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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.
Spoilers!
That moment Luke appeared in front of Ren on the battlefield and survived all of that weapons fire. That was so exciting. Luke was going to lay the biggest fucking beatdown on that Ren guy, who so badly deserved it.
And then it doesn't happen. Instead Luke's entire life ends just trying to be a diversion.
I wish I had seen it in theaters. I bet the disappointment would have been palpable.
I'm still kind of pissed off about it. I sat through that damn movie waiting for closure and it was denied. Luke checks out with basically a whimper.
Well played, Johnson. Definitely peed on Star Wars with that one.
Too bad they had Holdo sacrificing herself to slice that first order ship in half instead of Leia, given that the Carrie Fisher died so soon after. That would have been perfect.
Look, I don't want to defend TLJ overall, because I think it's a bad film, but I feel like this deserves a reminder of what the OT was about. Remember that the dramatic climax of the OT is Luke Skywalker throwing away his weapon and refusing to fight. The idea that what a Jedi needs to do is lay huge beatdowns on people is explicitly contrary to the text. Jedi are humble servants of peace, remember? Wanting a flashy show of power, a character demonstrating his dominance by crushing his foe, is Sith logic.
I thought that scene worked, actually, because even though Kylo Ren has all the physical power in the scene, he is obviously a pathetic loser and nobody, not even his own underlings, has respect for him. He has power but no presence. Meanwhile the projection of Luke has no physical power at all, but he has all the presence. He does not even need to be there to be more powerful than Ren could ever be. He, like Obi Wan before him, is more powerful than someone like Ren could possibly imagine.
The OT repeatedly makes that point. Just being able to destroy stuff, just being able to win fights, is not what makes one great. You may recall that the power to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.
Again, I am not defending TLJ in totality. I think that the entire Sequel Trilogy is a creatively bankrupt exercise in point-missing and I never want to watch that film again. But in this one, very limited context, I think it is really missing the point of what the OT was saying about power to conclude that Luke was in some way a failure because he didn't physically dominate Ren.
That's true, but I think it's a good feel it's a good example of what I mean when I say that the Jedi from the original trilogy are just very limited and stretched to the limits of what you can narratively do with them. It's very interesting to see a quasi-pacifist hero in a war movie, but you have to really rig the plot to make that work. I don't want to see Luke sitting around in a swamp offering mystical mumbo-jumbo doing nothing, like Yoda, but I also don't want to see him charging in killing everything. He sorta got lucky with RotJ that he could be a pacifist so that Vader could do the actual killing. It's fine to be in inspiration or philosopher, but someone still has to do the actual fighting, and they just never really had a good answer for that.
The prequel trilogy had the Jedi becoming reluctant leaders in a massive war, though, and then had that backfiring on them horribly in multiple ways. This was one of the good things about the prequel plot: it retconned Obi Wan's and Yoda's reclusion and pacifism as being a desperate reactionary attempt to return to the old pre-war ways, an overreaction which makes more sense from that psychological point of view than on its own merits, as the original trilogy itself showed their attitudes to be quite lacking. Fortunately the original trilogy also shuffled the last of the old guard Jedi out of the way in the end, clearing the stage for Luke's more tempered, more reluctant, more battle-tested inclinations toward pacifism and forgiveness, ready to try to build something anew.
How do you balance a unwavering love of peace with the varying need for violence? It's an interesting question, and it was all nicely set up for them to add new thematic answers to! They had a formerly main character who'd aged to fit the "old wise mentor whose advice might not be listened to" role himself (and whose wisdom therefore wouldn't necessarily disrupt the narrative tension of protagonists making their own mistakes), who'd seen the consequences of both extremes, and who definitely could come up with advice better than "I should try to murder my nephew in his sleep and then abandon the galaxy". All the sequel trilogy needed to do was complete the last third of the "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" dialectic, instead of going with "thesis, antithesis, potato".
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