TAKE 1: One Man’s Opinion
…because film is largely subjective
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Release Date: 15 December 2017 Runtime: 152 Minutes
Review Date: 1 January 2018 Rating: 4 (of 6)
Another mediocre
outing.
Our bad guy Kylo
Ren is still weak and poorly fleshed out.
And most of the
movie felt like needless exposition.
*Allow me to
preface the rest by noting that vague and specific SPOILERS abound
henceforth.
Like the last
film was a (poor) remake of the original, from the start this seems like a (poor)
remake of The Empire Strikes Back. Empire
begins with Imperial Forces discovering the Rebels' hideout and going in to
destroy it. The Last Jedi, likewise, has the Imperialist replacements having
located the last of the rebels and going in for the kill.
Supreme Leader Snoke--by
the way, what is the purpose of having him be computer animated when there is
nothing about his design that prohibits practical makeup for a more realistic
portrayal?--is supposed to be the ultimate baddie. But he fizzles too quickly (and easily) (ditto
Captain Phasma), and we're still left not knowing who he was or where he came
from.
The major cameo
was cool but leads to a major plot problem--Obi Wan was the first we saw
returning from the dead to mentor Luke.
By the end of Return of the Jedi,
we saw that Yoda and Anakin had this ability too. So when Kylo Ren went down the twisted path
he chose and started worshipping at the altar of Darth Vader, why didn't the
ghostly form of Anakin appear (repeatedly as necessary) to set his grandson
straight? If they're saving this for the
final installment, it's a little late, both on the storytellers' part and the part
of Anakin.
In addition to
the cameo (cheesy as it may have been), Luke's battle against Kylo Ren was
probably the highlight of the film. But
only because I used the same tactic in an unrelated screenplay I wrote myself
over 7 years ago.
I foresaw the
lame Obi Wan ending coming for Luke but was still surprised (and disappointed)
when they actually went through with it and how it was executed. Harrison Ford at least looked like he was
having fun during his return (as poor as the role was), while Mark Hamill was
just brooding what screen time he had.
And with Carrie
Fisher's untimely death, it makes for all our heroes now out of the
picture. Also untimely.
Maybe with
Princess Leia out, you can carry on with your cameos and have Lando take her
place. Just because, fuck it, that would
be fun.
Nitpicking, after
making a big (unexplained) deal about C3PO's arm being red in the last film,
it's back to normal now without so much as a word. [You were forced to read a one-off comic to
find out the history of the red arm. And
once you had, as cliché as it was, the sentiment behind it seemed like it would
have been a permanent replacement--it was a robot friend's arm that died saving
him--instead of disappearing as fast as you bat an eye.]
Then there was
the ridiculously bonehead occurrence of Rose Tico stopping Finn's sacrificial
suicide run, moments away from him surely succeeding. He was going to SAVE EVERYBODY. Instead, she just about commits suicide herself
just to save him alone, only to put him and everyone else back in harm's way
moments later; take a page out of the Star
Trek playbook here, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the
few or the one".
Or stick to your
own franchise--in A New Hope, the
pilots all knew it was a suicide mission going down the trench to try and blow
up the Death Star, but they did it for the wellbeing of others and were heroes
for it. Can you imagine some knucklehead
pushing Luke's fighter off course moments before he fired at and destroyed the
Death Star? Or, even better analogies from
this film, someone stopping Vice Admiral Holdo's final assault or Rose Tico's
own sister's attack! The Rebels would have
been in a worse dire straits, shit storm than they already were! (Ultimately, because of Rose Tico's selfish
act, Luke Skywalker is dead. That's
right, connect the dots. Had Finn been
allowed to complete his kamikazi flight, the resulting damage would have held
the First Order off rather than Luke having to expend all his energy doing so.)
There are so many
other issues, just rewriting history between The Force Awakens and The
Last Jedi --like totally reshooting the final scene of the former or
changing Kylo Ren's injuries--that I won't dive in any further. In any case,
I'd almost rather sit and watch the prequel trilogy again instead; I had no love for them. And in comparison to Adam Driver, who thought
we'd ever be heralding Hayden Christensen's acting chops?
I don't know how
they selected writer/director Rian Johnson from obscurity or know what hell
froze over that Disney has since given their blessing for him to helm a whole
new trilogy in the Star Wars Universe. I'm
just glad he won't be involved in the final installment of this one. (Seriously, it's like he was invited into a prestigious,
exclusive sandbox, asked "What's sand?," and then proceeded to dump
all the sand out.) Hopefully, J.J.
Abrams can salvage this mess.
[For any
naysayers, I'm not some Star Wars super
fan. Far from it. What I am a fan of is good writing
(characterization, dialogue, continuity and plot all included) and
entertainment. While I didn't enjoy
either of these Star Wars installments,
I did like Rogue One which was a
story that no one (myself included) even wanted.]
