[9.2/10] Throw away the past. The rap on The Force Awakens was that it was too derivative, too indebted to A New Hope and the blueprint that had started the franchise. There was a sense that the new trilogy needed to break new ground, that having established the new setting, the new characters, and the new conflicts and mysteries, it was time to break from what had come before.
You could be forgiven for thinking that the film’s main characters share that sentiment. Kylo Ren states it explicitly. He pushes Rey to do the same while she labors under the weight of her unknown parentage. And Luke Skywalker himself, the Jedi Master who won the day in those lodestone films that forever emblazoned Star Wars into the annals of culture, has written off his past deeds, and with them, the Jedi as a whole, as a legacy of failure that needs to simply end.
But it cannot, and should not. Where The Force Awakens featured new heroes reliving the past, The Last Jedi features them remaking it. It is a film devoted to embracing the power of that legacy, good and bad, without being beholden to it. Episode 8 a film that is of a piece with its forebears, but also so full of its own life, character, feeling, and awe.
The fear among the fandom is that, as the second installment in the new trilogy, The Last Jedi would be a mirror image of The Empire Strikes Back. (Though, as with the complaints of borrowing from A New Hope, there are worse sources to crib from!). There’s some of that here. As with Episode V, The Last Jedi splits up its heroes, leaving one of them in training with an old Jedi master on a distant planet, and the other on the run from the bad guys, until everyone is united in the end. There’s offers to rule the galaxy and reveals of who the protagonist’s true parents are and a less-than-savory character who seem like friends and then sell our heroes out.
But Episode VIII echoes the whole of the Original Trilogy in moving, thought provoking ways, not just the middle chapter of it. The film meditates (nigh-literally) on the most iconic image of the original Star Wars film -- Luke gazing off at the horizon in search of adventure. It features our light side hero being lured into the throne room of the Big Bad in the hopes of turning the black hat with the twinge of a conscience still remaining, just as Return of the Jedi did with Luke, Palpatine, and Vader. From blue milk to adorable forest-dwelling creatures to wizened masters passing into their next lives and leaving their robes behind, The Last Jedi is not so much reinterpreting The Empire Strikes Back as it is ruminating on all of Star Wars at once.
And yet what’s so striking about the film is that it’s so much more than a recapitulation of those films. It is, a celebration of them, a reflection on them, and an exploration of them, that advances and subverts those ideas and themes as much as it reintroduces them.
It takes the trigger-happy flyboy, the Han Solo-esque roguish type who, true to that lineage, shoots first and asks questions later, and tempers him with the reveal that the calm, measured leadership was a product of careful and clever planning rather than cowardice. It takes the Big Bad, the mysterious power behind the black-clad dragon who can shoot lightning and bark evil monologues, and kills him off suddenly halfway through the film rather than making him the final obstacle to be overcome.
And it takes the biggest mystery of this new trilogy, the question of who Rey’s parents are, that so many diehards and casual fans alike have been buzzing over, and delivers the most inspired subversion. Rather than Luke’s lost daughter or the Emperor’s scion or Kylo Ren’s forgotten twin, she is the product of nobodies, who sold her for drinking money. It’s a truth that deep down she always knew, but couldn’t accept, because like the audience, she assumed that for someone to have fate on their side, to be able to live a life with meaning, they must come from somewhere, from someone.
But that idea is, despite the Skywalker-mad connections of everything that followed, antithetical to the animating beginnings of Star Wars. Before it was decided that Luke was the son of Darth Vader, he was simply the son of some other guy named Anakin Skywalker. He was a nondescript moisture farmer on a backwater planet who was the last guy you’d expect to take down The Empire’s greatest weapon.
That’s what made his journey so powerful. He wasn’t The Chosen One in A New Hope. He was just a kid with unrealized potential who, with the right guidance and the right chance, could save the day. The Last Jedi returns its chosen one to those roots, to providence shining down on the common, that the savior of the galaxy can come from nothing.
It’s a reversion that’s anchored by the character dead set on rejecting his own longstanding anointment. Mark Hamill is a revelation here. Gone is the naive farm boy who whined about picking up power converters, and gone is the seasoned master who saved the world and redeemed his enemy, and in their place is haunted cynic, convinced he’s caused as many problems as he’s ever solved. There’s a caustic quality to the character here, one that makes him gruff and dismissive of Rey, fatalistic about the Jedi, and unquestionably angry at himself.
Where there was an cornbread innocence to the Luke we met on tatooine, The Last Jedi introduces his echo, a man who looks upon his accomplishments that have ascended into legend as false fables of failure, and the current blight sweeping the galaxy as a fault of his own that he cannot elide or escape. He’s done seeing the battle between the dark and the light, and instead sees the continuum between the two, the yin-yang like symbols that dot his surroundings and the film as a whole, the balance that leads light to breed darkness and darkness to breed light.
That sense of balance is at the heart of The Last Jedi. It comes between Rey and Kylo Ren, who feel a force-forged connection between the two of them that lets each see the other beyond the monolithic figures who stand in opposition to one another. It comes in Leia, who tries to find the midpoint between striking the blows necessary to stay in the fight and not losing too many of her compatriots in the process. And it comes in DJ, the Lando-like figure who rejects the good guy/bad guy dichotomy and sees the struggle between The Resistance and The First Order as the changing of the tides he’s unwilling to be swept up in.
It’s there that The Last Jedi feels the most reflective, even political, in ways deeper than the four-color civics parable told by The Prequels. It asks who benefits from these conflicts, who profits from them, and whether who’s on the right side and who’s on the wrong side can be so clear cut when Republics beget Empires, conquerors beget resistance, and slaughterers beget saviors who train yet more slaughterers. In all of the mythic good vs. evil that’s so much in the bones of Star Wars, Episode VIII steps back and dares to consider that conflict, that never ending cycle, as part of some larger, indifferent system rather than an epic journey toward salvation.
It also restores a sense of utter awe to the franchise. Johnson and cinematographer Steve Yedlin create thrilling, jaw-dropping sequences that rarely lose a sense of continuity, instead allowing even the more firework-heavy sequence to progress organically and tell a story rather than simply providing raw but empty splendor. When Leia glides through space to return to her ship, or Rey and Kylo Ren fight hand-to-hand with the Red Guards (who actually get to do something for once!), when our heroes and villains meet in crimson-dusted splendor in the final frame, Johnson and Yeldin show a virtuosity with big spectacle filmmaking to match the thematic and emotional resonance of the rest of their film.
But that spectacle never detracts from the feeling imbued into the film. Episode VIII is not merely a political tract. It’s not a heap of pretty but hollow action. It’s not even just a deconstruction and reconstruction of the films from whence it sprung. It’s a story populated by characters who love and hurt and feel.
There is power in the moment when Rey and Kylo Ren’s hands touch across light years not just as the meeting of lightness and the dark, but as a human connection between two struggling individuals on either side of the same crisis of self. There is meaning when Rose jams Finn out of the path of his suicide mission, not just for the thrill of the moment, but for Finn’s nobility in trying to live the most potent opposite of running away, and Rose’s attachment in saving him, rather than stopping him. And when Luke kisses Leia on the top of her head, it’s not just imbued with the impact of an on-screen goodbye having to stand-in for an offscreen one; it’s imbued with the poignancy of a film that builds the place in one another’s lives each occupies long before they’re face-to-face for the final time.
Because in a way, they both have to move on. Luke has to let go of his failures, cast off his guilt, to do as a delightfully, once again impish Yoda suggests and let his pupils outgrow him. Rey has to let go of her belief that her family is waiting for her, and find the new family who’s sustained her to this point. And even as he seeks the means to rule the galaxy, Ben Solo cannot let go of the masters who’ve failed him, of the feelings that rage inside him, and of the parents who cannot help needing, no matter how much he may want to.
But moving on doesn’t have to mean throwing things away. It can mean giving something back. It can mean sacrificing yourself, ending something, so that something else can be born anew in its place. It can mean preserving the tiniest spark of rebellion, the brave men and women and quirky droids who can start a conflagration to spread across the galaxy. It can mean doing great deeds, that will be bent and twisted and have consequences you never imagined five steps down the line, but also inspire the next nobody on a nothing planet to gaze up at the sky and wonder what adventure may lie there.
The Last Jedi moves on from its predecessors without discarding them, and moves forward enough to leave plenty of room for its successors, both literal and figurative. It moves on from the George Lucas originals, and even from its immediate, J.J. Abrams-helmed predecessor. But it embraces the spirit of these things, an aims to recreate that feelings, that core, that sense of wonder, for a new generation.
In that, Star Wars itself is like The Force as Luke describes it. It does not belong to Lucas or Abrams or Johnson or even our continually growing overlords at the Disney Corporation. It belongs to all of them and none of them, and to us. Like The Force, like the Rebellion, Star Wars is as much an idea as it is a franchise, and just as Lucas himself reimagined those ideas from Kurosawa films and Flash Gordon serials, Johnson posits himself as doing the same, and instilling the hope that one day, kids will look to these bits of awe and wonder and be moved to look out past the horizon and tell their own stories just as he was.
So don’t throw away the past. Remember it. Embrace it. It informs what we do and who we are and who we will one day be. But don’t be bound by it. Be inspired by it. As cheesy as that sounds, The Last Jedi makes good on all the inspiration thirty years of Star Wars has provided. And just as Luke, Leia, Rey, Ben, and the rest of the conflicted figures who populate the film do, Johnson reaches out in the hopes of not just vindicating that legacy, but extending it to whatever, and whoever comes next, no matter who they are or where they come from.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2017-12-16T04:49:48Z
[9.2/10] Throw away the past. The rap on The Force Awakens was that it was too derivative, too indebted to A New Hope and the blueprint that had started the franchise. There was a sense that the new trilogy needed to break new ground, that having established the new setting, the new characters, and the new conflicts and mysteries, it was time to break from what had come before.
You could be forgiven for thinking that the film’s main characters share that sentiment. Kylo Ren states it explicitly. He pushes Rey to do the same while she labors under the weight of her unknown parentage. And Luke Skywalker himself, the Jedi Master who won the day in those lodestone films that forever emblazoned Star Wars into the annals of culture, has written off his past deeds, and with them, the Jedi as a whole, as a legacy of failure that needs to simply end.
But it cannot, and should not. Where The Force Awakens featured new heroes reliving the past, The Last Jedi features them remaking it. It is a film devoted to embracing the power of that legacy, good and bad, without being beholden to it. Episode 8 a film that is of a piece with its forebears, but also so full of its own life, character, feeling, and awe.
The fear among the fandom is that, as the second installment in the new trilogy, The Last Jedi would be a mirror image of The Empire Strikes Back. (Though, as with the complaints of borrowing from A New Hope, there are worse sources to crib from!). There’s some of that here. As with Episode V, The Last Jedi splits up its heroes, leaving one of them in training with an old Jedi master on a distant planet, and the other on the run from the bad guys, until everyone is united in the end. There’s offers to rule the galaxy and reveals of who the protagonist’s true parents are and a less-than-savory character who seem like friends and then sell our heroes out.
But Episode VIII echoes the whole of the Original Trilogy in moving, thought provoking ways, not just the middle chapter of it. The film meditates (nigh-literally) on the most iconic image of the original Star Wars film -- Luke gazing off at the horizon in search of adventure. It features our light side hero being lured into the throne room of the Big Bad in the hopes of turning the black hat with the twinge of a conscience still remaining, just as Return of the Jedi did with Luke, Palpatine, and Vader. From blue milk to adorable forest-dwelling creatures to wizened masters passing into their next lives and leaving their robes behind, The Last Jedi is not so much reinterpreting The Empire Strikes Back as it is ruminating on all of Star Wars at once.
And yet what’s so striking about the film is that it’s so much more than a recapitulation of those films. It is, a celebration of them, a reflection on them, and an exploration of them, that advances and subverts those ideas and themes as much as it reintroduces them.
It takes the trigger-happy flyboy, the Han Solo-esque roguish type who, true to that lineage, shoots first and asks questions later, and tempers him with the reveal that the calm, measured leadership was a product of careful and clever planning rather than cowardice. It takes the Big Bad, the mysterious power behind the black-clad dragon who can shoot lightning and bark evil monologues, and kills him off suddenly halfway through the film rather than making him the final obstacle to be overcome.
And it takes the biggest mystery of this new trilogy, the question of who Rey’s parents are, that so many diehards and casual fans alike have been buzzing over, and delivers the most inspired subversion. Rather than Luke’s lost daughter or the Emperor’s scion or Kylo Ren’s forgotten twin, she is the product of nobodies, who sold her for drinking money. It’s a truth that deep down she always knew, but couldn’t accept, because like the audience, she assumed that for someone to have fate on their side, to be able to live a life with meaning, they must come from somewhere, from someone.
But that idea is, despite the Skywalker-mad connections of everything that followed, antithetical to the animating beginnings of Star Wars. Before it was decided that Luke was the son of Darth Vader, he was simply the son of some other guy named Anakin Skywalker. He was a nondescript moisture farmer on a backwater planet who was the last guy you’d expect to take down The Empire’s greatest weapon.
That’s what made his journey so powerful. He wasn’t The Chosen One in A New Hope. He was just a kid with unrealized potential who, with the right guidance and the right chance, could save the day. The Last Jedi returns its chosen one to those roots, to providence shining down on the common, that the savior of the galaxy can come from nothing.
It’s a reversion that’s anchored by the character dead set on rejecting his own longstanding anointment. Mark Hamill is a revelation here. Gone is the naive farm boy who whined about picking up power converters, and gone is the seasoned master who saved the world and redeemed his enemy, and in their place is haunted cynic, convinced he’s caused as many problems as he’s ever solved. There’s a caustic quality to the character here, one that makes him gruff and dismissive of Rey, fatalistic about the Jedi, and unquestionably angry at himself.
Where there was an cornbread innocence to the Luke we met on tatooine, The Last Jedi introduces his echo, a man who looks upon his accomplishments that have ascended into legend as false fables of failure, and the current blight sweeping the galaxy as a fault of his own that he cannot elide or escape. He’s done seeing the battle between the dark and the light, and instead sees the continuum between the two, the yin-yang like symbols that dot his surroundings and the film as a whole, the balance that leads light to breed darkness and darkness to breed light.
That sense of balance is at the heart of The Last Jedi. It comes between Rey and Kylo Ren, who feel a force-forged connection between the two of them that lets each see the other beyond the monolithic figures who stand in opposition to one another. It comes in Leia, who tries to find the midpoint between striking the blows necessary to stay in the fight and not losing too many of her compatriots in the process. And it comes in DJ, the Lando-like figure who rejects the good guy/bad guy dichotomy and sees the struggle between The Resistance and The First Order as the changing of the tides he’s unwilling to be swept up in.
It’s there that The Last Jedi feels the most reflective, even political, in ways deeper than the four-color civics parable told by The Prequels. It asks who benefits from these conflicts, who profits from them, and whether who’s on the right side and who’s on the wrong side can be so clear cut when Republics beget Empires, conquerors beget resistance, and slaughterers beget saviors who train yet more slaughterers. In all of the mythic good vs. evil that’s so much in the bones of Star Wars, Episode VIII steps back and dares to consider that conflict, that never ending cycle, as part of some larger, indifferent system rather than an epic journey toward salvation.
It also restores a sense of utter awe to the franchise. Johnson and cinematographer Steve Yedlin create thrilling, jaw-dropping sequences that rarely lose a sense of continuity, instead allowing even the more firework-heavy sequence to progress organically and tell a story rather than simply providing raw but empty splendor. When Leia glides through space to return to her ship, or Rey and Kylo Ren fight hand-to-hand with the Red Guards (who actually get to do something for once!), when our heroes and villains meet in crimson-dusted splendor in the final frame, Johnson and Yeldin show a virtuosity with big spectacle filmmaking to match the thematic and emotional resonance of the rest of their film.
But that spectacle never detracts from the feeling imbued into the film. Episode VIII is not merely a political tract. It’s not a heap of pretty but hollow action. It’s not even just a deconstruction and reconstruction of the films from whence it sprung. It’s a story populated by characters who love and hurt and feel.
There is power in the moment when Rey and Kylo Ren’s hands touch across light years not just as the meeting of lightness and the dark, but as a human connection between two struggling individuals on either side of the same crisis of self. There is meaning when Rose jams Finn out of the path of his suicide mission, not just for the thrill of the moment, but for Finn’s nobility in trying to live the most potent opposite of running away, and Rose’s attachment in saving him, rather than stopping him. And when Luke kisses Leia on the top of her head, it’s not just imbued with the impact of an on-screen goodbye having to stand-in for an offscreen one; it’s imbued with the poignancy of a film that builds the place in one another’s lives each occupies long before they’re face-to-face for the final time.
Because in a way, they both have to move on. Luke has to let go of his failures, cast off his guilt, to do as a delightfully, once again impish Yoda suggests and let his pupils outgrow him. Rey has to let go of her belief that her family is waiting for her, and find the new family who’s sustained her to this point. And even as he seeks the means to rule the galaxy, Ben Solo cannot let go of the masters who’ve failed him, of the feelings that rage inside him, and of the parents who cannot help needing, no matter how much he may want to.
But moving on doesn’t have to mean throwing things away. It can mean giving something back. It can mean sacrificing yourself, ending something, so that something else can be born anew in its place. It can mean preserving the tiniest spark of rebellion, the brave men and women and quirky droids who can start a conflagration to spread across the galaxy. It can mean doing great deeds, that will be bent and twisted and have consequences you never imagined five steps down the line, but also inspire the next nobody on a nothing planet to gaze up at the sky and wonder what adventure may lie there.
The Last Jedi moves on from its predecessors without discarding them, and moves forward enough to leave plenty of room for its successors, both literal and figurative. It moves on from the George Lucas originals, and even from its immediate, J.J. Abrams-helmed predecessor. But it embraces the spirit of these things, an aims to recreate that feelings, that core, that sense of wonder, for a new generation.
In that, Star Wars itself is like The Force as Luke describes it. It does not belong to Lucas or Abrams or Johnson or even our continually growing overlords at the Disney Corporation. It belongs to all of them and none of them, and to us. Like The Force, like the Rebellion, Star Wars is as much an idea as it is a franchise, and just as Lucas himself reimagined those ideas from Kurosawa films and Flash Gordon serials, Johnson posits himself as doing the same, and instilling the hope that one day, kids will look to these bits of awe and wonder and be moved to look out past the horizon and tell their own stories just as he was.
So don’t throw away the past. Remember it. Embrace it. It informs what we do and who we are and who we will one day be. But don’t be bound by it. Be inspired by it. As cheesy as that sounds, The Last Jedi makes good on all the inspiration thirty years of Star Wars has provided. And just as Luke, Leia, Rey, Ben, and the rest of the conflicted figures who populate the film do, Johnson reaches out in the hopes of not just vindicating that legacy, but extending it to whatever, and whoever comes next, no matter who they are or where they come from.