The Last Jedi

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, it is once again a period of civil war…

Star Wars Day is May 4th.

May the Fourth? May the Force be with you? Remember? We talked about this… it’s Star Wars Day? Right? Every year. May the Fourth. It’s a thing. And this year for Star Wars Day, I not only watched Rogue One, I also watched The Last Jedi.

Like a lot of nerds of certain age, Star Wars has been a big part of my entire life. I saw the first film in the theatre when I was three or four. I even saw it at a Drive-in. And it blew my little footie-pajamaed mind. Then, later that Christmas, I got a huge haul of the new Star Wars toys.

After that, I was all in.

But like I said, this isn’t all that unusual for nerds who grew up in the same time as me, and much like those other nerds, I also lived through the Great Drought.

Y’see, kids, a long time ago, there was once a very dark age when not only was there no new Star Wars movies in the theatres, let alone a steady stream of TV shows, but once a movie left the theatres, unless the film was shown on TV on a Sunday night, or in a second-run theatre, it was pretty much gone forever. You could never ever see it again, not ever. Not even for your birthday. From 1977 to 1983, there were only three Star Wars movies, and after that?

Nothing. For decades.

So it was left to those toys—and also the occasional crappy novel and weirdly drawn comic book—to keep the torch lit, to keep the love alive…

Later, there would come cable, where I would watch both the original film, and also Neil Diamond’s The Jazz Singer, a million times on HBO. Soon after, VCR rental and video stores also became a thing. There was also the occasional TV special, like the legendary Holiday Special that was so bad, that much like Roger Corman’s version of the Fantastic Four, Lucas actively tried to destroy every copy in existence. There was also the Droids and Ewok cartoon, as well as the strange and terrible Ewok Adventure TV movies, all of which seemed to be mostly concerned with never using, or even referring to, anything that actually happened in the films.

But these things were but meager drips of water to a fandom that was dying of thirst, a brief respite from an all-consuming desire that could only begin to be quenched by the coming of a deluge.

And thus… the Prequels.

It’s hard to describe the lead-up to the Phantom Menace to those who weren’t truly there, for those who hadn’t lived through the Great Drought. People famously camped out in huge lines. The franchise was suddenly everywhere. The nerd world was so sick with Star Wars fever, that we infected the entire world, an illness that society has yet to fully recover from.

I’ll never forget the moments in the Chinese theatre in L.A. just before the film actually started. People were in costume. There were lightsaber battles breaking out all over the theatre. Giddy! We were all giddy with anticipation. It was like a muppet wedding, where every muppet was drunk, and none of them had gotten any sleep the night before. Then the trailers started, and the entire theatre, hundreds of wild-eyed, keyed-up nerds booed every single trailer. Booed! At the top of their lungs! Taunting and booing until our throats were sore! For the entire length of every trailer! And it’s not that any of the trailers were particularly bad as I recall, it’s just the anticipation was too much at that point. We were on fire with blood lust… if the blood in question was cotton candy CGI-generated corporate IP sci-fi fairy tales. And then that fanfare hit, and once again, we lost our god damn minds.

(Wipe transition to a black screen, text reads):

Two hours and eleven minutes later…

The stunned silence in that auditorium had a physical weight, as the audience quietly shuffled from the theatre and out into the hot Hollywood night. Sad nerds in large Jedi robes, their shoulders slumped, dragging their plastic lightsabers back to their Hyundais and their Pontiac Grand Ams, the profound disappointment clear on their faces as they tried to reconcile their admittedly lofty expectations with what they had just seen. Perhaps, we had all simply flown too high, and like Icarus, we fell.

It was crushing.

But when the Sequel Trilogy was announced, we did it all over again.

And The Force Awakens was absolute garbage. Every bit of narrative connective tissue very obviously removed in favor of continual momentum, with scene transitions that can only be described as Benny Hill-like, it was absolute awful nonsense, with its only saving grace being the strength of its central cast. It was the most JJ Abrams film to ever be made by JJ Abrams. Just absolute trash.

But there was still hope…

Because Rian Johnson was the writer/director of the second film in the Sequel Trilogy, and he’s fantastic. From Brick, his Dashiell Hammett in a high school film, to his heist crew movie, The Brothers Bloom, to Looper, his twisting sci-fi time-travel movie, and following The Last Jedi, going on to make his two Agatha Christie Whodunnit films, like the Oscar nominated Knives Out and it’s follow-up Glass Onion, as well as his Columbo riff TV show, Poker Face, I love his stuff. Love it.

He’s great.

So, I was very excited to see The Last Jedi.

Finally! Finally, I thought, Star Wars will be good again.

But while I wasn’t disappointed, and I absolutely loved The Last Jedi, it is a hard film to revisit, mostly because the story set-up in The Force Awakens is such trash, and as a result, this film just ends up feeling like the orphan of the Sequel Trilogy. No matter how good the middle film of a trilogy may be, it’s hard to revisit a story that starts out so terribly, and by all reports ends even worse.

I say “by all reports” because I’ve never seen the last film in the Sequel Trilogy, Skywalker Revenge or whatever it was called. There’s no need. JJ Abrams was back writing and directing, and I know what his films and TV shows are like, and at this point, I don’t need to cross the yard, actually step in the dog shit, and then sniff the bottom of my shoe, so that I can know for sure that it’s dog shit, I can tell it’s dog shit from way over here.

So I’ll pass.

And that’s what’s so aggrivating about trying to watch The Last Jedi.

Much like how the baggage of long-term continuity will often hamper the efforts of modern-day comicbook creators, where events that happened decades before, or the events that the powers-that-be have determined must happen, prevent them from being able to truly tell their own actually good stories, the terrible bookends of the Sequel Trilogy are like chains around the ankles of The Last Jedi, making it very difficult for the film to keep swimming.

For instance…

Despite being played by long time favorite, Andy Serkis, Supreme Leader Snoke isn’t just a wet fart of a bad guy, with a stupid fucking name... Snoke. Snoke? That was the best they could come up with. Snoke? Anyway, the character represents the worst part of the failure that is the over-arching storyline, and that is because that while he’s the result of the Imperial Cloning Program, he’s not actually a nearly-successful clone of the Emperor, which would have made more sense, he’s just a poorly made but entirely new being, randomly created from a mix of genetics, I guess as a placeholder until the cloning of the Emporer is susccessful? Who knows. The problem is (one of them, at least) is that when he then dies, his whole plotline becomes a deadend. This already dumb bad guy, who already seemed like a pale imitation of better bad guys, who took up two entire movies in your trilogy, is now meaningless? He’s a plotline that just runs off to nowhere and fades away.

That’s great...

Instead, we get the third film in the Sequel Trilogy famously opening with the hackiest bullshit of all time, Poe Dameron just out-of-left-field explaining to a small crowd that “somehow, Palpatine returned,” which, despite being the beginning of the THIRD FILM IN THE TRILOGY, was apparently meant to be the shock reveal of what was the actual plot all along? They just say it out loud. This is a plot point that they didn’t bother explaining, in the movie in which it is crucial to the story.

That’s so bad!

And now, even worse, the job of explaining that nebulous bit of garbage, the “somehow” of Palpatine’s return, it has taken over the franchise, as explaining the “somehow” is now the entire point of shows like the Mandalorian, Ahsoka, and the Bad Batch.

It’s all so bad.

But this is just one terrible aspect of the Sequel Trilogy’s terrible legacy.

Through the fact that Rose and Finn simply exist, through the fact of Leia’s easily explainable use of the Force, through the fact that Poe’s daredevil bullshit actually has serious repercussions, through the accusations that Rey is a “Mary Sue” character, a derogatory term often wrongly applied by jerks in an attempt to criticize a character that they don’t like (usually a woman character) as either being an author-insert wish-fulfillment character, or as an over-idealized, overly-talented character with no real flaws, nothing shows the racism and misogyny inherent to fandom spaces more than the reaction to this movie by a bunch of man-babies and pick-me girls.

These unimaginative loser asshole “fans” were super pissed that Luke didn’t go the expected route, that his story instead reflected that of a man who came from a family long plagued by a struggle with the Dark Side, and as a result has had a life made of triumphs and mistakes. They wanted something more akin to the simple idiot rehash that The Force Awakens provided. They didn’t want narrative and character arcs, they wanted cozy fan-fiction. They wanted boring and expected, not an examination of the franchise’s legacy both in-world and meta-textually. They didn’t want an examination of revolutions and legends and their reality. They certainly didn’t want a film with jokes, which are the bane of the self-serious boring-ass nerd’s existence.

I will allow that the one good thing that The Force Awakens did think of was the character of Kylo Renn.

There’s no greater commentary on the toxicity of modern day fandom in this entire franchise than the character of Kylo Renn. The son of a legendary family legacy, born on third base and mad about it, slavishly devoted to his skewed perception of the past, and feeling like he was unfairly rejected for his unwillingness to see a new world, he is violently resistant to the idea of new eras and new players. In short, he is a sad little fucker, and a boring and obvious bad guy for the most part, but still…

He and Rey do look awesome when they team up in this movie to take out some cool looking bad guys.

But even this kind of shit is not want the whiny little weirdo “fans” wanted.

They wanted Han and Luke and Leia to all do a group side hug and be like “we’re all buddies!” Something we’ve already seen. Go watch the original trilogy or read some of the crappy novels. You don’t need more of that. They wanted “let’s show these young ‘uns how to be rebels!” Which is boring. Go write your own fanfic if that’s the kind of treading water bullshit you want.

To boil it down to a single microcosm… it’s obvious that they simply really hated the fact that the character who ends up in charge of the Rebel Alliance was a woman with purple hair.

The funniest part about a lot of the shit these “fans” still complain about, like how the Empire is able to track the Rebels through lightspeed, or the idea that the jump to hyperspace might be weaponized? They’re all the resulting fruits of seeds that were laid in some of the other shows and movies, like Rogue One, for instance. I guess they weren’t paying attention?

Some fans, right?

Anyway, The Last Jedi…

Picking up where The Force Awakens lumbered to its idiot asshole conclusion, where it needlessly and foolishly wiped out everything that the OT accomplished in favor of a lazy rehash of a story that was left behind years ago by the perfect ending of Return of the Jedi, otherwise known as the typical nostalgia-laden bullshit from no-talent rip-off artist JJ Abrams, the Last Jedi makes the most of the shit sandwich it was handed.

The story begins with the new Rebellion, now known as The Resistance, on its back foot and its last legs, all with the new empire, now known as The First Order, hard in pursuit.

Meanwhile, Rey seeks out the legacy of the Jedi, and struggles with the truth when Luke explains to her that the Jedi were stagnant and arrogant bullshit, who were bad for the galaxy. “If you strip away the myth, and look at their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi is failure, hypocrisy, and hubris.” In Rey, Luke sees a great potential, but not just in the Force, but in the potential for her to perpetuate the mistakes of the past, the same mistakes that he himself made.

Meanwhile, former stormtrooper/janitor Finn, and new character Rose Tico, a rebel mechanic, answer the question of who actually benefits from the continuing conflict that engulfs the galaxy. Hint, it’s the wealthy, and the corporations. Wait, Star Wars has corporations, you ask? Yes, who do you think makes the weapons and the ships? And most of them can be found luxuriating in oppulent excess on Canto Bight. While Mos Eisley is the classic wretched hive of scum and villainy from the OT, Canto Bight is known as a terrible place, full of the worst people in the galaxy, and the music for its introduction scene, a twist on the famous Cantina theme from the original Star Wars film, clearly illustrates that connection, with the only notable difference between the gaudy displays of wealth on Canto Bight.

Loved that.

Meanwhile, eat that space chicken, Chewie! You deserve it, brother. Fuck those whiny little sad eye bastards.

Meanwhile, Luke Skywalker takes a moment to spend time within the dusty nostalgia of the Falcon’s interior, and while he does meet a friend there, he ultimately finds that nostalgia to be… empty. And when R2 attempts to use Leia’s original message to drag him back into the conflict, to use that nostalgia as a weapon against him, it’s a cheap move, and he labels it as such. I really love how the film uses moments like this to directly address the value of wallowing in nostalgia.

Meanwhile, Rey and Kylo Renn are secretly sexting through The Force, despite the fact that Kylo wears ridiculously high-waisted pants.

Meanwhile, Benecio del Toro is great as a scoundrel and a mercenary who is actually a scoundrel and a mercenary, but one who is missing the heart of gold.

Meanwhile, that selfish little glory hound, Poe Dameron is really struggling with having to listen to women authority figures, and basically makes everything worse at every opportunity, and all because he’s a shortsighted little dipshit, better suited for the cockpit of a fighter than the leadership chair, but he still thinks he knows better for no apparent reason other than he just does. And the film takes every chance to prove that he is incorrect. That’s awesome.

In the end, there’s a big silly plan of action that culminates in one of the greatest and most pure Star Wars moments ever…

"A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack,” is one of the things that Yoda tells an impetus, hot-headed, little shithead Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back, and there is no greater demonstration of the truth of this then the moment when Luke faces the gathered might of The First Order, and defeats them, all without hurting anyone. It’s an incredible climax. Absolutely perfect. Legendary, both within the Star Wars universe, and in our own.

Plus, this moment is then capped off with the best farewell the Star Wars franchise could’ve asked for, as Luke and Leia bid a final goodbye.

I loved it.

Yes, it’s a divisive film, but mostly because it’s only interested in trying to move the story of Star Wars forward, out of the rut that The Force Awakens shoved it back into, trying to evolve past the legacy that has hardened like cement around the franchise’s feet. It’s a film that doesn’t have a place for characters like Chewie, or R2, or Threepio, characaters I love, but they mostly just stand around in the background, because the simple fact is, it’s saddled with more old baggage than it can carry, all given to it by the overly-nostalgic crapfest that is The Force Awakens.

Although, to be fair, The Force Awakens saddled The Last Jedi with more than just empty nostalgia. For example, Captain Phasma is also completely useless.

But the fact that the film is obviously aware of this, and does it utmost to burn it all down, and maybe grow something new from the ashes, is admirable. Especially as it not only uses Yoda, the series’ greatest jester, for its big main push of this idea, but when it does, it also uses its most significant symbol… a burning tree noteably shaped like the insignia of the Rebel Alliance, within which lies the heart of the Jedi Order.

“Pass on what you’ve learned. Strength, mastery, hmmm. But weakness, folly, failure also. Yes, failure most all. The greatest teacher, failure is.” Yoda says. “Luke, we are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all masters.”

This is a perfect encapsulation of the film’s theme.

It’s the idea that Star Wars, especially the Skywalker Saga, the story that has always been, and still is, the central stalk of the franchise, must change, that it must grow and become something new, or it will stagnate and die.

This is all failed effort ultimately, not because of this film, which is successful at delivering its message, but because of the nature of the franchise itself, not to mention the fact that fandom generally prefers stagnant rehashes, but still, like I said…

It’s admirable.

In the end, The Last Jedi is mostly a movie of grievances, both within the narrative itself, and as an address to the audience. It’s a film about trying to be better, and to create something better for the future, and how those efforts are often held back by regressive forces both within the ranks of your enemies, and amongst your supposed allies too. It’s a movie about the necessity of myth and legend, as well as the conflict that exists between beloved stories and their reality.

The Last Jedi is also a film that refuses to give a spoiled fandom what they want, and instead offers them what they need in order to grow, and all while hitting some of the favorite beats from The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi.

Sadly, much like we learned while watching Game of Thrones, The Last Jedi mostly proves once again that no matter how much people may claim they want innovative stories that challenge the narrative and do the unexpected, they actually just want the same old thing, a simplified rehash of the stuff they’ve already seen a million times before, and it’s disappointing to see this franchise ultimately bowing to that pressure, instead of seizing on the fertile opportunity that this film teed up for them, the promise of new adventures, out amongst the stars…

So, in the end, making the best of a really terrible setup, all while torpedoing the idea that bloodlines determines greatness, suggesting that anyone can be a hero, a message the “fans” who had difficulty understanding the film’s point called “heavy handed,” in a world of candy-coated blockbusters, The Last Jedi is a heap of vegetables.

And it’s delicious.

Also… RIP to the legend.