Friday, December 15, 2017

"Star Wars: The Last Jedi"

 ½ 

The eighth (or ninth, from a certain point of view) installment of the Star Wars movies begins with a certain baseline of entertainment that comes from hearing the flourish of John Williams' fanfare, watching the opening crawl that fills us in on what's been happening in the galaxy, and the promise of some familiar characters.  Well, at least one.

There's an undeniable sense of excitement at the idea of seeing Luke Skywalker back on screen in a significant way, Luke who began the whole thing when he looked off into a twin sunset and wished for (and got) adventure.

It was always strange to me, though, how Star Wars took such care to set up the concept of Luke as the ultimate hero, Luke as the every-kid who can do great things, Luke as the mythical chosen one, only to lose sight of his story a bit.  In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke was largely relegated to a secondary role in the action, and Return of the Jedi separated him from the main action even further -- yes, Luke saved the galaxy by killing the Emperor and redeeming Darth Vader, but when he finally met up again with Han Solo and Princess Leia, they felt curiously detached from each other.

That detachment is all the more evident three decades later when a new hero of the story, Rey (no last name), sets off to find Luke Skywalker in a remote corner of the galaxy where he has gone to live a monastic life and -- very minor spoiler -- try to snuff out the Jedi religion by dropping out of society. Rey has come to train with him, something that has little appeal to Luke.

And meanwhile, in another part of the galaxy, the battle rages on, with the rebellion led by Princess Leia, now General Organa, fighting not the Empire but the New Order, which is the same thing.

And meanwhile, in another part of the galaxy ... and this becomes the problem with Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which starts to branch off its stories into seemingly endless permutations and wear out those of us unable to keep track, which I think will be a pretty large segment of the audience.  Following along with a Star Wars movie shouldn't be this hard.  And given that Luke Skywalker is at least ostensibly presented as the main character here, after a while you start to wonder what has happened to him.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is filled to the brim with plot points and digressions, mini-missions and narrow escapes, revelations and story twists, that even while it barrels along fairly merrily there's not a single plot that jumps out as the main one.  It wants to tell every story.  The narrative economy of its predecessors seems to have vanished.  It was easier to follow along when the stories were primarily about Luke, Leia and Han, or Anakin, Padmé and Obi-Wan. Star Wars: The Last Jedi gives us Rey and Luke, Finn and the newly introduced Rose, Leia and (also new) Holdo, Poe and BB-8, Kylo Ren and Snoke, and these are just the (more or less) main characters.  There are new supporting ones, too, and some returning ones -- one, in particular, who is the highlight of the movie and reminds us of the soul that seems so missing from these latest Star Wars movies.

That first trilogy of films, from 1977 to 1983, may have lost the Luke thread a little too frequently, but he was always front of mind -- here, it's hard to know who the main character is supposed to be.  Is it Rey and her destiny as a rebel leader?  Is it Luke and his seeming ambivalence toward the Jedi?  Is it Leia and her struggle to keep together the dwindling resources of the rebellion?  Is it Kylo Ren and his battle with inner demons?  Star Wars: The Last Jedi wants to be about all of that and more -- like the recurrent theme of losing hope, which leads to a final shot I found one of the weirdest in Star Wars history -- which unfortunately leaves it being about nothing in particular.

It settles instead for offering a long and convoluted series of interconnected vignettes. Its strengths are largely, and rather unusually for a Star Wars movie, in the commitment of its fine actors.  Mark Hamill is both wise and unsettled as Luke, Daisy Ridley is a determined Rey with a spark of fire in her eyes, the late Carrie Fisher has too little to do but clearly is relishing her role (especially toward the end), and Adam Driver is earnest in a role that comes across like Millennial Vader -- still a little whiny, a little angsty, and not yet a commanding or fearsome presence.  There's no really formidable work here, like that of Alec Guinness or Ian McDiarmid, but it's all more than solid.

Writer-director Rian Johnson takes the film on some extraordinarily long and unnecessary detours, including a very, very long sequence in a casino city that feels strangely as if it was designed for one of the visually overstuffed prequel films.  The casino scenes go on forever and add nothing at all to the plot, save for being an elaborate setup for an odd penultimate shot.  Everywhere the camera turns, there are weird creatures doing strange things and pulling our attention away from the story at hand.

That's not the strangest part of this oddly constructed movie, though -- that would have to go to ... well, I shouldn't reveal anything, but I'll say that even in Star Wars movies I'm pretty sure a few minutes in the vacuum of space would be fatal.  One sequence in the film suggests otherwise and strains credulity to the breaking point -- it took me out of the film entirely and left me giggling in the same way the "I hate sand" scene did in Attack of the Clones.

Have I become too curmudgeonly for Star Wars? Apparently so, and maybe I need to accept that. On the other hand, I keep thinking that maybe soon a Star Wars film will live up to even my impossibly high (or maybe impossibly low?) expectations, that it will catch me off guard and capture the spirit of why I fell in love with this grand adventure in the first place.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi largely sees the concepts of action and adventure as mostly interchangeable and they're not.  And that may be why there's the occasional sequence in The Last Jedi (I think now of a scene with Holdo, played snappily by Laura Dern, on the bridge of a ship) that captures a sense of scale, heroism, loyalty and commitment and almost redeems the entire film.

After two films (or three, depending) from the Disney-era version of Star Wars, The Last Jedi finally gets us to a jumping-off point for a continuing story populated almost entirely by new characters, at long last doing what those previous films frequently threatened to do and jettisoning the central storyline altogether.  It ends in a place so far from the original story of Luke Skywalker and his quest, or even Anakin Skywalker and his fate, that it's hard not to wonder if the final moments of Star Wars: The Last Jedi are intended as a hint of new adventure to come or a wistful little eulogy for the things Star Wars won't be anymore.



Viewed December 15, 2017 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

1900

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