Star Wars The Last Jedi review (SPOILERS)
SPOILERS GALORE OK
Things this movie did right for me:
- Made all of Snoke, Kylo Ren, and General Hux into plausible and interesting villains
- Rey’s story and answering the question of her parentage
- Luke’s story for the most part
- Leia being awesome
- Finn generally being awesome although this was 99% John Boyega just inhabiting that character with extremely little help from the script
- The con man/bad guy/codebreaker by Benicio Del Toro
- General propulsiveness - it was long and there were a lot of fight scenes but it didn’t lose me
- The really cool new salt planet
- Having many things go wrong instead of right
- Most of what it said about/did with the Force although I think they somewhat still erred on the side of giving it too many concrete rules instead of sticking to emotional/fairytale logic.
- Ironing uniforms
Things this movie did wrong for me:
- Fundamentally, I did not come out of this with a sense of Star Wars-ian wonder and joy the way I did out of The Force Awakens. There are a lot of things I could point to as an explanation (see the below list) but ultimately it just didn’t have a certain kind of magic that for me Star Wars, Empire, parts of Return of the Jedi, and TFA all achieve.
- The long podracing-esque interlude on casino planet which bailed tension and suspense out of the story with a giant bucket.
- Poe doing incredibly stupid fucking things due to the equivalent of one of those bad romance novels where all sorts of misunderstandings could have been avoided if only the characters sat down and talked for literally 30 seconds, and then to compound it, getting totally let off scot-free by the narrative for said stupid fucking things
- Not enough Luke (There was a lot! But it was still not enough.)
- Phasma vs Finn was underwhelming and I wanted whelming
- The very ending which just sort of…trailed off in multiple ways
- It mostly failed for me at setting up Rose who I really wanted to love except my concluding feeling was I want her sister and not her
So for me the really great chunk of this movie was the Kylo Ren and Rey interaction both before and in the throne room. I loved them communicating, fighting together, and I loved him both killing Snoke but ultimately choosing the Dark Side and yet still wanting Rey with him and her rejecting him. That was the core of the movie for me and they landed it.
Also, on a meta level, I LOVED and think it is genius that they totally used the trailer (where we see her take his hand) to create suspense in that moment. I also give them a lot of credit for creating suspense in that moment by having several things before then, that in other SW movies would have gone well, go badly. It let me think they might be going in the direction of Rey falling and Finn has to save her - which actually I wouldn’t have hated, although I like what they actually did more.
The piece I came away wanting the most though that they didn’t give me is, I really did want to see Luke do something fucking amazing. I wanted him to DESTROY the AT-ATs - like if anyone has read Dark Empire from Dark Horse, I wanted that opening scene so much. I didn’t want to see him using the Force as basically sleight of hand, and the one line where Kylo says to Rey “you can’t be doing this force projection, it would kill you” was not enough to magnify that act to the level of power that I really wanted to see from Luke before his death.
It would actually have been fine if they didn’t then have that act exhaust and kill him. But they did, so it just sort of left me dissatisfied. Also I cannot BELIEVE they showed us the X-Wing underwater and did not pay that off with Luke raising it up, that is like the GUN ON THE MANTELPIECE, come ON. The beautiful visual of ending his story with him looking at the sunset didn’t fix it. His death just didn’t feel earned to me by the story, and I really wanted it to be earned. It ended up feeling like “well we’ve got to get Luke offstage before movie #3 so everyone stops paying attention to him” which, IDK, I just left feeling like I want more Luke and now have built-in disappointment for movie #3 because I know in advance I won’t have him.
That said, I’m mostly okay with what they did with Luke’s story also. My main problem was that the story they built around the Jedi stories just didn’t make me care. This is perennially the problem for me, and the way Empire and ROTJ fixed it is by having Han and Leia together, but here, I still loved Finn, but they failed to sell me on Rose. I wanted to be sold, but they didn’t give her character enough air. Fridging her sister failed to give her backstory the way fridging always fails for me, and the sort of comic-relief-jokey way they introduced her and Finn failed for me too.
And then second of all, they failed to sell me on the whole story they gave her and Finn and Poe. They don’t even try to make the Alliance make sense, why is Poe even talking to the vice admiral, why does Rose go from someone who works on pipes in the back and doesn’t talk to people to being a pilot and the chief engineer, why is Poe suddenly committing mutiny instead of discussing his idea with the vice admiral, and WHY WHY WHY are Finn and Rose zooming off to another planet for an interlude of what feels like a week while the Resistance cruiser is being chased down by the First Order in what feels like hours.
It just felt completely stupid and aggressively pointless and unsuspenseful (since clearly no matter what else they WERE going to get off this other planet and back in time) and then finally they get back and then the narrative did do one interesting thing, which is they got actually caught, except then this incredibly stupid mutiny operation of theirs literally gets the entire resistance except for a tiny number of people who can fit into the Falcon all slaughtered.
And we’re apparently supposed to come away from this thinking well, Poe has sure learned an important and valuable lesson about not committing mutiny, um, how about NO, how about you take the guy responsible for this and court martial him and shove him out an airlock instead of having Leia and the vice admiral he totally undercut standing over him talking lovingly about how he’s such a troublemaker and they like him ha ha ha. The movie really just totally destroyed the character for me with this.
Anyway, to get back to a happier note, in the last movie Snoke was literally a noneity, Kylo was mostly pathetic, and Hux was generic. One thing this movie did great was make all of them compelling. I found Snoke very viscerally awful in that throne room scene, and I was incredibly satisfied when Kylo killed him. They showed me Kylo being sympathetic and conflicted and then still deliberately choosing the dark in a believable way, and I am really happy that this kind of character is now the actual emperor. And then Hux actually had real emotions here and I felt like I saw them as Kylo Ren humiliates him and he’s sitting there seething in the background.
So the central villains, except for Phasma who was basically wasted, all came out well in a way that I feel like you really NEED in a Star Wars movie and I feel like I really care about Rey defeating Kylo and that has been powerfully set up for the final movie.
I just really need a better story for Finn, I need to care more about Rose, and they need to do some heavy lifting to fix Poe for me. AND I NEED MORE LUKE. :’(
Anyway those are my longwinded thoughts!
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth (
comments)
Things this movie did right for me:
- Made all of Snoke, Kylo Ren, and General Hux into plausible and interesting villains
- Rey’s story and answering the question of her parentage
- Luke’s story for the most part
- Leia being awesome
- Finn generally being awesome although this was 99% John Boyega just inhabiting that character with extremely little help from the script
- The con man/bad guy/codebreaker by Benicio Del Toro
- General propulsiveness - it was long and there were a lot of fight scenes but it didn’t lose me
- The really cool new salt planet
- Having many things go wrong instead of right
- Most of what it said about/did with the Force although I think they somewhat still erred on the side of giving it too many concrete rules instead of sticking to emotional/fairytale logic.
- Ironing uniforms
Things this movie did wrong for me:
- Fundamentally, I did not come out of this with a sense of Star Wars-ian wonder and joy the way I did out of The Force Awakens. There are a lot of things I could point to as an explanation (see the below list) but ultimately it just didn’t have a certain kind of magic that for me Star Wars, Empire, parts of Return of the Jedi, and TFA all achieve.
- The long podracing-esque interlude on casino planet which bailed tension and suspense out of the story with a giant bucket.
- Poe doing incredibly stupid fucking things due to the equivalent of one of those bad romance novels where all sorts of misunderstandings could have been avoided if only the characters sat down and talked for literally 30 seconds, and then to compound it, getting totally let off scot-free by the narrative for said stupid fucking things
- Not enough Luke (There was a lot! But it was still not enough.)
- Phasma vs Finn was underwhelming and I wanted whelming
- The very ending which just sort of…trailed off in multiple ways
- It mostly failed for me at setting up Rose who I really wanted to love except my concluding feeling was I want her sister and not her
So for me the really great chunk of this movie was the Kylo Ren and Rey interaction both before and in the throne room. I loved them communicating, fighting together, and I loved him both killing Snoke but ultimately choosing the Dark Side and yet still wanting Rey with him and her rejecting him. That was the core of the movie for me and they landed it.
Also, on a meta level, I LOVED and think it is genius that they totally used the trailer (where we see her take his hand) to create suspense in that moment. I also give them a lot of credit for creating suspense in that moment by having several things before then, that in other SW movies would have gone well, go badly. It let me think they might be going in the direction of Rey falling and Finn has to save her - which actually I wouldn’t have hated, although I like what they actually did more.
The piece I came away wanting the most though that they didn’t give me is, I really did want to see Luke do something fucking amazing. I wanted him to DESTROY the AT-ATs - like if anyone has read Dark Empire from Dark Horse, I wanted that opening scene so much. I didn’t want to see him using the Force as basically sleight of hand, and the one line where Kylo says to Rey “you can’t be doing this force projection, it would kill you” was not enough to magnify that act to the level of power that I really wanted to see from Luke before his death.
It would actually have been fine if they didn’t then have that act exhaust and kill him. But they did, so it just sort of left me dissatisfied. Also I cannot BELIEVE they showed us the X-Wing underwater and did not pay that off with Luke raising it up, that is like the GUN ON THE MANTELPIECE, come ON. The beautiful visual of ending his story with him looking at the sunset didn’t fix it. His death just didn’t feel earned to me by the story, and I really wanted it to be earned. It ended up feeling like “well we’ve got to get Luke offstage before movie #3 so everyone stops paying attention to him” which, IDK, I just left feeling like I want more Luke and now have built-in disappointment for movie #3 because I know in advance I won’t have him.
That said, I’m mostly okay with what they did with Luke’s story also. My main problem was that the story they built around the Jedi stories just didn’t make me care. This is perennially the problem for me, and the way Empire and ROTJ fixed it is by having Han and Leia together, but here, I still loved Finn, but they failed to sell me on Rose. I wanted to be sold, but they didn’t give her character enough air. Fridging her sister failed to give her backstory the way fridging always fails for me, and the sort of comic-relief-jokey way they introduced her and Finn failed for me too.
And then second of all, they failed to sell me on the whole story they gave her and Finn and Poe. They don’t even try to make the Alliance make sense, why is Poe even talking to the vice admiral, why does Rose go from someone who works on pipes in the back and doesn’t talk to people to being a pilot and the chief engineer, why is Poe suddenly committing mutiny instead of discussing his idea with the vice admiral, and WHY WHY WHY are Finn and Rose zooming off to another planet for an interlude of what feels like a week while the Resistance cruiser is being chased down by the First Order in what feels like hours.
It just felt completely stupid and aggressively pointless and unsuspenseful (since clearly no matter what else they WERE going to get off this other planet and back in time) and then finally they get back and then the narrative did do one interesting thing, which is they got actually caught, except then this incredibly stupid mutiny operation of theirs literally gets the entire resistance except for a tiny number of people who can fit into the Falcon all slaughtered.
And we’re apparently supposed to come away from this thinking well, Poe has sure learned an important and valuable lesson about not committing mutiny, um, how about NO, how about you take the guy responsible for this and court martial him and shove him out an airlock instead of having Leia and the vice admiral he totally undercut standing over him talking lovingly about how he’s such a troublemaker and they like him ha ha ha. The movie really just totally destroyed the character for me with this.
Anyway, to get back to a happier note, in the last movie Snoke was literally a noneity, Kylo was mostly pathetic, and Hux was generic. One thing this movie did great was make all of them compelling. I found Snoke very viscerally awful in that throne room scene, and I was incredibly satisfied when Kylo killed him. They showed me Kylo being sympathetic and conflicted and then still deliberately choosing the dark in a believable way, and I am really happy that this kind of character is now the actual emperor. And then Hux actually had real emotions here and I felt like I saw them as Kylo Ren humiliates him and he’s sitting there seething in the background.
So the central villains, except for Phasma who was basically wasted, all came out well in a way that I feel like you really NEED in a Star Wars movie and I feel like I really care about Rey defeating Kylo and that has been powerfully set up for the final movie.
I just really need a better story for Finn, I need to care more about Rose, and they need to do some heavy lifting to fix Poe for me. AND I NEED MORE LUKE. :’(
Anyway those are my longwinded thoughts!
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth (
comments)