I wrote this review in Jan-Feb 2020, and it is intended as part of a book on the mythology of the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy. As such, there are references to different chapters. To dispell confusion, you’ll have to wait until I publish that book soon to read the other chapters.
Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi
Score: A+
The following review for The Last Jedi was originally written as a series of texts conversations between me and a few friends from December 2019 to January 2020. Thus, I had lived with The Last Jedi for a few years. I loved it initially and after thinking about it for a few years I really became able to explain why. Also, this review was written after I had seen The Rise of Skywalker.
I was very impressed with The Last Jedi. I consider it to be second only the Original Trilogy’s The Empire Strikes Back. I think that The Last Jedi was very bold, creative, and original. It was more dark and somber than The Force Awakens was, as it should be, being the second act in the trilogy. It’s only fitting because The Empire Strikes Back is a more somber film than A New Hope. (Attack of the Clones is also a more somber film than The Phantom Menace, but then the third act of the Prequel Trilogy gets even more dark and somber.)
I appreciated how Luke in The Last Jedi continued to follow the Return phase of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, as I explained in Chapter 3.
A lot has been written already about The Last Jedi’s self-conscious myth-making, especially the myth-making that Luke himself performs in the story. Recall from Chapter 1 that the word “myth” comes from the Greek mythos, which is “a recurrent narrative theme or plot point” (Oxford English Dictionary). Myths are the stories that we tell ourselves, be it a personal narrative of our own lives or the narrative of our culture; “narrative patterns that give significance to our existence” (May, The Cry for Myth 15). At the beginning of The Last Jedi, Luke pokes and prods at the fact that he has become a legend to the galaxy. Yet no one knows of his failure involving Ben Solo and his Jedi temple years before the Sequel Trilogy begins. And yet, Luke plays into his own legend/myth by taking on the First Order alone on the planet Crait. No one knew that he was a Force projection from across the galaxy. After this action and Luke’s death, we are shown a group of children reenacting the scene with handmade toys. This inspires a young boy—deemed “Broom Boy” because he picks up a broom using the Force—to gaze up at the stars and dream big dreams. It’s a wonderful, self-referential scene that ends the film.
I liked all of the references and allusions to film history in The Last Jedi. I appreciated the multiple versions/memories of Luke attacking Kylo. It was an obvious homage to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). It is fun to note that Rashomon is a Jidai Geki film (“period dramas”), where the term “Jedi” comes from (IMDB, “Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope Trivia.”). Director Rian Johnson explicitly states that Rashomon was the inspiration for these scenes in The Last Jedi audio commentary (Johnson, The Last Jedi DVD audio commentary 01:01:53-01:02:06). Johnson states that the opening space battle was inspired by the 1949 film Twelve O’Clock High (Johnson, 00:08:48-00:09:00). There is also a tracking shot in the Canto Bight casino scene. Johnson states that this was taken from the 1927 film Wings (Johnson, 00:54:44 -00:56:00). And when Finn rises up on a gantry to hit Captain Phasma in the head, Johnson states that was inspired by the 1989 film Back to the Future Part II (Johnson, 01:54:00-01:54:16). Writing for Slate, Sam Adams and Forrest Wickman also go over some other film references, from Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Kurosawa’s Kagemusha and Ran, Hardware Wars, The Young Ones, and to many motifs employed by legendary director Steven Spielberg (Adams and Wickman, “A Guide to The Last Jedi’s References to Other (Non-Star Wars) Movies”). Even Rose’s Resistance insignia ring—which has the Original Trilogy-era Rebel insignia—is a reference to Casablanca (Adams and Wickman).
The design of The Last Jedi is really amazing. The end battle on the planet Crait, with the white salt flats “cut” into by the Resistance speeders is one of the best visuals in film that I have ever seen. It was great to think about the planet Crait as being cut or marred by the battle of the measly humans. It makes me think of how we constantly destroy our own planet with war. This was apparently inspired by Kurosawa’s Ran, “where color-coded armies slam into each other like rivers of paint” (Adams and Wickman).
I really liked the inclusion of Rey and Kylo’s Force connection. In the The Last Jedi DVD audio commentary, Johnson talks about simply using the grammar of film—Rey looks to the left of the screen, Kylo looks to screen right—to cut back-and-forth between the two (Johnson, The Last Jedi 00:45:51-00:46:00). And even though they are a galaxy apart, it reads like they are speaking to one another in the same room. Great stuff.
The Last Jedi is also very well-written. And I’m not just talking about the dialogue, which I think is good, too. The Last Jedi has great writing in terms of its plot and the characters’ conflicts and change, as laid out by YouTuber Just Write (real name Sage Hyden) in his video “The Last Jedi and the 7 Basic Questions of Narrative Drama.” The seven questions come from the Birth.Movies.Death. author Film Crit Hulk in a post titled “Smash: The Importance Of Dramatizing Character.” The seven questions are 1) What does this character want? 2) What does this character need? 3) How do those wants and needs conflict with each other within the character? 4) How do they conflict with the outside world? 5) How do they conflict with other characters? 6) How does the character change thought those conflicts and how does the resolution affect them? 7) What impact does that change have on everyone else? (Film Crit Hulk, “Smash: The Importance Of Dramatizing Character”).
Just Write goes over how these narrative questions affect The Last Jedi’s three main characters Rey, Finn, and Poe. As one example, Just Write explains: Rey wants external validation, but what she needs is emotional independence. Her internal conflict is “Who to join?” and the conflict with the world is with the First Order. The conflict with other characters is between Luke and Kylo. The change is that Rey becomes a Jedi. The impact is that she saves the Resistance (“The Last Jedi and the 7 Basic Questions of Narrative Drama”).
In another video, titled “Why We Can’t Agree About The Last Jedi (Or Art In General),” Just Write explains the cinematic language that makes Luke’s death scene in The Last Jedi so poetic. In terms of the camera shots, director Johnson deliberately plays off of and reverses Luke’s introduction in A New Hope with his death in The Last Jedi. Luke looks from left-to-right at a sunset in A New Hope. This looking from left-to-right in cinematic language evokes looking into the future. In The Last Jedi, Luke looks from right-to-left at a sunrise as he dies, almost as if he is looking back at the past, back at himself in A New Hope (“Why We Can’t Agree About The Last Jedi (Or Art In General)”).
Rey’s parentage, or lack thereof.
I loved, loved, loved that Rey was not descended from a famous lineage. In my The Force Awakens review above you can see that I hoped that the story went this way. I loved Rey not having a famous lineage because it is what I would have done had I been the scriptwriter. I loved it because Rey does not have to be related to anyone famous to be an engaging character who has strength all her own. She didn’t have to be related to anyone famous to stand up and be a hero. (Of course, Rey’s parentage/lineage was later unfortunately and haphazardly retconned by The Rise of Skywalker.)
A certain subset of fandom wanted a famous lineage for Rey and were angry that The Last Jedi didn’t give her one. But to be angry about this completely disregards what creator George Lucas set up in the Prequel Trilogy: that no Jedi had a famous lineage, nor a lineage at all. The Jedi in the Prequel Trilogy were supposed to be celibate. How then could any of them have a lineage? Every Jedi in the Prequel Trilogy, even Yoda, were the Broom Boy from The Last Jedi. Jedi lineages began with the Skywalkers. I have a sneaking suspicion that the celibacy rule of the Prequel Trilogy Jedi was in effect because the Jedi feared super-powerful Jedi lineages. How could super-powerful Jedi be controlled by the Council? They probably couldn’t be.
Some fans complain about Rian Johnson’s “democratizing of the Force.” I don’t like this because the term itself is a misnomer. Johnson did not invent it. George Lucas did in the Prequel Trilogy. Johnson didn’t change any notion of the Force to where suddenly anyone in the galaxy—I’m looking at you, Broom Boy—can use the Force after hearing the story of Luke’s bravery against the First Order. Anyone anywhere could already use the Force… if they were “Force sensitive” enough, or had enough midi-chlorians in their blood, as the Prequel Trilogy unnecessarily explained. The Broom Boy was simply Force sensitive. In the Original Trilogy, the Force was strong with the Skywalker family. Yes. But in the Prequel Trilogy, Lucas made the Jedi all celibate monks (which of course makes perfect sense to avoid attachments because the Jedi are all Buddhist monks.) So until the Skywalker family, there were no Jedi lineages. Every single one of the (supposed) 10,000 Jedi in the Prequel Trilogy were Force sensitive people born to parents who were not Force sensitive. And they did not pass on their Force abilities genetically because, again, they were supposed to be celibate. Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi simply reiterated what Lucas had set up in the Prequel Trilogy.
Some may feel that what Johnson did in The Last Jedi doesn’t fit with the so-called “Skywalker Saga.” They might say that having a whole saga about one family and then tacking on an unrelated protagonist in the third trilogy would be disjointed. (And yet, that’s what was going to happen in Colin Trevorrow’s Episode IX script. More on that in my The Rise of Skywalker review below.) However, I say that the Sequel Trilogy already had someone in it from the Skywalker family: Kylo Ren/Ben Solo. (Has anyone ever noticed how the names Kylo Ren and Ben Solo are almost an inversion of each other?) Rey could have, and should have, remained “no one” and simply been the new hero who either brought the villainous Skywalker (Kylo) to redemption or brought him down permanently. Rey could have then still chosen the surname Skywalker and had her own Jedi lineage. I think that could have been interesting. Rey did not have to be related to anyone famous to be an engaging character. Luke Skywalker was “no one” until the final moments of The Empire Strikes Back, almost two whole films into the Original Trilogy.
Force projecting.
I loved the force projection in The Last Jedi because it was an unexpected ability. Really, that’s the reason that I love The Last Jedi so much, because of all the unexpected choices that were made.
Interestingly, Johnson describes how he decided on using this Force ability and it seems to be what Jung described as synchronicity. Synchronicity is “the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear to have a meaningful connection when there is no explicable causal relationship between these events” (APA Dictionary of Psychology 1059). Johnson describes it this way:
I was in the middle of trying to crack this whole thing with Luke and the ending. I hadn’t quite got it yet, but I had this notion of what ended up being the projection thing that he does . . . I was sitting in the lobby at Lucasfilm . . . That book was sitting on the coffee table there in the lobby . . . I turned to it, and it described exactly what you saw. I landed on that and it was like a God ray came down or something. (qtd. in Cinemablend, “The Moment Rian Johnson Decided To Actually Use Force Projection”).
The Last Jedi detractors.
It’s unfortunate that I even feel the need to address those who did not appreciate The Last Jedi. Most critics praised the film highly. Rotten Tomatoes has an average score of 91% (Paul Tassi, “‘Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker’ Is Now The Worst-Reviewed ‘Star Wars’ Movie Ever”), but there was enough of an outcry from a small, but very vocal group of Star Wars “fans” that I will should address the complaints.
I’m still shocked that anyone disliked The Last Jedi. Film critics are very invested in films. They see them all the time. They know when they see something fresh and interesting. And film critics almost unanimously rate The Last Jedi as the second best of the Sequel Trilogy; 91% to The Force Awakens’ 93% (Paul Tassi, “‘Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker’ Is Now The Worst-Reviewed ‘Star Wars’ Movie Ever”), although I personally rate The Last Jedi higher than The Force Awakens. To me, The Last Jedi is so obviously not only the best of the Sequel Trilogy, but the best SW film since The Empire Strikes Back. Great writing (with interesting bold choices that subvert SW tropes, making it interesting, not boring/predictable like The Rise of Skywalker), good acting, incredible art design (the end battle of Crait is amazing), lots of references to films from film history (from Rashomon to Wings).
Some fans didn’t like that Luke refused to ride to the galaxy’s rescue. This plays into America’s myth of the loan cowboy, which comes from the Western myth of the redeemer, as explained in Chapter 5. To me, just because The Last Jedi does not follow this American myth does not mean that it is bad. I see it as refreshing in this aspect. Kofi Outlaw notes that, “Luke simply playing out the Yoda-esque role of the Sequel Trilogy is a weird thing to get upset about - let alone crucify Rian Johnson for” (“How The Rise of Skywalker Validates Luke’s Story in The Last Jedi”).
Some fans complained that new Force abilities were shown in The Last Jedi. For the life of me, I cannot understand why this would be a problem. New Force abilities are shown in almost every new Star Wars film that is released. In 2019, no less than four new Force abilities were displayed in The Rise of Skywalker—Force healing, Force draining, Force teleporting, and essence transfer is alluded to—yet fewer people took issue with those new powers than Luke’s Force projection in The Last Jedi. On January 19, 2018, director Rian Johnson responded to The Last Jedi detractors in a series of tweets in which he showed where he got this idea (Amino, “Rian Johnson Tweets His Source For Force Projection”). In the series of tweets—now deleted by the time I write this in January 2020—Johnson shows his bookshelf with a book from 2010 called The Jedi Path. He turns the pages to the “Advanced Force Techniques” section and comes to the entry titled “Doppelganger,” which states,
Doppelganger, or Similfuturus, permits a Jedi to create a short-lived duplicate of himself or herself or an external object that is visually indistinguishable from the real item. Those who have perfected this ability can create phantoms of any person of their choosing or trick and enemy into seeing more objects, such as droids, than are actually present. (Delia Greve, The Jedi Path 132)
This ability of Luke’s also displayed even earlier in the Dark Empire comic series from the early 1990’s. See Chapter 9 for more on this.
Some fans hated the Rose Tico character and the actress Kelly Marie Tran was harassed on social media to the point where she deleted her accounts (Tom Philip, “Kelly Marie Tran Deleted Her Social Media After Being Harassed by Star Wars Fans”). I will never understand the racist and sexist “fan” backlash against the Rose. Kelly Marie Tran is a perfectly good actress and Rose is a funny and knowledgeable character. A worthy addition to the cast. She’s like the Lando of the Sequel Trilogy. Also, aren’t nerdy white men stereotyped as being attracted to Asian women? I’ve always thought that was the case. Then why the backlash over Rose from that subset of fandom? I will never understand it.
Some complain about the “car chase in space.” They either don’t like the tracking through hyperspace or they complain about the use of “space fuel.” Tracking a ship through hyperspace as new technology is a perfectly fine choice. Needing enough fuel to outrun an opponent in space (which has no friction, so once you get going you continue at that speed forever)? Yes, that was an odd plot choice by Johnson. But odd does not equal bad. (Having Luke and Leia revealed to be twin siblings in Return of the Jedi after they had kissed twice in the previous film is also an odd choice. Not a bad one, just really odd.) As for space fuel: it is not talked about in the Original Trilogy, but the X- and Y-wings are refueled before the end battle on A New Hope, as they are in Rogue One (2016). Getting space fuel for the Rebellion is also a plot in a few episodes of the Star Wars: Rebels TV series. Lastly, obtaining a hyperspace fuel called coaxium was a major plot element of Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018). So The Last Jedi didn’t make it up at all.
Some like The Last Jedi, but still point out the Canto Bight sequence as pointless. All right. But I would ask those fans if the Bespin plotline in The Empire Strikes Back is pointless. Of course it is not. Yet all of the characters fail in the Bespin plotline, too, just as they do in the Canto Bight sequence. The Empire Strikes Back and The Last Jedi are all about failure as a linchpin for growth. Yoda explicitly states it in The Last Jedi. How can people love The Empire Strikes Back for it, but hate The Last Jedi for the same thing?
Subverting expectations and tropes.
Some may say that they don’t like The Last Jedi because Johnson subverted Star Wars tropes just for the sake of subverting them. But that wasn’t what Johnson was doing. The purpose of The Last Jedi’s subversion of tropes was so that new Star Wars stories could (finally) be told.
I’m surprised that many “fans” cannot see the subversion of Star Wars tropes that Johnson did as a good thing. Star Wars needed a bit of shaking up of expectations. (This was later proven true in 2019 when The Rise of Skywalker came out to low critical ratings.) I think that people who dislike The Last Jedi must just want the same story regurgitated back to them over-and-over again. And yet they are probably the very same people who complained that The Force Awakens was too similar to A New Hope. Just like the people who complained that Prometheus was too dissimilar to an Alien film, yet complained that Alien: Covenant was too much of a retread. When did surprises in storytelling and subverting expectations become a bad thing? Star Wars fans are too mired in hero-worship. That’s their complex. And the only way to healthily deal with a complex is to confront it.
Filmmaker and YouTuber Robert Meyer Burnett explained foreshadowing versus telegraphing in film. He says that, “The best storytelling is all about foreshadowing and not telegraphing, because if you’re telegraphing then the audience is ahead of you” (Burnett, “PT. 1: A Look At The Star Wars Episode IX: Duel Of The Fates Screenplay – Robservations S2 #317”). Furthermore, he states that storytellers/screenwriters should want the audience to be with them, not ahead of them. This is because a “deft storyteller” will “zig” when the audience will have expected them to “zag,” “And then they’re caught off guard and that surprises them. And it’s those moments that make stories great” (Burnett, “PT. 1: A Look At The Star Wars Episode IX” 39:43-40:26).
Zigging when the audience expected the story to zag is why The Last Jedi will always be the best of the Sequel Trilogy of films. Johnson played on expectations and subverted them. And while I like the two J.J. Abrams films, he telegraphed the story way too much. Just look at Han Solo’s death scene in The Force Awakens. The audience knew what was going to happen for a long time before it happened; the lead-up to Kylo stabbing Han was almost five minutes long (J.J. Abrams, The Force Awakens 01:45:00-01:49:10). Maybe some audience members didn’t want Han to be killed, but most knew that is was going to happen. And so it did. There was no surprise there. Abrams played into audience expectation, which is another reason The Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker feel like in-your-face fan service. Johnson played on and against the expectations of the audience, which is why The Last Jedi feels fresh, creative, and bold. In contrast, The Rise of Skywalker was completely unsurprising. It was as if storytelling boxes were being checked all the way through. It was boring. I liked The Rise of Skywalker more on subsequent viewings—because then I was watching it in the way I watch the Original Trilogy films, already knowing the outcomes—but on the first viewing I was almost bored.
As an example of bad subversion of expectations, one of my friends wondered how I would feel if Palpatine had won the day in The Rise of Skywalker. Once he said that, I thought that would have been a good idea. Evil won once, in the Prequel Trilogy, and it can win again. And that might have been more original because you were expecting Rey and Kylo to defeat the Emperor. However, it would have also been unacceptable to our American sensibilities. European films can get away with dour or sad endings. Not so in American cinema. American audiences demand happy endings. That’s why I think most people don’t like The Godfather Part III. It’s a bleak ending. The godfather dies. Bleak yes, but also natural.