Rian Johnson's To Kill a Franchise

Rating: 4/10 (15 December 2017)

AFI ranks Atticus Finch as being the best hero ever to grace the silver screen, and rightly so. His character and morals are impeccable. He and my grandfather are who I try to model my life after.
That is, until Harper Lee released her sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman.
To anyone who hasn't read it, let me sum it up for you. Lee takes what is perhaps the best literary protagonist ever and rips him to shreds. We see a man who seems to be the exact opposite of what we had come to love. Grey morals, pessimistic, hardened.
Rian Johnson must have loved that book, because he took a page from it when writing the script for TLJ.
One thing I love about Star Wars--what many fans love about Star Wars--is its structure of good and evil. The Star Wars universe has always been black and white. You knew where each character stood on the moral scale, with very few exceptions. (Good exceptions, I might add, such as the transforming of Vader at the end of ROTJ.) At the end of the day, you knew who the snakes were, and you knew who the saints were.
Now, however, it seems that even the mythical religion of the Force has succumbed to the postmodern world's view of all religions. There are no true good men or bad men. (According to one character in TLJ, these are just made up words.) There are different levels and twists; sometimes good is bad, sometimes bad is good. Black and white don't exist, only grey.
In TLJ, Luke Skywalker has become Atticus Finch: an old man who is seemingly oblivious to all around him, who cares little for what most people would consider good and just. He is a man who is a shell of his former self. Mark Hamill was right to say he disagrees with every choice his character makes in this movie. From his opening bit with Rey (taking the most important relic of the Star Wars universe and tossing it over his shoulder. This sums up the entire movie perfectly.It's as if Johnson just said to the fans "I'm gonna take everything you hold dear and say 'Screw it'") to the last line he says ("See you around, kid"?!?! Really?!?! Luke would never say that! Han, maybe, but never Luke!!) everything about Luke just feels...artificial. This is not the Jedi I wanted to be when I grew up. I feel cheated.
Let's talk about the other characters now.
Do you know why Han, Lando, and other characters remain fan favorites to this day? Because they were cast perfectly. Who else besides Harrison Ford with his permanent smirk could play the slimy, double-crossing, no-good swindler that we all know and love? Who else besides Billy Dee Williams with his smoldering good looks and velvety voice could play the old smoothie? The second installment in a trilogy is the perfect time to introduce some of the most memorable characters in a saga: Lando, Gollum, Jesse and the Old Prospector. This trilogy has given us three new characters: Benecio del Toro's character, Laura Dern's character, and the character of Rose.
What a disappointment.
What was Del Toro's character's purpose, what was the point? Why didn't he have the flower on his lapel like he was described? Did they ever address that in the movie?
You don't have an Academy Award winning actor play the nonessential part of a bumbling idiot no one understands.
And Laura Dern's character...ugh. Why does everything have to be so politically correct? I guess we'll never see a damsel in distress ever again in a Star Wars film. If ANH were made today, Leia would never have been captured and then rescued by Luke and Han.
Then we have Rose. A decent performance, but she's not memorable. Unlike Lando, she has no ties to established characters, so it's really hard to care about what happens to her.
There are so many other things wrong with the film: too much modern humor, too little romance, horrible political undertones, and pointless plot lines (Fenn and Poe could have been killed off during the first 20 minutes of the movie and it would have ended the exact same way. Much like Indiana Jones in Raiders, they are completely useless in this film.) And I feel like I could write as much about each of these points as I have written about my main grievance, therefore I will abstain.
TFA had problems of its own, but at least it seemed like a labor of love. One could tell that JJ Abrams is a big fan. And even though TFA seems to be a clone of ANH--imitation is the sincerest form of flattery--it had enough heart in it for me to enjoy it during multiple viewings. This newest installment, though...I'm just not sure if Johnson's--and Disney's--heart is in the right place. I think I will close my critique of this movie with a quote from another literary figure, Dr. Ian Malcolm. (Edited for the purpose of making my point.)
"If I may... Um, I'll tell you the problem with what you're doing here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it. You wanna sell it. You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could that you didn't stop to think if you should."