cosmic whiplash

Rating: 6/10 (21 September 2019)

From the first instant, it seems that writer/director Rian Johnson is out to contradict not only the expectations and curiosities generated from The Force Awakens, but indeed undermine much of what we know of the Star Wars cinematic reality. Not that there's anything wrong with that approach. On the contrary, part of what made episodes 1-3 nearly unwatchable was a slavish devotion to old plot devices and gimmickery, a devotion so total that not a single new idea surfaced, and what made The Force Awakens so refreshing was its proficiency with those devices that revitalized them through elaboration. In this sense, that expectations are contradicted right and left in The Last Jedi ought itself be to its credit. But sadly, the baby is too often thrown out with the bathwater. We find an unrecognizably foul-tempered, off-puttingly irreverent Luke Skywalker, whose former boyish charm turned calm mastery had been so central to what made the original story arc of episodes 4-6 compelling. We find the rebellion mocking a clownish imperial army, the former sinister and ruthless intellect of which had posed such ominous threat to our heroes, captured sobelievably in Darth Vader and convincingly cultivated in Kylo Ren, now diminished by ineffective comic relief in the form of General Hux. The rejectionism of The Last Jedi has only a few interesting ideas to offer in trade, namely a doubling down on the feminism so totally and embarrassingly lacking in the original films, and the shrugging off of a nagging, implied sense of elitism whereby the Force had seemed accessible only to a select few of some mysteriously royal lineage. The extent to which such revisions of the Star Wars cosmos are sustainable are perhaps yet to be seen.