by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I went to the movie at the San Diego Public
Library and saw Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. I have a curious relationship to the Star
Wars saga because while I saw the first
movie in theatres as soon as it came out in 1977 and liked it enough I went
back to see it twice more, I missed all the rest in George Lucas’s Grand Saga
and never saw a Star Wars movie
again until a few months ago, when I bought the DVD of Rogue One — an interstital Star Wars movie not part of the main sequence which I thought
might make a convenient way back for Charles and I to re-enter the saga without
having to pick up the plot threads of who’d done what to whom in episodes 2
through 7. I was more than a bit disappointed in Rogue One, despite some interesting plot threads and the
presence of a good, if rather inconsistent, director, Gareth Edwards (whose
other films — at least the ones I’d seen — include Monsters and the latest reboot of Godzilla), because it lacked the quirky humor of the original
Star Wars and, as I realized
about a third of the way through, it was just The Guns of Navarone transposed into science-fiction: the bad guys have a
super-weapon and the good guys have to send in a commando team to blow it up. At
least partly because I was judging it as a stand-alone movie without reference
to Star Wars episodes two through
seven, I quite liked The Last Jedi
even though it had its limits: it was pretty much just a high-tech space opera,
and its occasional bouts of philosophizing (when I saw the first Star
Wars I thought the Force was a metaphor for
religion in general and Christianity in particular, but this time around it
seemed more like Zen) only slowed things down. It’s also a grandly depressing
movie — the good guys seem to lose just about every battle they get involved
in, and in a way it’s weirdly appropriate that The Last Jedi came out the same year that two movies about the
evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk in 1940 were released, because that
operation, too, was a military disaster but one that turned into a political
success because it mobilized the Brits who were left behind to resist and
ultimately win.
The Last Jedi was
both written and directed by Rian Johnson, and a lot of the criticism of the
film came from nit-picky Star Wars
fans who resented the directions in which he took some of the fabled characters
from earlier incarnations of the series — but I quite liked Johnson’s debut
feature, Brick (a
contemporary-set tale of high-school kids and drugs that avoided both the
noble-outlaws and just-say-no sets of clichés available to people who write
and/or direct drug movies), and while his later science-fiction film Looper didn’t seem as strong, it’s still a lot better than
most of the big blockbusters that come out these days. Curiously, Johnson was
fired from the last film in the main Star Wars sequence, which is due to be released in December
2019 (though another prequel, Solo,
just came out to disappointing box-office returns, and one of the reasons cited
in today’s Los Angeles Times
article about the fiasco suggested it was because the Walt Disney Corporation,
which bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion largely to get their hands on the Star
Wars universe and characters, went to the
well too soon and released another Star Wars movie just five months after The Last Jedi), and J. J. Abrams, who’s now in charge of both the Star
Wars and Star Trek franchises, is apparently going to take back the
directorial reins himself. The Last Jedi basically consists of three overlapping plot lines: Rey (Daisy Ridley)
is determined to learn to become a Jedi fighter and seeks out the legendary
Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill, appropriately cast as a grizzled old man after his
spectacular debut as the beamish-boy Luke in 1977), but Luke has exiled himself
to a faraway planet where he wants to burn the accumulated Jedi textbooks
containing their knowledge and die because he thinks the Jedi and their bad-guy
equivalents, the Sith, both need
to die for the universe to be reborn under decent auspices. Meanwhile, the
First Order, the ruling junta of
the Star Wars universe in this
incarnation, and its leader, Snoke (played by all-purpose motion-capture guy
Andy Serkis, who’s enacted so many of his roles with computer-generated faces
and bodies grafted on top of his own it’s a surprise to see his imdb.com head
shot and realize what he really looks like), are determined to wipe out the
Rebellion once and for all.
The Rebellion is led by General Leia Organa (Carrie
Fisher, also playing her character from the first film as she had naturally
aged; though it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the mavens at Disney and
Lucasfilm have enough “wild” footage of her they can recast her in the next
film even though she’s dead, if this is indeed Carrie Fisher’s last film she
went out on a high level: her part is a lot longer than the reviews indicated, she’s crucial to
both the opening and the closing of the film, and she turned in an excellent
performance), though she gets injured and turns over the reins to her
second-in-command, Vice-Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern). Both the women in control
have a problem on their hands: a hot-shot male underling, Commander Poe Dameron
(Oscar Isaac), who’s constantly launching reckless attacks against the First
Order’s giant dreadnoughts and star-destroyers that just get more and more of
the rebels killed. Poe gets demoted from commander to captain, but nonetheless
he still plots an attack against Snoke’s flagship. Unfortunately, the First
Order’s scientists and technicians have figured out a way to track the rebel
spaceships even when they do time-warp jumps and go into faster-than-light
travel, so the good guys need a way to disable the bad guys’ tracking system —
which means infiltrating a super-hacker with great skills to jam the First
Order’s security system so they can get onto the First Order flagship and
disable its tracking device so the rebel ships can make their escape to the
original home planet of the rebellion before they run out of fuel. (Just how the spaceships of the Star Wars universe are propelled is never made clear — at
least Star Trek creator Gene
Roddenberry came up with something faintly scientifically plausible — and one
of the odd things to someone coming to the Star Wars universe after years of familiarity with the Star
Trek universe is that no one in the Star
Wars universe ever invented a teleporter —
I had to keep reminding myself of that because my Star Trek-trained mind was wondering why the good guys
couldn’t get out of the bad guys’ traps just by having themselves beamed up to
safety.)
Finn (John Boyega), a Black crew member on a Resistance vessel, meets
up with Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran), a surprisingly homely Asian person on the
same ship, and the two team up to go to a casino planet called Canto Bight to
recruit their hacker; the guy they end up with is called DJ (no periods) and is
played by Benicio del Toro; he gets them on to Snoke’s ship and they disable it
long enough for the Rebels to make their escape, but then he sells Finn and Rose
out to the First Order. While all that is going on Rey (ya remember Rey?) has mastered the art of levitating objects that
you acquire with sufficient mastery of the Force, and she’s recruited by Kylo
Ren (Adam Driver), a.k.a. Ben Solo, son of Han Solo and Princess Leia from the
original cycle, who like his great-uncle Anakin Skywalker, a.k.a. Darth Vader,
went over to the Dark Side big-time and is now Snoke’s second-in-command — only
midway through the movie he assassinates Snoke with a lightsaber and declares
himself the new leader of the First Order, sort of like Kim Jong Un and his
relatives. Finn and Rose ultimately escape by stealing a First Order
spacecraft, and they high-tail it back to the rebel planet base — only the
First Order hunt them down and arrive on the planet with a giant star-destroyer
cannon ready to blast the rebel base to pieces — only, against the advice of
his field commander, General Hux (whom Poe derisively refers to as “General
Hugs” and who’s played by Domhnall Gleason, who proves that they didn’t make
the mold that produced Peter Cushing, who played a similarly cold,
matter-of-fact, bureaucratic villain in the first Star Wars), Kylo Ren gets sidetracked into a duel to the death
with lightsabers either with Luke Skywalker himself or an astral projection of
him, and though Skywalker dies and virtually the entire Rebellion is
annihilated in the battle, enough members of it are still alive (including Leia
— one imdb.com contributor noted that of the three principals in the first Star
Wars, Leia is the only one left alive since
they knocked off Han Solo at the end of film seven, The Force Awakens, while Carrie Fisher is the only one of the stars of
the first Star Wars who’s passed
on: Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford are both still among the living) that they
decide to revive the Jedi cult and keep on fighting.
It’s true that some of the
gimmicks are a bit wince-inducing — that new comic-relief “droid” character
BB-8, who looks like a bowling ball with a pool ball sitting on top of it, is really
annoying and I felt a sigh of relief when our old and genuinely charming friend
R2-D2 made an all too brief reappearance — and some of Johnson’s cuts from
storyline to storyline are so fast they almost induce whiplash, but overall I
quite enjoyed The Last Jedi. I’m
also fascinated by the fact that the Right-wingers who saw anti-Trump
propaganda in Rogue One — and
even started a (false) rumor that the film had been withdrawn from release and
re-edited after Trump’s victory so the makers could insert more anti-Trump bits
— didn’t come down on this one, since the First Order’s Snoke is pretty clearly
an avatar for Trump and Kylo Ren comes off as a sort of interstellar Mike
Pence, waiting for the idiot he’s serving to self-destruct so he can assume the dictatorship. (Adam Driver turns in a
marvelous performer as Ren, a character who reminded me enough of Shakespeare’s
Richard III I’d like to see him play that role; I’m sure he’d be a lot better at it than the overrated Benedict
Cumberbatch.) The Last Jedi also
deserves praise for a cast full of women as authority figures and enough people
of color we don’t get the impression, as we did in the first Star
Wars and virtually all science-fiction
films that preceded it, that the future is going to be all-white!
