I loved the Last Jedi when I saw it the first, second, and third time in theaters. The fact that there was some controversy around the film, and it was actually getting some 1 star reviews — not only some, but a lot — was literally incomprehensible to me. I just shook my head and wondered why and how such a thing could possibly be. The movie was self-evidently a great tale of the Force, of darkness and light, of being broken but pulling it together enough to do one’s duty… so much good storytelling stuff!
Since then, I’ve come to a better understanding of why some folks don’t like the movie. I still love it, but I am more able to accept that there are legitimate reasons why a person may not like it. I think it’s time for a slightly more dispassionate analysis, six months later. Get your spoiler hats on, because I’m about to fling some at you. If you’re still in danger of having your The Last Jedi experience spoiled by giving stuff away, you are not a true Star Wars fan.
Here are the complaints I’m aware of:
- It’s out of character for Luke to have considered assassinating Ben Solo
- Leia’s superman in space scene
- The bomber run at the start of the movie was just completely implausible. They’re in space, who drops gravity bombs?
- The whole low-speed chase through the vacuum of interstellar space is implausible and also not interesting.
- Rose Tico
- Too feminist.
- Too animal rights-y
- Too multi-racial
- The Canto Bight subplot
- Rey’s parents
- Snoke’s untimely demise
So let me address those one by one. First, my least favorite. It’s out of character for Luke to consider assassinating Ben Solo. For those who hold to this belief, I have one single line of dialogue for you: “Sister… so, you have a twin sister! Obi Wan was wise to hide her from me. If you will not turn to the dark side, then perhaps she will.”
Luke, who came to the meeting out of love, with the explicit intention of drawing out the good in his father and saving him from the darkness, flew into a blind killing rage at the hint of a threat to his sister. Not only that, but he also quits his training on Dagobah to charge into Cloud City with saber blazing when he sees a vision of danger to Leia. When, twenty years later, he once again raises his saber to someone he envisions as a threat to Leia and his family, that’s not out of character. That’s as “in character” as it’s possible to be. I’m sorry, but this is just not a valid complaint.
Leia, expelled into the vacuum of space by the attack on the flagship, comes to the edge of death in the freezing nothing before using the force to pull herself back to the ship. What’s wrong with this? Luke uses the Force in Empire to pull his saber to him. Have you seen some of the jumps in Qui Gon and Obi Wan’s duel with Maul? Jedi use the Force to propel themselves superhuman distances quite regularly. Yoda used the Force to move a ship. Leia doing so is not something never heard of before.
I think two-three things made this hard for people to stomach. First, it looked a little weird. OK, granted. Second, Leia has never used the Force before. Well, that’s not quite true (finding Luke in Cloud City) But even so we know she could have been a Jedi, she just chose to be a general. Third, Carrie Fisher actually did die. So seeing Leia dang near dead and then miraculously pull herself back to life was probably jarring to some people. So for me, this scene wasn’t bad at all. But I suppose on further reflection I can at least grant that disliking it is a legitimate opinion people can hold.
Who drops gravity bombs in space? OK, granted. But you know what? Who forgoes flying straight at an open target hole, and instead maneuvers straight down this trench? Who mounts a giant tank on stilts with weapons that can only fire straight ahead? Tactics in Star Wars always give way to good visuals and drama. If you insist on realistic weaponry and strategy, you’re watching the wrong series.
The low speed chase and the PETA protest at Canto Bight, taken as one: OK, granted. You win. This is the movie’s great flaw. After watching it so many times in the theater, when I bought the home video version I realized at once what I was doing: I was watching The Last Jedi the same way I watch Return of the Jedi.
I fast forward through the Ewok scenes.
Star Wars has a big storytelling hurdle to overcome: the central conflict is around the Force users, but there are far more non-force users in the cast of characters. What everyone is there to see is Rey’s rise from young vagabond with the potential for greatness to a trained warrior ready to stand against evil. The audience wants her training montage with Luke, and then her determined march to confrontation with Kylo Ren. That is the great narrative arc in play here. That’s the real story.
The problem is, Poe, Finn, BB8… they have no place in it at all. So we have to keep them busy until Rey fights Kylo Ren and we can wrap everything up with a big bang.
The White Ford Bronco chase in space, combined with freeing the animals on Canto Bight, are a way to monetize some of the massive salaries paid to Boyega and Oscar Isaac. But they don’t have anything to do with the real story we came to see. So these scenes are just filler and, after you’ve seen it a time or two, you realize that. Also, yes, the freeing of the horses was a little bit PETA-political for me.
Too Feminist, too multi-racial: If you dislike the movie because of some characters’ skin color, then this is an area where we’ll have to settle for not sharing the same opinion. And as for “too feminist,” it’s true that almost the entire leadership of the good guys was female. But I don’t see that as a problem.
I happen to like strong women. I’ve had jobs with women for bosses and with men for bosses, and both can be good leaders and bad leaders. They’re just different, that’s all. Women can be in charge and when they are, they will either succeed or fail based on their individual abilities, not on their sex. It’s just a morally neutral fact.
I might be with you if I felt like the movie was subliminally broadcasting the message that white males are the cause of all the problems in both our galaxies. But I didn’t get that vibe. I just got that there were more female actors portraying the leaders of the resistance. That’s not a big deal to me.
Rose Tico: Yeah, boring. Not interesting. It’s a valid point, but not a reason to one-star it on Rotten Tomatoes. At most, that’s worth a star off.
Rey’s Parents and Snoke’s Death: Ah, now we come to the heart of the matter. This, I think, is what enraged a lot of nerds. I recognize it because I’ve been there.
See, when we see a character we like, we want to know more about them. When Darth Maul first lights up the second blade of his saberstaff, a whole lot of us fanboys were like, “Who’s that guy, and where did he come from?”
The same thing with Snoke. People wanted to know who he was, how he got there, why he ruled the First Order… etc. And for two years, they made YouTube videos imagining where he came from, they wrote long blog posts (not unlike this one) putting together clues about how he came to rule the first order — fans obsessed about finding out who this guy was.
Likewise with Rey’s lineage. Star Wars has trained us to expect that a person’s family is a major part of the story. And in between that midnight in December 2015 when we first heard Rey false-confidently predicting that her family would come back and the day before Last Jedi came out, the fans littered Reddit and YouTube with theories about who that family might be.
And then all those years of speculation got wiped away in about ten minutes between Snoke dying and Kylo telling Rey her parents were no one.
So, as I see it, it’s not that these are actual criticisms of the story. These are meta-criticisms of the universe of Star Wars fandom, where this story was a bit tone deaf to the kind of people who were waiting for it like predators at a watering hole.
(Side note: After plunging chest-deep into spoilers for the Phantom Menace in the 90’s and then being so achingly disappointed with the actual movie, I developed an aversion to spoilers of truly epic proportions. I viewed not even one single YouTube video speculating about Rey’s parents or Snoke in between the two films. Not one time. My thumb developed a special instinct so I could flick past that stuff extra fast when it got into my iPad feed. I believe that’s why these two criticisms never even occurred to me until I heard them from a friend. Don’t take the bait, nerdy brothers and sisters! Don’t watch spoilers. (He said, in a festival of spoilers blog post))
So. The Last Jedi. Five star or one star?
In the end, I think the most accurate comparison is Return of the Jedi. This is a fundamentally good Force User story wrapped around a boring middle about characters no one cares about. I love Return of the Jedi. I re-watch it with alarming frequency. And I love The Last Jedi too. I still cry when the single sun in front of him blurs into the twin suns of Tatooine for Luke as he dies. It’s just that I love both with my finger on the “skip” button, to blur past the dumb stuff in the middle.
Four stars.