The Last Jedi Finally Brings Balance to Disney's Force

Rating: 8/10 (17 December 2017)

Director Rian Johnson has delivered an intense, eye-popping, stirring and thought-provoking entry in the Star Wars saga, perhaps the best episode we've seen since the original trilogy. Johnson took the "Christopher Nolan" approach to Star Wars with this movie, giving it a darker, more realistic tone and a complex plot filled with reversals and reveals. In doing so, Johnson has created a far more interesting and involving movie than J.J. Abrams' bubblebrained retread The Force Awakens and the sloppy, unfocused Rogue One. While the movie lacks the dazzling visual splendor of George Lucas' prequels, most notably suffering from some uninspired creature designs, it makes up for that with its sheer sense of literacy. For the first time, audiences can have hope in the ongoing quality of Disney's Star Wars movies.
The Last Jedi is darker, grittier and more realistic than anything we've seen before in the Star Wars film series. Its battles are more reminiscent of Dunkirk than of Flash Gordon. This approach takes some of the original trilogy's escapist fun away, in the same way Nolan's Batman films did not provide the same simple entertainment of the previous live-action Batman movies. But in exchange for that, we get a rich and dense experience that gives thinking adults a lot to digest and enjoy.
Johnson makes almost all of the characters introduced in Episode 7 more developed, more believable, less cliched and less simplistic. He also does well fleshing out the new characters he introduces. Most importantly, Johnson succeeds at advancing Luke Skywalker's character into new and intriguing areas. Compare this to The Force Awakens which actually regressed Han Solo's character into a lazy retread of his original smuggler persona, giving us absolutely nothing new to think about.
Johnson wisely understands that for a character to be truly heroic, he has to first be seriously tempted by the dark side. Like Batman V Superman, this movie makes the characters into bigger heroes by forcing them to deal with the temptation of evil. In a movie filled with some of the strongest acting ever seen in the Star Wars movies, Mark Hamill fully embodies all the complexities of this older, grayer Luke in the best performance of his career. Hamill ages perfectly into his role in a way that his original trilogy co-stars did not.
Johnson is handed a lot of mess from The Force Awakens to try and clean up and is mostly successful in doing so. Some plot threads are perhaps still being saved to be resolved in the next and final chapter of the trilogy. Others may have been mercifully forgotten. Johnson had a herculean task on his hands to fashion a proper followup to movies created by two different previous directors and still make a movie that is worth seeing on its own terms. He did an admirable job in light of that challenge. It's no surprise that Disney has promised him his own separate Star Wars trilogy to create from start to finish. One can only imagine how much more solid and satisfying this new trilogy would've been if a real artist like Johnson had helmed it from the beginning instead of the serial plagiarist J.J. Abrams. This movie is the sequel we deserved from the beginning, something that respects what came before but takes everything in a new and different direction.