The Last Jedi: Expectations vs. Reality (An unfair way to approach cinema)

Rating: 7/10 (31 August 2019)

The Last Jedi is a controversial movie with nerds and Star Wars fans alike. While people on both sides of the political conversation use this movie as a totem poll for their world views, I will not join in on such egregious banter. Movies are escapism, Star Wars is escapism, politics in movies, art, and Star Wars are not new. Despite what people people online drone about this movie doesn't make any statements about gender politics, Donald Trump, or a conversation specific to North American politics. Finding anti-conservative ideology in this movie requires mental gymnastics.
I'll start off by saying i'm not a Star Wars fan, not really. I don't interact with the fandom online or IRL, I don't bother ranking the films, and the source material isn't something I hate or love. My first decade of life on this Earth happened during the height of prequel trilogy hype. I'm 21 years old so I've lived through "Star Wars" culture. I don't think Star Wars if for everyone and up until a certain point it had a very strict criteria for it's fanbase, a criteria which has been shattered in recent years. Star Wars is loved and crafted by a more diverse group of people now than any other point in history, and that's perfectly fine, that happens with just about anything big enough to be defined as a cultural phenomenon.
My background is that i'm a white male with a rural less privileged background, so I don't want people to draw unfair conclusions about my review. I'm not some Vox writer who lives in a condo and trolls "Star Wars Fan Boys". But I don't appreciate or condone "old-school Star Wars fans" calling names and claiming everyone who likes the new movies are elitists. I understand there is a smaller group of people who hate "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" because it's an objectively bad movie, but that is a statement that attacks the idea of looking at art subjectively so please throw any logic like that out the window or don't bother reading any further. Here we go...
Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a good movie in my opinion and it's a sum greater than it's parts. It has very many flawed parts. In The Last Jedi's opening shot the camera unrealistically zooming down to the resistances rebel base says a-lot about about the movie before the runtime has even hit a minute. We know this movie will have unrealistic but enthralling special effects, energetic well-composed music, a corny but whimsy sense of wonder, and no focus whatsoever. The idea of starting a Star Wars movie immediately after the last one, while not obscene is jarring. If i'm correct none of the main movies did that, and though I haven't seen the spinoffs in their entireties I think it goes without say that they don't do this either. The story structure of this film is all over. The scenes with main cast members Mark Hamill and Daisy Ridley are expertly edited, the scenes with the rest of the main cast however seem to have less attention to detail. For the first two-thirds of the movie the supporting cast has a bloated and somewhat less artistically approached direction and editing style. Though near the end of the movie the energy of the final scenes are real spectacles on par with the best of Star Wars and the similar Harry Potter films. Over all it's not poorly edited or directed but it feels like Lucas Films took it easy on some of Rian Johnson's less creative ideas.
The script of the movie seems to be almost identical to the directing and editing. Ridley and Hamill carry the dated and almost too Star Wars-like dialogue style, while the supporting cast is stuck with a mish-mash of ideas that feel significantly less inventive or mystical than the Star Wars movies that came before. We see a naval battle in outer space, horse racing, gambling, a prison break, and a dog fight by the time we make it to the third act and the only interesting part is the dog fight. I'm surprised Rian Johnson directed this because instead of the grounded character moments in Looper we got something that feels a lot more like a Roland Emmerich movie. All spectacle and nothing tying it together or grounding it realistically. It's not boring for a child because they're enough energy on screen to keep them interested for most of the 2 1/2 hour runtime, but for an adult this cgi numb action-adventure approach is boring. That's precisely why the halves of the Star Wars prequels that don't look like Eiffel 65 blended with C-Span are flat and uninteresting. The only real saving grace here is that the CGI will age better than the prequels. It sucks because Oscar Issac, Laura Dern, Kelly Marie Tran, and John Boyega are all fantastic actors yet it feels like they're working on a college play. This film just criminally underuses characters and plot points introduced in The Force Awaken. By the end of the film however enough parts come together to make a decent film.
There's nothing wrong with subversion, looking into another persons point of view, learning the virtues of failure, or critiques of classism and the industrial military complex except that The Last Jedi take some of these themes halfway and really only commits to a critique of western cultures inability to accept failure. They execute this one idea really well and drop all of the other plot points in favor of tying up a film that had many bloated side plots. It's not even a confusing film, just a really simple one that tries to be more complex than it is. I think children and adults will reject the message of accepting failure because they see the film itself as a failed delivery of that message. But really it's all the confusing jargon around that message that makes it harder to find.