I guess I’m one of those longtime fans I keep reading about in movie news; I have spent most of my life consuming Star Wars media, and I did not care for The Last Jedi.
By no means do I hate this movie; I was on the edge of my seat wondering what would happen nearly every moment. The acting and other technical aspects are pretty good. I would watch The Last Jedi again more readily than any of those craptastic George Lucas prequels.
But as I watched The Last Jedi, I gained a feeling early on that the movie was not for me when the good-guy commander made a Joss-Whedon-style “your Mom!” joke towards the bad-guy commander. My feeling of alienation kept increasing as more and more content involved self-aware jokes about Star Wars and the ideas I like so much from the earlier movies.
I especially did not like how the script treated the ideas and characters from the previous film (sequentially), The Force Awakens. The Force Awakens asked me to accept a lot of new ideas, characters, and uncertainty. I gave that movie the benefit of the doubt because it was so hard for a team to start an entirely new Star Wars trilogy. But the script for The Last Jedi ignored, negated, and even made fun of the content and aesthetics of the previous film. I think this was uncalled for, because the Force Awakens was a perfectly fine movie.
The mocking tone of The Last Jedi, combined with the script’s negation of concepts and characters from the previous movie, left me feeling like the writer-director of The Last Jedi felt contempt for Star Wars, or maybe the fans of Star Wars, or maybe the expectations of the fans of Star Wars … or maybe J.J. Abrams for (once again) starting stories and handing them off with no notes on how to finish them (see, e.g., “LOST”).
Or maybe I just didn’t buy in to Rian Johnson’s style.
Star Wars doesn’t have to be this way. I know this because last year I saw Rogue One and I LOVED it — even though it had so many technical problems (the first 1/3 of the movie is hard to understand and mostly pointless; it is also a public fact that there were many problems with the film’s production). I liked Rogue One, I think, because it had a serious tone and recreated the things I like about Star Wars. The Last Jedi is so much more competent technically, but was just not quite what I want or expect from a Star Wars movie.
Rogue One and The Last Jedi were dominated by the same themes and similar plot ideas. In both movies, the outnumbered, outgunned rebels must take extreme risks, stick together under pressure, confront mortal danger, and knowingly sacrifice their lives to resist a cruel, fascist, murderous empire. Rogue One, for all its technical flaws, satisfied me with a serious script about what it means to fight and die in a war of good against evil. The Last Jedi explicitly confronted that very theme… while simultaneously making far too many off-putting jokes. As I said, the movie begins with the rebel commander making a “your mom!” joke, and follows this with a scene of heroic tragedy and sacrifice as a rebel pilot – already certain of her death – struggles to activate a bomber and destroy a major First Order ship before she dies. The tonal jerk is sudden and extreme. In my opinion, The Last Jedi continues on like this from start to finish.
Most of the super hero movies are morphing into Joss-Whedon-style self-aware joke-a-thons (literally; they hired Joss Whedon to put more jokes in Justice League so it could be more like The Avengers). I got enough of that this year with Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Thor 3, etc.[1]For the record, I liked those movies.
I like a serious Star Wars movie. I hope Disney produces more movies like Rogue One than The Last Jedi.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | For the record, I liked those movies. |
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