The Force Enrages

Rating: 6/10 (24 December 2017)

In early 2017, Star Wars: The Last Jedi's trailer launched, and the world swooned. All but one. Instead, Mark Hamill's Luke Skywalker grumpily intoned, "This is not going to go the way you think" - an effective trailer-stinger line that only served to further fan the flames of excitement.
Boy, was he right.
No historical Star Wars whipping boys - Ewoks, Jar Jar, or George Lucas himself - have incurred the polarizing cultural ire of The Last Jedi, which courts opinions as diverse as 'best since Empire!' to 'worse than Naziism!' Objectively, it's a mixed bag of extremes, flaring up with standing ovation-worthy moments of giddy movie magic, but misfiring more than a blindfolded Stormtrooper. Halfway through my screening, clutching my Admiral Ackbar figurine in a death-grip,* I became afraid for the film I was watching. And, Yoda called it: anger and hatred were soon to follow. And the aftershocks of such potential falling to waste through carelessness and clumsiness? Suffering.
If J.J. Abrams' The Force Awakens courted nostalgia to the point of verging on being a New Hope remake, director Rian Johnson shrugs off the bridles of fan service with the disdain of a surly teenager - "Let the past die," poignantly, is less a trailer stinger than mission statement. Those expecting the 'dark Chapter II' will not be disappointed (content aside, the film is frequently so aesthetically murky it's frustratingly imperceptible during key scenes), but this is avowedly not Empire 2.0. Johnson, to his credit, makes Star Wars an utterly unfamiliar terrain, with bold left-field twists from canon and expectation providing a real sense of vibrant uncertainty. Nothing and no one is sacred or safe, and characters fail, fall, and grow in unexpected and fascinating ways. Divisive or not within the old guard of fans, a franchise that could too easily stray into stagnation here feels the most alive since the revelation of Luke's real parentage.
Unfortunately, Johnson's screenplay feels like a first pitch draft, anchored on a handful of bold story beats, but with preciously little fleshed out in between. There's an overbearing sense of uneasiness pervading both plot and tone, with momentous melodrama clumsily interrupted by anachronistically inappropriate Marvel superhero-style comedic beats. Poignantly, the film's two central plot strands are BOTH(!) anchored on inert evasion, lending an irksome, procrastinating feel to the narrative. And if that wasn't enough, Johnson effectively stalls his plots about stalling(!!), orchestrating an inexcusably artificially motivated second act jaunt to a casino planet (which may as well have been named 'MacGuffin'), for the sake of a humdrum Cantina rehash and a lazy message about war profiteering. A judicious editor would have exorcized the segment completely, and saved audiences from 20 minutes of bum-numbing redundancy.
Thankfully, Johnson finds his footing on the spectacle front. The Last Jedi conjures some of the franchise's most eerily beautiful settings and imagery (scars of red slicing across a porcelain salt planet; the mythic dampness of Ireland's Skellig Michael), tied together by virtually flawless CGI (though the dearth of fun and visually memorable new alien characters is a bummer), and the sheer perfection that is John Williams. Similarly, Johnson's action scenes are breathlessly enjoyable, from a succession of dazzlingly intricate lightsaber duals, to exhilarating and unprecedented usages of the Force, to an epic finale so jaw-droppingly jubilant it's about as masterfully bombastically entertaining as Star Wars gets - no idle praise.
Sadly, Johnson is more adept at balancing the Force than his ensemble. Many key characters are ingloriously sidelined (sorry, Oscar Isaac's blandly charismatic Poe, and poor Chewbacca, 3PO and R2...), underutilized (sorry John Boyega's formerly interesting Finn, Andy Serkis' woefully camp Supreme Leader Snoke, and Domhnall Gleeson's warily comedic relief General Hux), or killed - sometimes offscreen(!) - with an appalling absence of deference or dignity. Instead, Johnson introduces a cabal of new players... who are universally reprehensible and useless (Laura Dern's grim Admiral, Benicio Del Toro's transparently superfluous thief, and the intolerably chirpy Kelly Marie Tran's trite Resistance hero all range from forgettable to infuriating). And: the elephant in the room that is the tragic death of Carrie Fisher? Well, Fisher herself is as fiery and ebbing with sass and aching humanity as ever, but more than a few eyebrows will be raised at some of the brain-bending character beats Leia is subjected to throughout.
Ultimately, it seems that, if Johnson had his way, the film would singularly revolve around its titular trio of Jedi. The Rey/Kylo Ren/Luke Skywalker storyline is by far the film's most heartfelt and effective, and Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, and Mark Hamill each give blistering and formidably emotive performances. Their melodramatic morality play strikes unexpected depths of darkness, hope, and tenderness, and hypothesizing how their genuinely unpredictable story will reach its culmination will fill the year with fevered expectation.
Oh - and those worrisomely cutesy Porgs? They're inoffensive, charming, and sell arguably the film's biggest laugh. Eat it (heh).
The Last Jedi is, overall, worthwhile, but more fundamentally conflicted than Kylo Ren. It takes fearless strides with plot and characters, then mires them in hours of dithering uncertainty. It's infectiously, thrillingly zippy, then plodding and inert. It loves its internal lore and history as much as it resents them. It's both invigoratingly unpredictable and disappointingly safe. In a sense, it exemplifies the mantra of Yoda: it either Does or Does Not with equal conviction, with its successes mercifully (slightly) overshadowing its frustrations.
If anything, Johnson's enigmatic final shot poetically speaks both to the cyclical timelessness of Star Wars, and the tremendous joys it heralds for past, present, and future audiences. Let's just hope that Supreme Overlord Disney extracts the appropriate conclusions from The Last Jedi's furor: DO keep Star Wars joyful and nostalgic, but remain unafraid to take chances. DO NOT succumb to rushed, excessively convenient scripts, poorly crafted new characters, or forced, cheap tonal shifts. Otherwise, Hamill's other trailer stinger line may yet prove worrisomely prophetic: "It's time for the Jedi to end."
-6.5/10
*:(