Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi

[super_city_si]

Yes.
It was ridiculous, disjointed, failed to respect any of the lore of the franchise yet at the same time failed to reboot the series.
A third of the film was a thread born from a stupid premise which lead nowhere.
At the same time as attempting to demystify the force we had lea able to magically survive in space which if we are to believe the force is in everyone and no one is special means we can all survive in space. The embodiment of the dark side who is supposed to be all knowing was killed off like a chump.

It was just a big mess of a film aimed at 10 year olds.

Watch empire strikes back then this and weep at what has been done.

I hated the prequels but the force awakens was a rebirth that gave me hope.

It’s all gone now.

How I saw it. Kept waiting for it to get past the childish nonsense and kick on and it didn’t.

 

[Blue Maverick]

Seems Disney are expecting Solo to bomb after a bad filming and the reaction to TLJ, well I hope that makes them rethink what they are doing.

 

[Bewar3them00n]

So many people seem to be down on TLJ, yet it has a score of 7.7 on IMDB?
The accusations of it not sticking to Star Wars lore, were the same ones aimed at Empire Strikes Back after its release, Luke and Vader, Leia and Han, the downbeat ending, only after the dust had settled on the trilogy did Empire rise to its lofty position as the best Star Wars movie.
I admit to having a few unanswered questions about TLJ, did it need to be such a sprawling epic, or could it have been edited down to trim some fat?
I'm prepared to give it the benefit of doubt until I see it again, because I did enjoy it, even though it has its flaws.

 

[squirtyflower]

So many people seem to be down on TLJ, yet it has a score of 7.7 on IMDB?
The accusations of it not sticking to Star Wars lore, were the same ones aimed at Empire Strikes Back after its release, Luke and Vader, Leia and Han, the downbeat ending, only after the dust had settled on the trilogy did Empire rise to its lofty position as the best Star Wars movie.
I admit to having a few unanswered questions about TLJ, did it need to be such a sprawling epic, or could it have been edited down to trim some fat?
I'm prepared to give it the benefit of doubt until I see it again, because I did enjoy it, even though it has its flaws.

Like you I thought it was good, much better than the force awakens. I don't get this 'Star Wars lore', is there a book of what you can and can't include?

 

[aguero93:20]

Like you I thought it was good, much better than the force awakens. I don't get this 'Star Wars lore', is there a book of what you can and can't include?

There was, but Disney got rid of it :)

 

[adrianr]

I'd usually agree but the parts that most people are questioning the relevance of are the largest thematic anchors of the film.

The Last Jedi is transformative for Star Wars in a way that none of the others were. Whether Star Wars needed that is obviously a matter of personal opinions and as a long time SW fan who was interested in the Expanded Universe enough to watch a 160 video Youtube series about it, I've felt for many years that it did.

The problem with Star Wars is that the fans "ruined it" for lack of a better phrasing. They deified Luke, Vader/Anakin and the Skywalker bloodline into Poochie levels so that in every Star Wars story, all characters were either part of this elite blood or they were defined by their relationship to it. The Jedi and the Sith stopped being religious cults and started becoming centuries old institutions that were full of wisdom and whose existence was predicated on their own existence in a circular loop. X-Wings and TIE fighters and AT-ATs and lightsabers became iconography in the same way crucifixion images are and every change to them was met with horror that somebody could attempt to change the design of a revered icon.

Rian Johnson as a Star Wars fan understood this. He understood that Star Wars had lost its way. It was supposed to be a fun sci-fi action adventure character story but instead had turned into this huge display of sacred cows and fan servicing. The Last Jedi was about tearing it all down.

This is the whole point of the film. Snoke being slayed immediately by Kylo, Rey being nobody but a junkers daughter, Luke giving up on the Jedi way of life (and his deepest darkest fear in his pit is literally a mirror), Yoda burning down the tree, Poe mutineering, the "1%" arms dealers of the casino planet - all of these were specific rejections of inherited privilege and royal bloodlines by the new generation or an example of slaying sacred cows.

The Yoda tree scene was the perfect representation of this. Luke was fucking about and in his anger wanted to burn down the sacred tree but still couldn't because he was trapped in the groupthink of the Jedi. Yoda turned up, burned it down himself then told him that it was just a tree and that the interpersonal connections were the important thing about the Master-Padawan relationship rather than the dogma.

All the characters were serviced well. Rey and Kylo had the best romance in any Star Wars movie including the OT. They are intimately connected but divided by politics of how to save the Galaxy from all of this. Rey had to learn that her heroic father figures are not all they cracked up to be and are real people with flaws. Kylo slayed his Master who manipulated him and tried to live through him while destroying his own heroic father figure through his Vader-lite mask. Finn actually now has a reason to be part of the Rebellion and the growing heroism movie by movie is heartwarming to watch as his reasoning goes from chasing a girl to chasing an ideal. Poe had his responsibility arc and went from a rogueish young hotshot pilot into a leader of men. Luke accepted his mistakes were due not only to his hubris but also his cowardice. There's only real Leia who didn't get any character development but we got to see her force powers for the first time and how she was the matriarch of the Rebellion, acting as a motherly figure to both Poe and the Vice Admiral.

A large theme of the film was growth through failure. You'll notice that literally every single plan that anybody has in this film fails. Literally every single one by any person, no matter what side they're on or what they're trying to achieve. Some people think this means it's a bad film which is an incredibly odd criticism in my opinion. I found it much more refreshing than the opposite and much more in line with the slaying of the unrealistic and somewhat childish notions that everything always works out for all the Skywalkers and their clan in the end. In Star Wars, the Skywalkers and their friends balloon around the place fighting but there's very little real consequence for most of them. Maybe the odd death here or there but in part it's the entire galaxy that suffers due to this single family infighting. Let me make this really clear - the problem with Star Wars recently wasn't that the Skywalker group found themselves falling into these big galactic events and had to save the day, it's that the entire fate of the galaxy consistently rested on the whims of the Skywalkers. Imagine being one of the trillions of citizens that live in the Republic; you'd probably dislike the Skywalkers. You could be going about your business one day and for little reason outside of your control these Death Stars show up and blow up a planet to prove a point to a Princess. The Last Jedi and specifically the Rey reveal started to democratise this.

It did however acknowledge that the symbolism of the Jedi, of Luke Skywalker and the Rebellion itself was a source of hope in the Galaxy that allowed people to continue on in their lives in the same way that the symbolism of the First Order and the Sith and Darth Vader was a source of hope for Kylo and his minions.

This isn't to say that it didn't have problems - it did. There were tonal and pacing issues which threw things off on occasion but the overall was an interesting deconstruction of Star Wars mythos, of the need for establishment icons, of father figures, of the obsession with success and acknowledging the seedy underbelly of the galaxy is the puppetry of the war economy rather than the puppetry of the Sith or Jedi.

This film was directed by the man who directed the Fly and Ozymandias episodes of Breaking Bad. If people are going in expecting it to be a JJ Abrams Force Awakens type of by the numbers fan service machine then they need to change their expectations. Johnson is an auteur, not a Hollywood studio man.

That's a really good post, thanks for that. Will admit that not a lot of that dawned on me at the time - Still loved it though!

 

[Blue Maverick]

@Damocles many of your points are valid but the big issue is that “the fans” are the ones who have made star wars what it was, also the writers of countless books who with Lucas blessing wrote great stories of the adventures of the original trio and their families throughout the drought before the prequels were made. Even after those abominations, many carried on their love because of the novels etc. Many of shall we say the true fans have pre conceived ideas about where the story should go, the immense Timothy Zahn trilogy would have been amazing way to continue the story and then by introducing other characters through standalone films or a new trilogy maybe then you could have satisfied everyone.
Instead we have JJ and RJ trying a balancing act and it’s not worked either don’t bring back the old characters or use them to their full potential. Disney dropped the ball when they chucked a lot of stuff out of the canon. Maybe TLJ will be viewed differently after episode 9 but everyone already knows it will because JJ has had to rewrite to salvage from the mess that RJ has left.
Also I think after that Vader moment in R1 many expected the films to kick on from there.

 

[Damocles]

@Damocles many of your points are valid but the big issue is that “the fans” are the ones who have made star wars what it was, also the writers of countless books who with Lucas blessing wrote great stories of the adventures of the original trio and their families throughout the drought before the prequels were made. Even after those abominations, many carried on their love because of the novels etc. Many of shall we say the true fans have pre conceived ideas about where the story should go, the immense Timothy Zahn trilogy would have been amazing way to continue the story and then by introducing other characters through standalone films or a new trilogy maybe then you could have satisfied everyone.
Instead we have JJ and RJ trying a balancing act and it’s not worked either don’t bring back the old characters or use them to their full potential. Disney dropped the ball when they chucked a lot of stuff out of the canon. Maybe TLJ will be viewed differently after episode 9 but everyone already knows it will because JJ has had to rewrite to salvage from the mess that RJ has left.
Also I think after that Vader moment in R1 many expected the films to kick on from there.

We in very different minds about the state of Star Wars.

I loved many of the Expanded Universe stories, now termed "Legends canon" and have maintained a semi-active interest in it for a long time. But it had gone too far, Star Wars devolved into a parody or satire of what Star Wars was. Not to mention that the Legends canon had such a huge complicated and intricate backstory to every minute detail in every film that realistically they couldn't be creative in that space to fulfil the needs of a general audience release. And obviously they couldn't build excitement for trilogies because everybody knew what was going to happen due to the books.

I'm happy with both main story films though I thought Rogue One was poor and a misstep.

The Force Awakens was a soft reboot of A New Hope. Its purpose was to shift away the memory of the prequels and tell fans that Star Wars was Star Wars again instead of whatever the hell Lucas was doing in the late 90s/early 00s. Yes it was a retread but it was an enjoyable and perfectly fine retread to reintroduce the franchise to a new generation.

Now they'd done that, they had to start building their Universe and this is where things become a problem. Everything in Star Wars means something. There's no room to grow, to explore or to create in a Universe that is so rigidly dogmatic about its structures without just making 25 similar films. They had to find a way to start tearing down the old structures while keeping the root branches of them so that they could grow, no different from how tribes used to burn down forests to allow new trees to grow. That was what The Last Jedi was about.

What you're talking about really boils down to fan service. Vader at the end of Rogue One was nice enough but it was "hey, remember Darth Vader? Here he is!". Remember that Disney are making ANOTHER Star Wars, they're not REMAKING Star Wars. They have to not just tickle nostalgia tastebuds but instead build a compelling Universe that will sustain itself to a wide audience over the course of 25 movies. It's a balancing act and the hardcore fans will enjoy seeing Nien Nunb in the film when 99% of the audience have no idea who that is. But fan service can only carry you so far, you have to start to tell original stories and this requires change.

 

[KS55]

Confession. I hate fantasy. I have never watched a Star Wars film. No idea what you are talking about. Never seen Game of Thrones, for that matter. Tin hat on.

 

[aguero93:20]

Confession. I hate fantasy. I have never watched a Star Wars film. No idea what you are talking about. Never seen Game of Thrones, for that matter. Tin hat on.

You've never watched any fantasy, but you hate it. Good lad. Every Martian I've ever met has been a dickhead.