No Place in Her Story

The Last Jedi is really just a rehash of many of the ideas from the first Star Wars movie.


This post has lots of spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Please don’t read it until you’ve seen the movie.

My brief review of The Last Jedi: I liked it much better the second time I saw it.

No doubt that was partly because the second time was with an audience filled with nine-year-olds and their parents, who cheered and applauded at the best moments (of which there are several). But it’s also because I think the movie’s kind of an overstuffed mess in terms of plot and pacing. Once I could stop trying to make sense of where the story was going and instead tried to figure out what the movie was trying to say, I thought it held together a lot better.

You can sense the conflict within this movie. It’s a story that’s about rejecting all-powerful heroes, but it still needs to sell action figures. Its main dramatic tension is about desperation and being low on fuel, in a movie series that previously cared so little for practical details that it had a spaceship traveling from solar system to solar system without a working hyperdrive. The main story of The Last Jedi is essentially — almost literally — a Battlestar Galactica premise instead of a Star Wars story.

More than that, it doesn’t quite get the scale right. Star Wars stories tend to work best when they’re very personal, melodramatic stories set against a grand, enormous backdrop. The Last Jedi doesn’t seem comfortable dealing with more than two characters at the same time. It’s a bit like a tribe with no concept of numbers greater than a dozen or so; any group of more than around four people just ceases to exist. These movies are stories about gigantic armies, but The Last Jedi has to whittle the Rebellion down to a group small enough to fit on board one ship.

There are characters who’ve been reduced to one-dimensional shadows of themselves and seem to be in the movie only for the sake of their toys. There’s an entire subplot that is poorly motivated, poorly paced, and doesn’t accomplish much of anything. There’s an ethnically diverse trio of adorable orphans right out of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker. There’s a soldier who stops before a tense battle to taste the ground and declare “It’s salt,” clearly because an executive in a screening somewhere was briefly confused.

But there’s also plenty of terrific moments, both big and small. (Nothing as breathtaking as in The Force Awakens, but they still work on the “that was bad-ass!” level if not the “I feel like I’m nine years old again” level). And all the stuff that has no place in terms of advancing the plot does find a way to reiterate and re-emphasize the central themes of unity, humility, and self-determination.

One of my favorite of those smaller moments happens right before a cross-the-Galaxy conversation between Rey and Kylo Ren. She’s standing underneath the Millennium Falcon during a miserable rain storm, and she’s just delighted. In a movie series where characters always have to explicitly state how they’re feeling, it could seem out of place. Until you remember that she grew up on a desert planet, and it’s entirely possible she’s never seen rain before. Something that’s at best taken for granted by everyone else, and which is more likely a nuisance to everyone else, is to her something magical.

It’s a reminder of how inherently charismatic Daisy Ridley is. Rey’s already become my favorite character in the entire series, because of Ridley’s performance and a few perfectly-delivered lines of dialogue. (Like “I’ve seen your schedule; you’re not busy.”) She became a character who’s inherently good but neither sanctimonious or boring.

And not at all like Luke Skywalker, which is crucial. It’s unfortunate (but not surprising) that so many “fans” called out Rey as being an “unrealistic” wish-fulfillment character. I have to wonder if the movie was equating that with Supreme Leader Snoke, who scolds Kylo Ren for losing to a girl who’s “never held a light saber before.” And then calls him a beta cuck. In any case, though, Luke is the wish-fulfullingest George Lucas stand-in imaginable: the kid from a backwater town (by his own estimation) who loved working on cars and cruising around with his friends but turned out to be the lone savior of the Rebellion and the heir to the greatest power in the Galaxy.

But in the beginning at least, with that first Star Wars movie, we had a story of a whiny kid who looked off to the horizon and wanted adventure, and then found himself becoming a part of something much greater.

Which is something that Lucas gradually chipped away over the course of the next five movies. Star Wars was a story about a kid from nowhere becoming a hero; The Empire Strikes Back needed a twist that made him part of a lineage. Yoda said “wars do not make one great,” but was then given a moment to show his true power during the Clone Wars, which was to flip out and slice up bad guys. Obi-Wan defined the Force as a power that surrounded all living things and bound us together, and then Midochlorians happened.

Over time — or maybe just as I grew older, perhaps — the movies seemed more and more to say one thing but then show another. It’s entirely possible that I’m unfairly projecting, but they seemed less like a Hero’s Journey and more like a stream of consciousness from an anti-union billionaire with a special effects company.

Even if that is an unfair assessment on my part, I think it’s clear that they became less democratic and more elitist, more interested in queens and lords and senators than farmers and smugglers, and inexplicably making its central figure not only the most powerful person in the galaxy but the result of a virgin birth. It became less interested in the heroes of the republic or the rebellion, and instead obsessed with the redemption of its iconic villain.

That’s why I liked The Last Jedi’s callback to that first moment, when Luke was just a kid looking off to the horizon. At that point, Star Wars was still a series about self-determination, and The Last Jedi wanted desperately to bring that back to a series that had increasingly echoed the Emperor’s whispers of “your destiny.”

We already knew that there’d be no satisfying answer to Rey’s question of her parents’ identity, because abandoning a child to that life would’ve been unforgivable for any recognized character. But I hadn’t expected it to tie in so well to what this story has become: a return to fantastic, operatic, and melodramatic stories about heroes who choose adventure and choose to do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Kylo Ren’s story becomes interesting again, because he’s presented as the opposite of Rey in every way: not just dark side vs. light side, but someone who’s always lived in the shadow of his parents and uncle and was never allowed to define his own path. Finn becomes the good guy whose first inclination is to give up, and Poe becomes the hot-shot who wants to solve everything himself instead of being part of something larger. But really, they both could’ve been worked in more effectively or even left out of the story entirely.

As part of the initial buzz in response to this movie, there were a lot of people focusing on how JJ Abrams had set up all kinds of things to be resolved later, which Rian Johnson just steamrolled away. It seems absurd since for one thing Abrams was an executive producer on this movie, and for another these are installments in one of the largest franchises in all of entertainment, not indie productions.

But more than that, it seems absurd because The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi work well as a matched set, with the shared theme of “People Who Grew Up With Star Wars share what Star Wars Means to Them.”

The Force Awakens was all about how Star Wars feels, setting up moments that feel more like sense memories than actual plot developments, to remind you of how it felt to see spaceships swooping around to an orchestral soundtrack, and underdogs coming through to save the day at the darkest moment. And if that’s the case, then The Last Jedi is a reiteration of what Star Wars means. Or at least, what it was supposed to mean. The Force than surrounds and connects every living thing, instead of the Force that was a power that Jedi had to make things float.

So ultimately I can’t say I love The Last Jedi, but I do love what it tried to do. And I love being set up for the conclusion of a story that started for me when I was six years old, and not having any idea what’s going to happen next.