenly get this ability? Moreover, when Poe and the rest of the crew see her doing the Superman thing through outer space, why were they not surprised? Why didn’t they ask her how she did it?

HYPERSPACE AS A WEAPON

Laura Dern’s Admiral Holdo goes out with a bang, rescuing the few hundred surviving members of the Resistance by using her Mon Calamari cruiser on a final kamikaze run by ramming her way through the First Order Fleet at hyperspeed. It’s a gorgeous, ultra-slow motion shot and a great way for a character who you’re never quite sure about to win your support, but it does make you think, “why have we never seen weaponized hyperspace in a Star Wars film in the past?” X-Wings have hyperdrives. Surely sending an astromech droid on a kamikaze mission to ram an X-Wing through the center of a Star Destroyer would be an effective use of resources? The closest we get to a prior reference is Han Solo’s dialogue in the first film about the essential nature of careful lightspeed calculations.

IT’S ALL POE’S FAULT

Does anyone else think Poe got off way too easy here? Early in the film he disobeys orders in order to take out a First Order Dreadnought but in the process the Resistance loses nearly all of its bombers and many pilots. He gets rightfully reprimanded only to immediately mutiny again. His second plan ends up leading directly to the entire Resistance fleet getting destroyed and nearly every remaining member getting killed. The small team aboard the Millenium Falcon at the end of the film is all that’s left of the Resistance, and that’s all on Poe. He literally gets all except a dozen or so members of the Resistance killed.

WHY THE RESISTANCE?

Another thing was made clear in this film: The Resistance does not have popular support. They send out their beacons for help to allies they were sure would come to their aid, yet nobody does. So who is left to fight for?

The stage set for the beginning of Episode 9 is a bleak one. The good guys are at the lowest point they’ve ever been and our emotional investment with Kylo and Rey is as great if not greater than our investment with carbonite-ensconced Han, Leia, and hand-free Luke was at the end of Empire Strikes Back. At the end of Force Awakens, there were unanswered questions, but the general trajectory of the beginning of the next film was pretty much set. The way The Last Jedi ends, all bets are off for Episode 9.

OTHER RANDOM THOUGHTS

The creature design, especially on the island, is great. The nun-like caretakers of the old Jedi dwellings are truly funny and the Porgs are thankfully not annoying. The fish Luke catches are like Jim Henson-meets-Dr. Seuss. I love the detail of the sea serpent breaking through the waves in the background during Luke and Rey’s travels across the island.

The fan service sometimes gets in the way of the movie. The gold dice that Leia handles in the new film show up twice in a prominent way. The only other reference to them in the series is a single scene where Chebacca accidentally bumps his head against them on the bridge of the Millenium Falcon. To Star Wars nerds, this is a clear symbol of Han Solo but casual viewers are left wondering why Leia cares about these dice (I had to explain this point a couple times to other viewers in my group).

How did Finn’s Bacta suit have enough liquid in it to continue squirting out as he stumbled down the hallway?

I guess we finally learn the answer about how fast hyperspace battle is. Finn and Rose make it to Canto Bight and back all within the 18 hour timeframe that the Resistance fleet has before they run out of fuel. This means that in Empire Strikes Back, Luke is training on Dagobah with Yoda for at most a few days or a week while Han and Leia are on Cloud City. It also means that though Last Jedi begins with a scene of the restistance escaping their base, chronologically all of this takes place some time after Rey’s interactions with Luke. Her training sequence is somewhat condensed.

BB-8 driving the walker reminded me of the scene from Attack of the Clones where R2D2 flies and made me similarly roll my eyes. In the original trilogy and The Force Awakens the writers managed to give R2D2 and BB-8 genuinely heroic moves without giving them unrealistic superpowers.

John Williams’ score work as usual plays a huge role in propelling the films. If I’m not mistaken, the scene where the Falcon flies through the cave on Krait is the first time since A New Hope that we hear Williams’ score for the trench run (unless you count its appearance in the old LucasArts game Dark Forces) and I gave a little internal cheer when I heard it pop up. (EDIT: I’m mistaken. It is not the trench run theme, it is the “Tie Fighter Attack” theme which we hear first in A New Hope when the four tie fighters attack the escaping Millenium Falcon (remember back when four fighters actually put up a decent fight against the Falcon?) and briefly again during the space battle at the end of Return of the Jedi. In The Last Jedi, as the Millenium Falcon does a flip and dives into the hole on the planet surface, we also hear the trumpet flourish that we hear in Empire Strikes Back as the Falcon does a flip around the clouds towards the end of the film. It’s a nice musical call back.)

Leia and Han’s love theme from Empire Strikes Back is used very effectively as well, as it seeps into scenes where Leia is reminiscing about her dead husband.

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