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You know what movie I'm kind of coming around to? The Last Jedi.
I know, I know, it's a terrible Star Wars movie, for all the reasons laid out eloquently by acoup.It's jokey when it should have been serious, it completely screws up both Stars Wars lore and actual military stuff, and it's a weird convoluted mess of a plot. None of the new characters are likeable, and it makes us retroactively dislike the old characters too.
But.... maybe that was the point. Maybe the movie did exactly what it said it would do in the title... it killed the jedis. Permanently. It's the last of them.
Imagine that you're Rian Johnson. You're not someone like Michael Bay or JJ Abrams who can endlessly churn out fun blockbusters. You're an "autor" director, who takes himself very seriously and writes all your own movies. Also, you're relatively young in your career, having made a grand total of 3 movies (all rather low budget) before being suddenly handed the reins to Star Wars. You've obviously heard of Star Wars, but you were never a big fan, and you've spent your entire filmmaking career under its shadow. Your personal inspiration for getting into filmmaking was Annie Hall, a weird surreal comedy movie that came out the same year as original Star Wars but is about as different as it's possible to get.
What do you do with this thing? The eyes of the entire world were suddenly focused on you. You know basically what they expect, of course- a fun blockbuster movie that's basically a soft reboot of Empire. You could do that. But that's boring- it's been done before.
I think what he did was to take it in a very "meta" direction. It's not really a Star Wars movie at all, it's a movie about the relationship that Star Wars has with its fans. Specifically the most obsessed, hardcore fanboys who have been rewatching the same few movies over and over for almost 50 years now while mindlessly consuming all the new products. I think he wanted to scream "get a life" at them like William Shatner. I also think he wanted to sabotage it a bit, to stop the Disney Empire from endlessly remaking this one silly movie from the 70s for all time. (part of the reason the original is so good is that it's a remarkably short and self-contained story- it was hard even for them to stretch it into a trilogy, and it really shows the cracks when you try to stretch it any further than that)
This movie is almost a parody of Star Wars, a much darker and more brutal parody than Space Balls. It starts by completely throwing logic out the window by showing a space battle with gravity to drop bombs from the world's slowest bombers. Then it portrays Leia as some sort of coward who tries to cancel the mission at the last minute when it's obviously correct for them to go for it. I believe this is intentional, to make us realize that Star Wars was always silly Space Opera and really should not be taken seriously by anyone. There's certainly no reason to think that "Princess" Leia was any sort of great military leader. She was originally just a damsel in distress, waiting to be rescued. Why should anyone be taking orders from her?
In a similar vein, I think Holdo was supposed to be incompetent. Why are all the rebel leaders in Star Wars so good at their jobs? Real militaries are full of idiots who get their jobs through political connections, and rebel forces even more so. Her strange appearance ("admiral purple hair") also suggests this. The movie is just being realistic here- an incompetent person is placed in high rank for political reasons ("the force is female!") and disaster ensues. That's actually a realistic and interesting story, it's just not the one we expected from Star Wars. It's essentially a comedy of errors.
Then there's all the Jedi stuff with Luke, Ray, and Kylo Ren. Here's where I think the movie really finds its mark. I remember a time not too long ago when "Jediism" was being taken semi-seriously by some people as a philosophy. The original movies made the Jedi look so cool and wise. But this movie just savages them. Luke is this weird, disgusting old man who has completely given up on everything. Ray is a silly, naive little girl who's constantly falling for everyone's tricks. Kylo Ren murders his own leader for basically no reason at all. Yoda makes a brief cameo just to use force lightning (!?) to burn down all the sacred Jedi texts, before literally telling us "time it is for you to look past a pile of old books." All of them completely fail at actually doing anything to affect the larger war going on- the resistance is mostly wiped out by regular guns.
I think this was done very artfully and intentionally to kill the Jedi. It's not easy to kill off a fictional character- as the next movie showed, you can always write in some excuse to bring them back to life. Even actors can now be brought back from beyond the grave by digital technology. But when you make both the Jedi and the Sith look, not just incompetent, but disgustingly, stupidly incompetent- it really turns the fans against them. It makes the producers not want to bring the dead characters back, which is what really matters.
A lot of people have criticized it for leaving nowhere for the next movie to go. All the plot beats from The Force Awakened were tossed aside, a lot of the main characters were dead, and the ones left alive no longer looked like heroes. I think that was the point. This is not a story that should be turned into an endless series of blockbuster movies. There's no where good for it to go, and it's unhealthy to just wallow in nostalgia. I feel like people have largely forgotten about The Rise of Skywalker by this point (what a bland, forgettable movie), but they definitely will remember The Last Jedi. The https://old.reddit.com/r/saltierthankrayt/ subreddit to hate on it is still, to this day, surprisingly active! People really hate this movie! (edit- I meant https://old.reddit.com/r/saltierthancrait/ but it's kind of funny that there's another active subreddit just to hate on that one, and at first glance I couldn't even tell the difference)
If I'm right, I think Rian Johnson pulled off one of the all-time greatest troll jobs in history. He got Disney to pay him to make a movie that didn't just parody its biggest brand, but made even its biggest fanboys realize some of it is. I feel like it used to be somewhat cool for everyone to like Star Wars. Or you could use it in an ironic way like the unipiper. I don't see any of that anymore. As Mr Plinkett tells us, Disney is cranking out Star Wars content for TV now, going in all sorts of crazy directions, but no one is paying attention. It just doesn't have the cultural relevance it once did. Harrison Ford might have spent much of his life grumbling about how he dislikes obsessive fans, but he still kept it going. Rian Johnson was the one man who could actually kill this franchise and save us from an eternity of shitty corporate nostalgia and soft reboots.
I am a huge fan of Expanded Universe, which also killed Star Wars in many other ways. There were many other interesting expansions, the most famous being that of admiral Thrawn painting the Empire in slighlty better way and subverting the movie narratives a little bit. Then there was now non-cannonic Yuuzhan Vong War, which made the post Empire republic look stupid, partly vindicating the Empire as they would have been able to deal with that out of galaxy invastion much more efficiently with their technology of star destroyers and Death Stars. And of course there were several force users, who claimed that there was not Dark or Light side and that the force is just a tool to be used for good. An interesting idea which was developed quite a lot in EU and which produced some Sith Lords and light masters questioning the dichotomy between the force sides.
The main thing going against The Last Jedi is not that it destroyed the themes in the original movies, but that it was just shit. The fandom would jump for other perspectives or even non-canonical things happening, if they were good.
I feel like that's a recurring problem in Star Wars. The original gets away with handwaving it away like "now we suffer under an evil empire, but once we had a glorious republic!" But every time it actually shows the details, the republic seems to be completely feeble and inept, while the Empire can at least
make the trains run on timedefend its people against alien threats. Like, in the Phantom Menace, it seems that slavery is openly practiced on some worlds and the Republic just doesn't give a shit.Something that always gave me pause in A New Hope in the officer meeting where Vader chokes the guy while saying "I find your lack of faith disturbing", is the way the Empire got rid of the last vestiges of the old republic. According to Tarkin, regional governors are taking over for the republic bureaucracy.
If we ignore the big villain energy he adds with the whole "fear" line, the change sounds... positive to me? In my mind an evil empire would be centralizing power, not decentralizing it. Bureaucracy is at the very best a necessary evil, usually closer to evil than to necessary.
Ultimately, the way things shake out in the prequel trilogy, I find myself rooting against the republic. Fighting separatists? Separatists are people who don't WANT to be in your republic, crushing them puts you on the side of meddling interventionist empires, not freedom fighters.
I mean, I don't literally root against the republic, because since it's work of fiction, it's written so all the cool people are that side, and all the kitten stranglers are on the other. But if you were describe to me in neutral terms with no loaded language and no villain speech about fear the political systems in the Star Wars universe, I don't think I would identify the good guys and the bad guys the way Lucas and Disney seem to think I would.
A regional governor isn't a guy you elect locally to represent his home region, it's a guy hand-picked by the central ruler to control his assigned region. Think Lord Cornbury, not George Washington. It's a form of centralization.
This, on the other hand, is part of my headcanon too. The separatists are clearly assholes, but they're also just the second-to-last of the series of puppets that Palpatine has been using to manufacture crises and accrue power, and at this stage of his plan the way to avoid such a trap would simply be to not walk into it. I'm honestly not sure whether this was a brilliant decision by Lucas (showing that the physical downfall of the Jedi was a consequence of their moral downfall, that they were all as prone to paranoid attachment and jealousy as Anakin, but for power and control and stability rather than for love) or a lucky-but-ignorant decision by Lucas (thoughtlessly internalizing a false lesson of the US Civil War, the idea that because separatism for an evil cause is evil, separatism can simply be assumed to be inherently evil), but it worked.
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The Empire basically never defends its people. Sometimes it actively sells them out. This is because the Empire doesn’t really have people. It has subjects, measured only by their value to the Emperor.
It might be more accurate to compare the New Republic to Imperial splinter warlords (Zsinj, Isard) or to Pellaeon’s Imperial Remnant. None of those have a great track record vs. alien interlopers or even each other.
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The opening crawl for that movie explicitly states: "The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute." Naboo is an outlying star system. Tatooine is even more distant from the capital than Naboo—possibly not even part of the Republic, as indicated by how Watto refuses to take Republic credits. These two systems are not representative of a "glorious republic", any more than Moldova and Transnistria are representative of Europe.
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