Star Wars: The Last Jedi 2017
B+
It has been two years since The Force Awakens, but The Last Jedi picks up immediately afterwards. The big finish to the last movie was Rey finding Luke Skywalker on Skellig Michael off the coast of Ireland. Rey is the center of the main story of the movie and the best part. But there are subplots going on as The First Order hunts down the rebel fleet and the rebels try to find a way to survive. It seems like a lot of fans are disappointed with the movie, and I will admit there are some bothersome flaws, but overall I thought the movie was entertaining, but you should know that I even enjoyed the prequel trilogy for the most part. It is kind of easy to pick a movie like this apart because not everything in sci-fi ever makes a whole lot of sense. You just have to accept it for the most part. People complained that The Force Awakens was too derivative of the original trilogy, but now that this one has ventured off in a new direction (kind of, still a lot of similarities), people complain about that too. I liked the new characters, enjoyed catching up with the old ones, and was surprised at the direction the Luke Skywalker story went. Some of it is pretty clumsy where if a character would just tell somebody what was going on, it would have solved a lot of problems. There were a few plot holes and the whole arc seems seriously crippled not just by events of the movie but the real life death of Carrie Fisher. I gave the previous movie an A and I was equally or more impressed with last year’s Rogue One. This movie is still fun, but not as good as those two, so it gets a B+.
spoilers
Extras always get killed in war movies, and Star Wars is not exception, but it seems like in this movie it is much worse. Quite a few times every single person on a mission is killed *except* the one main character or maybe a small group of main characters. And when that main character is saved it is somehow supposed to make the loss of all of those others okay? The message of this movie is instead of fighting what you hate, save what you love, but it never shows why that might work, except that after a bunch of fighting and killing, the main characters are always saved.
It seems like by killing almost everyone off (except Carrie Fisher, whose death will have to be covered in the next movie) and leaving the entire rebellion down to about a dozen people, that they have painted themselves into a corner. At the same time I guess it gives them plenty of options to bring in new characters and a whole new rebellion. Or maybe they really are saying that war isn’t the answer (odd since the series is called “Star Wars") and instead the focus will be on converting Kylo Ren.
Some of the plot holes or bothersome contrivances:
- Why couldn’t the admiral just tell Po what her plan was? There are several times that key information is left out for no reason. Why doesn’t Luke tell the whole story of Kylo Ren? Why doesn’t Rey tell Luke about talking to Kylo Ren? Why doesn’t Luke tell Leia that he is a hologram? Why doesn’t he tell the rebels he is just buying them time?
- A lot of people complained about not knowing where Snoke came from (obviously must not matter) or that Leia all of the sudden can use some Jedi powers, but I was okay with that since we know the force is strong in the Skywalkers. I don’t know how long it would actually take someone to die in the vacuum of space.
- The whole trip to the casino planet seems like a waste of time. They ended up with the wrong hacker, who betrayed them and foiled their plan.
- If you can just hyperwarp into a ship, why didn’t they do that with the other small ships instead of just letting them be blown up? Or try it with x-wings? Or do it remotely? Or do it in any of the other movies? Meanwhile none of it mattered much because almost everyone in the rebellion dies.
Written: 18 Dec 2017
Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD, Digital