Review: Star Wars: The Last Jedi

As titles go, The Last Jedi suggests a finality rare in modern franchise film-making. The Last Jedi: so we're only a few movies into their takeover of Lucasfilm’s Star Wars franchise and Disney are axing one of the series’ core concepts? That’s gutsy story-telling. And then the film ends on the opposite note, with a major character literally saying out loud that anyone who expected this story to be about “the last Jedi” is wrong. Guess misleading titles are part of the Star Wars tradition too.

This misdirection sums up the entire film: claim big narrative-shattering developments, deliver as little real change as possible. It's hard not to see The Last Jedi as the first Star Wars movie to fully embrace the idea that these movies don’t need to have a traditional story. The original series was about a struggle for the Galaxy that was also a family drama; the prequels explained how evil rose to power in the first place. Even The Force Awakens was about a variety of biggish things; characters leaving their pasts behind for a new life, the Rebellion trying to find Luke Skywalker while the sinister First Order overthrew the Republic and so on. But this film’s story is as follows: the First order have found the Resistance, the Resistance flees, there’s a battle, the First Order follows, there’s another battle, some side characters who did almost nothing meet their fate, the end. It’s the story of a minor skirmish where most people run in circles.

Still, there are plenty of subplots and side adventures that flesh out what is one of the more enjoyable Star Wars films to date. But previous films have been built around the idea that these “star wars” are winnable, that what our heroes are doing will lead towards a definite conclusion. This one repeatedly says that there will be no conclusion, that this battle will never end, and it's only the bad guys who want to discard the past to create a new future. “They blow you up today, you blow them up tomorrow,” as Benicio Del Toro’s morally ambiguous hacker says helpfully. Ending the story on a moment where a lovable space urchin pledges to carry on a fight that never ends feels more like Starship Troopers than Star Wars.

I think my favourite part in the new STAR WARS was when Laura Dern said “We can ill afford another Klendathu”.

— Anthony Morris (@morrbeat) December 13, 2017

Meanwhile, the now-traditional recycling of scenes, plot points and lines from previous films continues. An isolated training camp with an elderly mentor? One-man fighters taking on massive space juggernauts? Giant walking robots stomping towards enemy trenches on a chilly planet while tiny fighter craft try to hold them off long enough for the main force to escape? The Millennium Falcon swooping in when all seems lost to turn the tide of battle? Well met, old friend.

This running in place extends to the previously introduced characters, who in this installment either find their emotional arcs coming to a resolute end – at least one character will no doubt continue to appear, but their story wraps up in this film – or are kept in stasis, perhaps forever. It feels like Disney, worried about their new investment, seeded their first Star Wars film The Force Awakens with potential mysteries and developments then, when it all worked out just fine, made sure to kill off as many of those plot points as possible here.

To be fair though, part of that feeling is a function of a story which separates the three main newcomers on the Resistance side for almost the entire film: hothead pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) mostly spars with General / Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Laura Dern’s buzzkill Vice Admiral as they flee the First Order, Finn (John Boyega) has a mission that keeps him occupied alongside techy newcomer Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) and Rey (Daisy Ridley) is trying to browbeat Luke (Mark Hamill) into handing over his closely guarded yet useless Jedi knowledge.

(seriously, why did old-style Jedis need a decade or more of training when both Luke and Rey seem to have picked up the gist in a week or so?)

Still, if this was a franchise interested in character development they would have chosen a different story to tell. Which is another break from the past; the previous two trilogies were, at their heart, about the idea that people change and grow (in good ways and bad). Even the best parts of The Last Jedi – which would be the way that Rey and Vader wannabe Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) are somehow telepathically linked via the Force and basically have secret skype sessions where they hate-flirt all through the night – are heavy with the suggestion that either character could possibly grow to agree with the other and change their path in life.

Almost from the very beginning Star Wars has been about selling merchandise, and action figures need a consistent, unchanging backstory for “goodies versus baddies” play; what development action figures do have is more about changing costumes and getting cool new toys to drive around in. And for fans who do want character development, there’s all the ancillary media – tie-in novels, games, comics, possibly even spin-off movies – to keep them happy. The movies are the big spectacle that lures people into the franchise, where they discover it contains everything they could want from a story… just so long as they’re willing to purchase the expansion packs.

So while this is full of striking images, effective fight scenes (one lightsabre battle is up there with the series’ best), and even a few honestly emotional moments (mostly based around nostalgia for characters from the earlier, more character-based films), this also feels – even more than the blatant retread that was The Force Awakens – like the point where the rot sets in. Not because of any failure in the film-making; on top of the previously mentioned virtues this is also probably the funniest Star Wars film to date, with a firm sense of the characters as people with shifting moods and senses of humour. But while all previous Star Wars films presented audiences with a galaxy where all the characters’ struggles meant something, this presents us with a war that never ends.

There are plenty of decent stories that can be told against that backdrop: the USA has been fighting the Forever War since 2001 so there’s examples everywhere you look. But Star Wars has always been about brave heroes and evil villains battling it out against a high stakes cosmic backdrop: to have the end result always be a violent stalemate will eventually become depressing no matter how many cute aliens and wacky robots turn up. Presumably that's why future films are focusing on side characters (a Han Solo prequel, a non-Skywalker trilogy) who can have adventures with meaning without being involved in the wider struggle. It might have started a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, but the war they’re fighting rages to this day.

Anthony Morris