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Could Daisy Ridley be The Last Jedi in this controversial new Star Wars chapter |
Director: Rian Johnson
Cast: Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Carrie Fisher (General
Leia Organa), Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), Daisy Ridley (Rey), John Boyega (Finn),
Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron), Kelly Marie Tran (Rose Tico), Andy Serkis (Supreme
Leader Snoke), Lupita Nyong’o (Maz Kanata), Domhnall Gleeson (General Hux),
Laura Dern (Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo), Benecio del Toro (DJ), Gwendoline
Christie (Captain Phasma), Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), Frank Oz (Yoda)
Spoilers! OK I’m
really trying my best to not have too many spoilers in here, but you know it’s
pretty much impossible. So you should do what I do and go to the see the film
knowing almost nothing about it. That would be much better than reading any
reviews!
It’s pretty clear the Star Wars franchise is going to be
with us for some time. So eventually it’s going to have to move past telling
similar stories, with familiar characters, in very familiar settings, and
branch out into something new and a bit more daring. Star Wars: The Last Jedi is an attempt to do this. Is it completely
successful? No, probably not. Does it try and push the franchise into a
slightly new direction? Yes it does.
The film starts moments after the end of The Force Awakens. Rey (Daisy Ridley)
has met with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) on the remote planet he has spent the
past decade hiding on. She believes (as do we!) that he will train her in the
ways of the Jedi – instead he tells her to leave, and firmly states that the
Jedi are a failed organisation that don’t deserve to continue. Meanwhile, during
a speedy evacuation of the resistance base – covered by a suicidally reckless
military operation by Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) that costs the lives of dozens
of resistance ships and pilots – General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) is
incapacitated, and the surviving rebel ships find themselves relentlessly
pursued by the First Order. While the new leadership of the resistance seems to
be offering no alternatives, Poe and Finn (John Boyega) hatch a plan to travel
to a distant planet and recruit a codebreaker, to help them hack into the First
Order flagship and disable the tracker it’s using, allowing the fleet to
escape.
The Last Jedi is a
film that has had a mixed reception from the fandom. After spending a couple of
days thinking about it, this might be because the film so completely inverts
expectations and refuses to play it safe. It’s a film about loss and
disillusionment, but also about hope against adversity. It would have been very
easy to transform Luke into a new Yoda, to make Poe and Finn heroic guys whose
actions save the rebellion over the heads of their stuffed-shirt commanders. To
build Kylo Ren further towards a redemption arc. These are all things you could
expect – none of them happen.
Subverting these expectations has angered a lot of people –
fascinatingly the same people who complained The Force Awakens was too similar to Star Wars. So I guess that kinda shows you can’t keep the Internet
happy – so why even try. The main issue has been the re-imaging of Luke
Skywalker. The man the first trilogy presented as the universe’s
bright-eyed-boy, our new hope: here he’s a bitter, depressed man who has lost hope
and his love for the Jedi. He’s a man who confesses to dark thoughts, who it
transpires considered acts of murder, who has failed at almost everything he’s
touched since the conclusion of Return of
the Jedi. This is a big turnaround for the franchise’s hero, and yes it is
jarring. Is this what people expected after the end of Force Awakens? It sure ain’t.
But, after the play-it-safe Rogue One and the thrilling remember-what-you-used-to-like-before-the-prequels
joy of The Force Awakens, the
franchise needed something like this. A shake-up, a repositioning of the
universe. It’s not always bright and hopeful, and our heroes are flawed people who
make huge mistakes. It’s in many ways a logical extension: if Rey is the new
hope, than something must have gone wrong with the old hope. Luke has failed
totally in the same way both his mentors (Yoda and Obi-Wan) did – he encouraged
and honed the viper-in-the-nest.
As that viper-in-the-nest, we’ve got the terrifically
complex Kylo Ren. Ren’s path in this film is the most inverted, unexpected and
unusual development in the series so far. Adam Driver was superb in Force Awakens, and he’s great here once
again as a very different type of villain. Ren is strong in the force, but in
almost every other way he’s hugely weak: a sullen, moody man-child, straining
for greatness, a tearful brat easily led, driven by his emotions, trying to
take on a mantle of greatness he is psychologically ill-equipped for. He seems
barely aware of what he wants from life, except for a vague wish to pull the
world down – like any teenager, angry at his parents, which is what he is.
Pulling the world down seems to be Rian Johnson’s aim as
well. An early attack wipes out the resistance leadership – Admiral Ackbar! No!
– and the resistance itself is eventually reduced to a single ship, desperately
running from the far stronger First Order. Never mind Empire Strikes Back, the resistance has never been so pummelled,
its military achievements so minor. Even their one victory in the film – the
destruction of a fearsome First Order ship – carries such a huge cost of men
and equipment that Leia strips Poe of his rank for even attempting it.
Thereafter, the only victory the resistance can hope for is to survive. No
other Star Wars film has ever allowed
such monumental failure to be the main plotline for our heroes. Johnson is
clearing the decks and resetting the tables – he even wraps up lingering
mysteries from The Force Awakens with
such abruptness you wonder if he wanted to kill parts of the Internet dead.
Failure also ekes through the Poe/Fin subplot. Every single
decision these characters take in this film is wrong, misguided, hugely costly
or all three. If the film does have a major flaw it’s that Finn’s journey to
the gambling planet is a cul-de-sac of plot development, that could have easily
hit the cutting room floor and probably cost the film very little indeed. It
never really goes anywhere, other than to allow Johnson to make some points
about arms traders selling weapons to both the First Order and the resistance.
It also introduces into the mix Benecio del Toro’s fantastically annoying,
overly-twitchy performance as the hacker DJ – Del Toro seems to be getting more
and more prone to “Deppism”, where a good actor succumbs to twitches and quirks
rather than acting.
What is most interesting about this plot-line though is its
very pointlessness. The plan (major
spoiler here) doesn’t work at all, in fact it leads to many, many, many
more resistance lives being lost, and wrecks Hondo’s secret plan which would
have saved everyone’s lives. The film doesn’t quite have the courage to pin the
blame for this disaster directly on Poe and Finn. In fact the film gets a bit
confused here about the message it wants Poe to learn – it’s something about
costly actions in war not being worth mindless sacrifice, but then this is a
film that at its conclusion celebrates another character making a huge
sacrifice. Unclear? A bit. Anyway: the point however is: you can’t imagine
previous Star Wars films allowing our
characters to so completely fuck up here as Poe and Finn do – and give them no
moment of triumph to make compensation later in the film.
What this does though, is Rey to be repositioned at the real
hope – although the film goes about inverting her as well, with several
suggestions that she is far more open to the dark side of the force might have
thought. Daisy Ridley is very good as Rey, juggling conflicting pulls on her
personality, her desire to redeem both Ren (and there is a great sexual chemistry
between these two) and Luke, and the different directions these desires pull
her in. Rather than seeing the force as a binary good/bad thing, Rey seems to
want to find a balance between the two of them. Johnson explores this via a
number of visually interesting scenes, not least Rey in a cave from the dark
side, full of endless reflections. It’s an unexpected re-working of the
Luke/Yoda relationship and works very well.
The Last Jedi is
not a perfect film. For all its interesting inversion of old tropes, and the
lack of triumph it allows our characters, it’s way too long. It could easily
have been cut down by half an hour at least. Although some plots are designed
to be expectation-defying dead-ends, they still end up feeling less than
interesting (and ripe for fast forwarding on later viewings). Despite an
attempt to include some scenes of deliberate humour, the film has less spark
and joie de vivre than many of the
other entrances in the franchise. Structurally, it’s not always clear what the
timeline of events is between the different locations (weeks seem to go past
for Rey, while only hours go by in the rebel fleet), and some of the points the
film wants its characters to learn are unclear or hard to understand (I
genuinely don’t know what Poe was supposed to have learned by the end of this
film).
Its strength though are the characters – building on the
groundwork from The Force Awakens
(and very differently from Rogue One)
this film is full of characters we care about. John Boyega and Oscar Isaac
continue to excel as Finn and Poe (and still have great chemistry, shippers…) –
Boyega in particular is quite the star. Ridley and Driver are superb. Hamill
was never the strongest actor in the world, but he gives his most complex
performance yet as Luke. The film mostly rattles along very nicely, and has
plenty of action and excitement as well as “race against time” structure that
works very well. Interestingly, its main handicaps are that it defies
expectations almost a little too much (so it demands second viewing and
reflection) and that it’s overlong and at times unclearly structured. But as a
step forward for the franchise it’s still a good thing. A new hope indeed.
Coda: The film’s
main sadness is the premature death of Carrie Fisher. One problem watching the
film was that two or three times I was convinced that the film was about to
show us Leia’s death. Johnson avoids changing the film from its original plan
(Episode IX was intended to be “The Leia film” after films focusing on Han Solo
and Luke), but it does seem a shame that Fisher’s good work wasn’t crowned by
the sort of iconic final scene she deserves. The Episode IX planned will now never happen – but it would have been
great to see Fisher really head centre stage in that film. RIP.
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