As has become customary for me I went to see the new Star wars movie, The Last Jedi, at a midnight screening. It was actually a part of a double-bill, with The Force Awakens showing first. It was good to see that film back on the big screen, getting immersed into the galaxy far, far away and reacquainting with the characters but it was really all about The Last Jedi.
Just hours after having seen it my head is still processing all that I saw - what I liked, what I didn't like - and unpacking that against how it all sits versus the other movies. My first over-riding impression was that this was a mostly good film, occasionally quite brilliant, but it had some problematic bits and pieces. The Force Awakens was accused of perhaps being too reliant on the template of A New Hope and unoriginal in where it took the Star Wars franchise - both fair points. The Last Jedi certainly rails against that; no such accusations can be layered here as this is a movie that isn't afraid to make some departures and new innovations.
Where The Force Awakens was a crowd-pleasing blast of a ride The Last Jedi is more challenging fare. Where The Force Awakens was very much cut from the same cloth as A New Hope, The Last Jedi has much more in common with The Empire Strikes Back. In fact that's probably the most succinct summary of it - The Last Jedi is to The Force Awakens what The Empire Strikes Back is to A New Hope.
SPOILERS from here on in. Not just mild ones. Huge ones. I'll work through in a general order of sequence my highlights and lowlights of the film.
Let's start with the start, and The Last Jedi kicks off with a terrific opening sequence. Poe Dameron is the lead character here, as he was at the start of The Force Awakens, launching a one-man fighter assault against an enormous First Order dreadnought.
The bittersweet victory tone is set in early here, with the rebel alliance suffering huge casualties as their bombing run is almost thwarted. I particularly liked this opening, and the use of bombers, because it brought the "Wars" back into Star Wars; getting us back to the feel that this is a proper war being fought across the galaxy. The plucky soldier (later revealed as a sister of a new character) who has a desperate last gasp attempt to get the big tube of bombs to unload on the target had equal measures of pathos with the excitement. It reminded me of Rogue One in that regard, which is no bad thing.
Big tick here for The Last Jedi. It's arguable the best action opening to any Star Wars movie (though to be fair most of them usually start with a slow preamble before the action kicks off). Only Revenge of the Sith has really launched directly into a big action set-piece right from the off. . .
. . . but The Last Jedi's was shorter, but way better because it had more heart and impact than the CGI-driven, boy's own adventure of the Episode III opening.
After this the movie splits for a good portion into two stories; the First Order pursuing the rebel fleet and Rey 'learning' from Luke. Here the film pulls a chronological shift, as we likely spend days with Rey on the Island with Luke whilst the story of Finn and Poe and Leia and the rest takes place over the course of less than a day.
As was indicated at the end of The Force Awakens with Luke's enforced banishment on the Island, just like how Yoda banished himself to the Dagobah system following his failure (more on which later), The Last Jedi found him to be a cantankerous and embittered figure. His throwing away of the lightsabre over his shoulder and milking the alien cows and glugging the milk was all played for laughs, which made for an uneasy balance with the evident turmoil of the character. At first I thought he was playing the curmudgeon, similar to how Yoda played at being an irritating nuisance when he first encountered Luke on Dagobah - but it transpired it wasn't a similar ruse.
Luke's series of lessons to Rey about becoming a Jedi were more interesting, and ushered in a more fairytale and dreamlike vibe. Again, this shared similarities with Empire Strikes Back in Yoda's grumpy training of Luke and his encounter in the strange cave. Rey's equivalent is a strange sequence of looking into an infinite mirror hoping to discover her parentage - it's cool, but lacks power.
The issue of Rey's parents was hanging over from the previous film, with the most obvious candidates suggesting she was either Luke's daughter, or Han and Leia's (another brother and sister, pairing Rey with Kylo). This movie doesn't absolutely resolve that matter. Kylo informs Rey that her parents were nobodies that just gave her away. Perhaps that's true. But it does feel strange that she is so imbued with the force so powerfully for an unimportant nobody from nothing parents. I expect there's a bigger revelation yet to be sprung.
Rey and Kylo's relationship was pivotal to the action here, with a new innovation for the Star Wars universe being ushered in through their ability to see and communicate with each other through the force. It's indicated by Snoke that he was the one who opened the lines of communication for them in this manner as part of his plan, which is likely true, though by the end of the movie - with Snoke out of the frame - this is something they are still both capable of doing. In a galaxy without the convenience of mobile phones this was a handy convention! I didn't have a problem with it - it felt like a natural extension to characters being able to feel each other across distances via the force.
Kylo Ren's backstory, and Luke's failure, was also delivered across a new convention for Star Wars; the use of flashback. We've had visions and sounds of the past and the future from time to time, but this was the first use of true flashback to show how it was that Luke considered destroying Kylo, if only for a second, to prevent the darkness he saw in him from emerging into a threat.
I think most Star Wars fans had generally figured that was the way of it. Kylo had been sent to be trained by Luke and the dark side in him grew, twisted him, and he turned against his master. Luke, in turn, exiled himself as a consequence of what he had done (or not done). That Luke had actually considered murdering the young Kylo was a more interesting addition - once again feeding into the tone of grey (i.e. nothing is strictly black or white) that permeates across the movie.
Overall Luke's training of Rey functioned more to examine the nature of how worthy the Jedi actually were, which was interesting. I liked the point Luke made, referring to Episodes 1 to 3, about how when the Jedi were in full flow they had blindly allowed Darth Sidious (a.k.a The Emperor) to rise up and all but wipe them out. It was a brief sentence or two that did more to retroactively fix the maligned prequels than the films themselves did. An essay for another time, but there's a good case that the prequels should really have delivered not just the story of Anakin becoming Darth Vader but the story of how the Jedi were flawed and arrogant and the architects of their own destruction.
One for another time.
The last bit of business for Luke - before the end - was in a neat little moment between him and R2-D2 (very underused, I thought) where the droid used Princess Leia's hologram from A New Hope to cajole him to not giving up. That was delightful. The surprise appearance of Yoda (certainly a surprise to me, as I actively avoided any rumours or gossip about the film beforehand) was also fun. He remained mischievous, still spouting grammatically-challenging, garbled wisdom and, wisely, the movie kept his appearance brief.
Back with the rebels and there was a startling shock that became a moment of slightly far-fetched elegance. I refer to Princess Leia's near-death. When Kylo Ren refused to fire at her ship that didn't stop the First Order from also firing and then Leia was on the control deck as it got blasted into space. Whoa! That moment genuinely shocked me. So early in the film, and with such a lack of fuss, it appeared Leia had just been wiped out.
But she wasn't. Despite being blasted into cold, inhospitable space she managed to float there for some time before waking back up and floating back to the safety of the ship. At first, when she was flying back, I thought we were watching her force ghost - having left her physical body - in action. Then when it wasn't that I thought it would transpire that she was housed in some kind of protective veil spacesuit. But that wasn't it either. It was basically left to be assumed that she used the will of the force to protect her from the vacuum of space, keep her alive and guide her back to the ship.
Hmmm. If it hadn't been so welcome that she survived, and so elegantly presented, I'd have perhaps been more aggrieved and willing to cry foul.
After this point Finn, Poe and a new character called Rose get involved in a plot to try and save the fleet through a plan to stop the First Order from tracking them. This is, far and away, the weakest aspect of the whole movie. The initial plan to find a codebreaker is delivered by Maz, via some bizarre cam following her around whilst she's involved in some battle in a place unknown (which did look exciting - I'd have liked to know more about what she had gotten herself into!). This codebreaker was located on a planet were the very rich used slaves to mine materials for weapons to sell to both the First Order and the Rebel Alliance.
There was a good idea here - again going back to that notion of grey - where the moral ambiguity of war is tapped into. Benicio del Toro appears as a character that's rather too fortuitously well-placed to further the plot to maintain belief. Yet he does bring the viewpoint that the whole war between good and evil is all part of the same venal machine that the likes of the very rich on this planet can profiteer from, and the best thing to do is to stay outside of it.
It's a powerful idea for Star Wars to introduce, but it's as fleetingly introduced as it is dispensed with. In the meantime new character Rose has to cram in her backstory of a childhood spent on this place, fostering a loathing of the super-rich, and we watch both her and Finn spend a short amount of time in a casino before they are captured and imprisoned. And then there's a breakout. And a chase where they ride the horse-like indigenous creatures of the planet in a charging escape and. . . Oh dear. As I was watching it, I was not sold on it. It felt ill-fitting.
Don't get me wrong, I think Star Wars is right to introduce new ideas and places and concepts, but this casino just felt a little bit too offbeat for the integrity of the universe. And the whole prison breakout chase, and the dumb manner by which Finn and Rose were captured in the first place, felt altogether too frivolous to the tone of the rest of the movie.
I could be wrong. The sports commentators in The Phantom Menace pod-race felt incongruous at first but I've since settled happily with them.
But then I recall the diner in Attack of the Clones that Obi-Wan visits and how I didn't like it the first time and I still dislike it now. It's just too close to our real world for the Star Wars universe to swallow. I don't think the casino in The Last Jedi is quite as bad as the diner but it's in the same zone. It's too incongruous. It pulls you out of the universe.
In a similar manner I think some of the language here also served to break immersion. There was, to my recall, use of the word "bloody", "ass" and "bastard". I am reasonably certain none of these words have ever been used in the Star Wars universe before. The only one that may have was "bloody", in the context used as an expression of negative emphasis, possibly in the Original Trilogy. I can't think of an actual instance of it, and certainly can't think of a time that "bastard" or "ass" were used.
It's not that I have a problem with bad language. I'm more known to turn the air blue than many. My issue is with how it fits in Star Wars lexicon, and when a word turns up that snaps me out of the universe and reminds me I'm watching a film of a script someone wrote it jars with me.
The good news it that once The Last Jedi gets away from this casino planet and the plot to get a codebreaker it shifts gears and hits its stride. There's a three-way climax of plans going wrong that works incredibly well; Finn and Rose are about to be executed, the rebel's escape vessels are getting picked off one-by-one, and Rey is in the clutches of Snoke and about to be killed by Kylo seemingly out to prove himself as truly evil.
It's perhaps the darkest hour of a Star Wars movie yet. It reminded me of Return of the Jedi, when Luke faces the Emperor who reveals that all that has happened was by his design and he and his friends are doomed. It's brilliant. And the reversal of fortune - with the lead rebel ship crashing at light speed into the enemy in a moment of silent, sparkling spectacle - alongside Kylo taking down his master (you know, like Vader did to the Emperor) ushers a showstopping fight between Rey and Kylo versus Snoke's skilled red guards.
Oh, but wait. What was that? Snoke got taken down?
Now this was a surprise!
In some ways, in hindsight, it makes sense to get Snoke out of the way. He is a villain that came out of nowhere, is merely a catalyst for getting Kylo Ren onto the dark side, and is not someone we are invested in. He's a plot mechanic, not a vital character component. The issue is that he appears to be incredibly powerful with the force and his intervention in getting to Kylo and undermining Luke is clearly a massive event that has had huge repercussions for the saga, and we know nothing about where he came from, how he did it, or why.
There's potentially a great big gap of character and plot that can be explored in the future through a spin-off, anthology story. Would not surprise me.
Anyway, back to that showstopping fight between Rey and Kylo fighting the red guards. It was a terrific fight. Stylishly presented against a plain red background, implementing slow-motion, and the fighting style leaned towards a middle-ground between the rapid, breakneck choreographed pace of the prequel duels to the more cumbersome, fencing-style fights of the original trilogy; aggressive and technical. The red guards' myriad weapons were entertaining, seeing Rey and Kylo on the same side (briefly) was a thrill, and that final move where Rey threw the lightsabre to Kylo and he switched it on point blank in his foe's face received a loud, positive reaction in the cinema.
I understand that this was the longest Star Wars movie to date (probably by minutes rather than a substantial length of time) so this last push to the end after such an exhausting, and brilliant, sequence was a tricky bridge. But it got there, and The Last Jedi still had some surprises left up its sleeve to the finish.
Luke's arrival and face-off against Kylo Ren hung on a reveal that he wasn't, in fact, actually there but was instead projecting himself from back on the Island. It did make sense of some potential plot points (one which crossed my mind immediately was why didn't Luke tell the rebels about the back door he had let himself through - turned out he hadn't!). The biggest laugh the movie got in the audience I was in was when Luke was hammered with a barrage of hits from every gun the First Order had. . . and then the dust drifted away and there he stood, untouched, and did a little brush away on his shoulder as a response. Absolutely brilliant.
Luke's death at the end was poignant, looking at two suns as they were covered behind clouds. The interpretation was that he had given everything, all his power, to project the way he had and he was left utterly spent. I suppose it is very draining when you astrally project the ornamental dice from the Millenium Falcon! No, really, it's something that may get picked apart and discussed but, in general, I was surprised by it and I was sold on it. Luke passed on, and Rey is now the last Jedi.
I fully expect to see him again, Obi-Wan ghost style.
Things were relatively well set up for the final portion of this trilogy. Poe looks set to take over from Leia as leader of the resistance. Whether this is really the last time Leia will be on screen is an interesting one. Carrie Fisher has died so it would depend on if there was some footage of her filmed already that could be used to give her a goodbye, or if they went down the CGI route. If this really is the last time we see her then it's not the worst way to go, but it didn't quite feel momentous either.
Finn is the only real main character that doesn't appear to have much more development in him. Towards the end of this movie when it looked like he was on course to die for the cause it did feel like it could really happen because it didn't seem like there was much more else left for him to do.
Just when it looks like The Last Jedi is about to end on the classic wide shot of our heroes the film adds a coda, in another break from Star Wars tradition, tacking on a little piece around a kid that is destined to form a part of the resistance and showing that there is still hope for a fightback that is surely to come in the next episode. I personally thought the end coda was a bit cheesy, and superfluous - the film would have functioned better without it. Yet this is a small quibble in what has been an overall top notch return; the sheer length of this essay speaks volumes about how much there has been to digest and absorb. I'll be going back for another look, for sure, but for here and now I just wanted to capture my immediate impression of the film.
Next movie title: Star Wars Episode IX: The Rebellion Strikes Back.
OK, that was a guess. Actually I think it should be an 'Of The' title, like Return Of The Jedi or Revenge Of The Sith. We haven't had one of those this trilogy. Balance Of The Force, anyone?
