Tag: Movies

FINN: Look, this whole place is beautiful. I mean, come on–why do you hate it so much?

ROSE: Look closer. My sister and I grew up in a poor mining system. The First Order stripped our ore to finance their military…then shelled us to test their weapons. They took everything we had. And who do you think these people are? There’s only one business in the galaxy that’ll get you this rich.

FINN: War.

This was originally going to be the part about Rey, but I decided to add this one instead after some recent events in Star Wars “fandom” that reveal a great deal of underlying ugliness. Basically, Kelly Marie Tran, the actress who played Rose Tico in TLJ, deleted her Instagram account after she was subjected to relentless criticism, slurs, and abuse pretty much ever since the film opened.

I find this deeply sickening on a number of levels. First is just the basic idea of such abuse, the idea that attacking someone famous online is even an idea that appeals to anyone. Being mean online has been a thing as long as being online itself has been a thing, but it really does seem to have taken off in the era of social media. Tran isn’t the first person to deal with such nastiness. “Fans” managed to chase Daisy Ridley off the very same forum after TFA came out.

It’s pretty easy, anyway, to see where such impulses come from. Tran is a non-white woman, and for a lot of people who almost without exception turn out to be white men, those are two unforgivable strikes against her. It’s one of the most deeply depressing realities of the time we’re in. It should be incredibly exciting, these social media platforms that allow us to interact with those whose work we admire. But we humans can be a very ugly and petty lot, so it comes as no surprise that many of us flip that behavior around.

As a lot of these people have crawled out of the woodwork this week, so too have a bunch who claim to be oh so committed to not being pro-harrassment or bigoted in any way, but gosh golly, can’t we have the Star Wars of old when it was all just about adventure and good guys and bad guys and none of this dreaded “SJW” stuff?” [For me, the term “SJW”–Social Justice Warrior, if you haven’t heard it before–has become a reverse-dog whistle, in that the second I hear someone say it in derisive fashion, I immediately stop listening to them.] This argument always strikes me as colossally weird, as the new Star Wars movies, storytelling issues aside, are certainly chock-a-block full of adventure and good guys and bad guys. This is one of those criticisms that puts me in mind of this exchange from an episode of The West Wing, when Sam is told that right-wingers have taken exception to some incredibly innocuous thing that the First Lady has said:

SAM: I don’t see it.
CJ: Well, you have to want it.
SAM: Oh. Now I see it.

Also obnoxious is a kind of response I’ve seen in a lot of places online, especially Twitter, when someone says that the harrassment Tran has endured is unacceptable: “But her character is awful!” This is either meant as an excuse to justify the harrassment, or it’s couched in some kind of mealy-mouthed “I don’t condone the harrassment, but Rose is an awful character!” The problem is that the one does not have a single damned thing to do with the other. Think about how stupid that sounds when framed another way: “I don’t condone setting the elementary school on fire, but their parking lot has a lot of potholes.” These types of formulations are attempts to direct conversation away from extremely toxic behavior by overwhelmingly white and male “fans”, and it’s bullshit.

But what of Rose Tico as a character, anyway?

Well, I loved her.

Rose is another of this new trilogy’s non-Skywalker and non-Force using characters, clearly intended at least partially to expand the focus of what Star Wars can be about. It’s not just that she’s Asian, although that’s frankly a perfectly nice development. It’s that she’s a mechanic who does her job and does it proudly. She’s a part of the Rebellion/Resistance that isn’t all lofty and concerned about tactics or finding lost Jedi masters or doing heroic things in an X-wing.

More importantly, though, Rose Tico articulates a moral vision for what she’s fighting for that’s quite distinct from anything we’ve heard before in a Star Wars movie. She’s not just another entry in the long line of people struggling against the Dark Side, or against the Empire’s vague tyranny. She puts a definite, specific spin on the nature of the fight, and she gives reasons for fighting that are very real. She also shines a light on a dark moral underbelly of how the galaxy does business. Maybe that’s the “SJW crap” that bothers people, but…yeah, I don’t care. That exchange up top, about how war can make people rich like no other thing can? That’s not some lofty SJW thing. That’s just history.

But Rose isn’t great just because of all that. She also shows Finn that there are other things to love, other things that are worthy. Not bad for someone who initially misinterpreted Finn’s attempts to escape. Some of her shifts of heart, especially regarding Finn, do come a bit too quickly, but I suppose that’s just the way things are going to be in this new trilogy. At the end, is she claiming to love Finn? Well…sure, why not? They’ve been through a lot together by that point. Is it romantic love? I have no idea. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Either way it’s fine. Rose has gone from innocent hero worship to being a hero herself, and she’s paid a lot along the way.

So yeah: Rose Tico is a terrific character, Kelly Marie Tran does a wonderful job playing her, and every dolt what says otherwise should just go play in traffic. Here endeth the lesson.

Next: Rey. I promise.

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Original TFA screenwriter Michael Arndt has said in interviews that a big problem he faced in drafting that movie was that no matter how hard he worked on making the new characters compelling, as soon as Luke Skywalker showed up he pretty much took over the movie. That’s why the structural solution to that problem was to postpone Luke’s appearance to the very end of that film, which always struck me as one of the things that TFA genuinely got one hundred percent right. TLJ gives us Luke…and he nearly does take over the movie, but Rian Johnson carefully structures things so he doesn’t.

The focus remains, mostly, on our three new main characters: Rey, Finn, and Poe Dameron. I had problems with these characters to varying degrees last time out. As well as they were played onscreen by their respective actors, the characters were all problematic as written. Less so the case with Poe, but Rey and Finn were only sketched very broadly, with no clear explanation at all of their motivations or desires. Rey is Force-sensitive and is pining for the return of the family that left her on Jakku, but so little is given of her backstory that it’s a surprise every time another of her considerable abilities is shown. (This is not the same claim that some dippy fans made of her at the time, calling her a “Mary Sue”.)

Finn, on the other hand, has skills but develops conscience out of the blue in a situation where that shouldn’t even be a possibility, and he forms an instantaneous bond with Rey that almost borders on creepy. Very little about Rey or Finn is explained or shown, and TFA never really gave either character a real, genuine desire, either. As I noted at the time, characters have to want things, and they have to want them for reasons. On either score TFA gave almost nothing to go on.

So here’s TLJ, which fares much better–in a way.

Rian Johnson doesn’t so much rectify the problems in TFA‘s characterizations as he pretty much ignores them. He instead takes Rey and Finn and Poe at this point and gives them very clear motivations and desires, even as those change as events warrant throughout the film. There is never a moment’s doubt as to what these characters want at any particular point in Johnson’s story. This is huge, because for me it led to a lot more investment in the characters.

Poe Dameron came off best in TFA, because he’s basically a pretty simple archetype: the action-loving flyboy ace pilot. He’s kind of Han Solo and Wedge Antilles blended into one character, always up for an adventure and action. He’s the guy who is most likely to stop and smile at the camera just long enough for a CGI twinkle to be added to his teeth.

In TLJ, Poe gets a more meaty storyline (and a bit more problematic in other ways). He’s still a brilliant pilot, but now he’s the one who chafes against his superiors, the one who always wants to err on the side of action rather than fleeing and trying to live to fight another day. He even goes so far as the defy General Organa’s orders in the film’s opening battle sequence, not for one second considering the price paid for a temporary victory or the possibility that retreat might be the best course of action. He questions his superiors constantly, flying into rage when he’s not told what “the plan” is and when it involves yet more retreat.

There’s an unfortunate note of sexism in Poe’s reactions throughout the movie. He respects Leia, but not enough to not defy her order and get all the bombers destroyed in an effort to blow up a single Imperial First Order ship. Later, when Leia is incapacitated and command falls to Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern), Poe openly defies her in front of the rest of the crew, and hatches plans to go around her back. He does grow in TLJ, eventually realizing that maybe he really does need to slam the brakes on his constant instinct to “jump in an X-wing and blow something up,” but this is…well, it’s pretty conventional, isn’t it? We’ve seen this before in any number of stories, right down to the moment when he realizes that Admiral Holdo had a good plan after all and maybe he just should have shut the hell up for a bit. Oscar Isaac does the best he can with the part, but there’s nothing new here. Maybe they’re setting Poe up to be General Dameron next time out, since everybody else is pretty much dead.

On the other hand, we have Finn, whose story in this movie might be my favorite. (This despite lots of fans who thought his story was utterly useless, but more on that.) When last we saw Finn he was comatose after getting his ass kicked to within an inch of his life by Kylo Ren. And when first we see him now, he’s still comatose (it’s only been a few days) in a medical capsule of some sort. He awakens suddenly, breaks out of the medical capsule, finds Poe, and asks the one question on his mind: “Where’s Rey?”

One of TFA‘s oddest character moves was Finn’s entire set of motivations. No hint was ever given as to why he felt the sudden need to defect the First Order (and no, seeing his buddy’s blood on Jakku is not a good reason, not for a stormtrooper who has been assigned to a mission so important it’s being led by Kylo Ren and Captain Phasma herself–would you take a total rookie on a mission like that?), nor was any convincing explanation ever given for his instantaneous attachment to Rey. Shared trauma and adventure can explain a lot of it, but not that level of pure devotion. That’s where Rian Johnson had to start, though, and start there he does. Finn’s first thoughts are of Rey, and then his thoughts turn obsessively to protecting her when he realizes that if she follows the signal of Leia’s beacon, she’ll fly right into disaster.

His solution to this problem is to snatch the beacon and get himself away from the Resistance fleet, so Rey won’t go anywhere near it so long as it’s being relentlessly pursued by the Empire First Order. He grabs the beacon and is boarding an escape pod when he is discovered by a young mechanic named Rose (whose sister has just died in the heroic, but ultimately futile, bomber run on the Imperial First Order dreadnaught). Rose makes the same mistake that a lot of fans have made in interpreting Finn’s actions: she assumes that he is deserting the Resistance because of cowardice. And yes, a lot of fans have made this mistake, and therefore they interpret what follows as Finn’s “redemption arc”, which is silly. Finn? A coward? Just days after he personally walked into Starkiller Station with just two other people because he wanted to save Rey?

Finn is no coward. But he does have an odd set of priorities. And that’s what changes for him in TLJ.

Rose is dragging Finn off to the brig when he susses out the situation (the Resistance fleet can be tracked through hyperspace) and he quickly figures out not only how that’s happening, but how it can be incapacitated. This too will keep Rey safe, but here’s something interesting: after he meets Rose, Finn never mentions Rey again.

He becomes invested, focused. He and Rose work very hard to make their plan work. It eventually fails completely (and more on TLJ and failure in a later installment of this series), but there are two key moments when Finn’s thoughts are driven to crystalize and he makes his choice. First is when he faces Captain Phasma in combat, gets the better of her, and corrects her when she calls him scum: “Rebel scum. And then when the only chance for the Rebels (by this point in the film we’re not even calling them “the Resistance” anymore) to survive is for Finn to destroy himself, he decides to do just that. (This whole scene seems to me, by the way, an allusion to the classic Star Trek episode “The Doomsday Machine”.)

Of course, Rose won’t let him. She crashes her speeder into his, sustaining bad injuries as she does so, but before she lapses into unconsciousness, she tells him, “That’s how we’ll win. Not by destroying what we hate, but by saving what we love.” This is one of TLJ‘s best moments.

By the end of the film, Finn has grown. He has learned and he has truly become a part of something. That’s not a redemption arc, it’s just an arc, and it’s a good one. He still loves Rey–the embrace they share when they are reunited, after she moves the rockpile, makes that clear–but he has found something new to believe in and to belong to. In the last scene he is standing over an unconscious Rose, just as Rey once stood over him.

Finally, a common theme I heard about Finn’s story is that it’s just filler, that it doesn’t really go anywhere or add anything. Take it out and everything else plays out the same, doesn’t it? Maybe, maybe not. Again, failure is a theme of this movie, maybe the theme of this movie, and in that sense it’s important. But even moreso is the movie’s very last scene, when the stablehand kids are sharing the amazing story of what’s happened on Crait. That one little boy goes off to sweep, calling the broom to his hand with the Force. But he stops and looks up at the sky. He is wearing the ring that Rose gave him, the one with the Rebel insignia on it. Finn and Rose met that kid earlier, and here he is, looking at the sky and holding his broom in such a way that the handle almost looks like a lightsaber.

That might make Finn and Rose’s story the most important subplot in the film, as Star Wars transitions beyond the Skywalker family saga. Finn and Rose made a connection, and that connection seems destined to inform the future.

So there we have Poe, Finn, and Rose. But what of Rey? She gets a post of her own…but first, a detour into some more thoughts on Rose and Star Wars fandom in general of late.

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Star Wars has always had a different thing going on with the mothers, hasn’t it? Anakin’s mother, Shmi, is killed by the Sandpeople in the event that catalyzes Anakin’s descent toward the Dark Side of the Force. Luke Skywalker never knows his mother, and only has a mother figure in Aunt Beru. Leia herself claims to know nothing of her own birth mother beyond vague images and feelings.

In this new trilogy, Leia herself is a mother, and her son Ben is now Kylo Ren, the major villain of this saga. He fell to the Dark Side, and yet she has for some time held out hope that he could be rescued. By all reports, the forthcoming Episode IX was to have delved more deeply into this relationship, but Carrie Fisher’s death took that off the table. (For the record: I want no part in a recasting of Leia Organa, no matter who it is.) Now Ben Solo really will be the “last Skywalker”, as in, the last person with a claim to that bloodline. As for Leia’s death? I’m sure that sad event will be dealt with eventually. Perhaps some notable science fiction author will be allowed to write that story in a novel someday.

Meantime, we have The Last Jedi. Of all the shifts we’ve seen in the galactic and personal state of affairs between the events of ROTJ and TFA, I am least vexed by the developments in Leia’s life. Aside from Claudia Gray’s wonderful Lost Stars, I haven’t read any of the newly-canonized books in the Star Wars universe, so I don’t have much idea of what has officially been going on in Leia’s life prior to this. But her evolution from political figure to military one is utterly believable. Even with my issues with the state of things at the beginning of TFA, I had very little problem with the idea of General Organa.

Even better, the films show Leia being truly in command. She isn’t one of those movie generals whose role is to basically say “Make it so!” once her brilliant underlings think of something. Leia is really in command here. She really has plans and strategies, she is genuinely invested in her soldiers, and she is willing and able to hold them accountable when they screw up.

Leia was always a person of action in the Original Trilogy, a trait she doubtless inherited from her Prequel Trilogy mother. She is still a person of action in TFA and TLJ, even if now she must be more thoughtful about her actions now that anything she does has even larger ramifications than ever before. It’s telling that she is only shown having the very briefest of moments when she can sit down to mourn Han, and her son, and an entire life that she never got to have. And when she gets that moment, it’s in front of a window with hyperspace whipping by in the background. Leia’s whole life is spent either in battle or on a mission, or on her way to the next battle or mission.

What impressed me most about Leia’s story in TLJ is that the film actually didn’t shy away from the ramifications for her of Kylo Ren’s fall to the Dark Side. He has a moment early in the film when he could blast her away with one shot from his fighter, but he doesn’t; later on, however, he knows that she must certainly be among the Resistance fighters left alive in the fortress on Crait, and he gives the order for his forces to storm the fortress and leave no survivors. He knows he is ordering his mother’s death in that moment. He has to know it.

Meanwhile, Luke Skywalker arrives and talks to Leia before going out to face the First Order. He tells her that he is going to face Ben Solo, but that he can’t save Ben Solo. Leia nods, sadly, and admits that her son is gone. I honestly did not think that the writers were going to have the courage to confront this moment, and maybe if JJ Abrams had written this movie, he wouldn’t have been. Rian Johnson, however, does. He also does it in such a way as to acknowledge the Star Wars trope that when one turns to the Dark Side, one effectively destroys their former self. Kudos to Johnson for following that story thread to its logical conclusion.

The film hints again at Leia’s Force-sensitivity, which has never apparently never been developed with any real official “training”. Should Leia have become a Jedi? I don’t recall if the original “Expanded Universe” stories ever went that way, but in these films with their new canon, it’s clear that she has not. She can use the Force, though: she Force-communicates with Luke a few times over the course of the Saga, and in TLJ she calls upon the Force to get herself back to the ship after being blasted out of it and into bare space. (The visual here–Leia flying through space in a pose that looks very reminiscent of Mary Poppins–has been much derided, but it didn’t bother me and anyway I wonder if it wasn’t a visual tipping-of-the-hat to my other favorite space opera film of last year, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.)

In his exchange with Yoda on Ahch-To, Luke is taken to task for not having passed on what he learned. I wonder if Yoda is upbraiding Luke for not teaching Leia about the Force. Maybe all along it should have been Luke and Leia, working together.

But we don’t know that it wasn’t, either.

From everything I’ve read, Episode IX was to have featured Leia most strongly of all. Apparently this trilogy was to conclude with the final act in Leia Organa’s story. That can’t happen now, but the final Leia story that we actually got is a pretty good one, even if it ends on a sadder note than I would ever have hoped for the heroes I was watching onscreen when I was twelve.

The film does miss an opportunity in Leia’s last scene, though. Maybe Rian Johnson thought of it but it was too late to have Carrie Fisher re-record the dialogue, but at the film’s end, when all that’s left of the Resistance is now the Rebellion and it consists of about a dozen people on the Millennium Falcon, Leia sits down next to Rey, who is holding the broken halves of Luke’s lightsaber.

REY: How do we build a Rebellion from this?
LEIA: We have everything we need.

Surely, after Rogue One this exchange should have gone like this:

REY: How do we build a Rebellion from this?
LEIA: Rebellions are built on hope.

If only.

But think about that: when we first met Leia Organa, she was searching for Obi Wan Kenobi, saying “You’re my only hope.” Now, when we see her last, Leia is that new hope.

Next: we turn to the adventures of our new Star Warriors.

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Ever since Luke disappeared, people have been looking for him…he was training a new generation of Jedi. One boy, an apprentice, turned against him. Destroyed it all. Luke felt responsible. He just walked away from everything…people that knew him best think he went looking for the first Jedi temple.

–Han Solo, The Force Awakens

The Force Awakens ended with Rey flying the Falcon, with Chewbacca and R2-D2, to a distant and lost planet where apparently the Jedi Order first began, on a rocky island in a wide ocean. Here she finds Luke Skywalker, who has disappeared. Rey approaches him and offers him a lightsaber–his lightsaber. His original lightsaber, the one that his father carried when he turned to the Dark Side, the one that Obi Wan Kenobi recovered after defeating Vader on Mustafar, the one with which Luke first fought Darth Vader before losing his hand and seeing that lightsaber plummeting down the central shaft of Cloud City.

In The Last Jedi, we continue this exact moment. Luke takes the lightsaber, looks at it, looks at Rey, looks at the lightsaber again. It’s his new “Hero’s Journey,” his new call-to-adventure–and he immediately rejects it. He tosses the lightsaber over his shoulder and walks away. Luke has no intention of returning to the fight. He tells Rey that he has come here to die. He really did give up on everything. He has come to Ahch-To, the first Jedi planet, to bring it all full circle. When he dies, the Jedi will have begun and ended in the same place. Luke didn’t come to the “first Jedi temple” to find some special wisdom or motivation. He really is giving up.

I am not really a big fan of this notion in itself. The Luke Skywalker who refused to give up on the idea of some small bit of goodness still flickering in the heart Darth Vader, his father and the most terrifying Sith Lord of all? That Luke Skywalker? And having the failed Jedi student be none other than Han and Leia’s son? No, I am not a big fan of that development. It doesn’t resonate with me. But Rian Johnson’s script for TLJ treats the idea with respect and logic, which I appreciate. It’s an old archetype in itself, the tired and weary onetime hero who has to drag himself out of his final, bitter retirement for one more attempt at glory. Decades after Ben Kenobi looked Luke in the eye and said “You must come with me to Alderaan,” along comes Rey to call Luke Skywalker to adventure again.

The problem I have–which Rian Johnson attempts to address, with varying results–is that we’ve seen Luke’s heroism before. We’ve seen him at his heights, and we’ve seen him when he’s already hit rock bottom and been in the pit of despair. We’ve seen him triumph, and yet here he is, utterly defeated. But we have seen nothing of his defeat. We haven’t seen him lose, we haven’t seen his failure. As deftly as Johnson handles Luke’s version of the Reluctant Hero and Mentor, he can’t do it total justice because the preceding film hasn’t done the heavy lifting that it needed to do to justify this story. Johnson tries his best with some flashbacks and a nod to Rashomon, but I am still left wondering the thing I wonder so many times in this sequel trilogy: “How can this be the way it all turned out?”

It’s hard to really get invested in a story when I don’t buy its premise in the first place.

So Luke has come to Ahch To to die. Fine…but is he sick? Has he become “old and weak,” like Yoda was? Or is he planning to live however many years it takes in seclusion on this island? And if he has come to die, then what of the “sacred Jedi texts”? Does he plan to burn them at some point and he just hasn’t got around to it? Or does he plan to die and just leave them there on the shelf? Eventually they’d get found again. Maybe he has those weird caretaker beings sworn to the task of destroying the texts if and when he dies.

As near as I can figure, Luke is trying to break the cycle. His father fell to the Dark Side, and his nephew has as well. He is weary of the whole Light Side/Dark Side dichotomy and the endless yin-and-yang of Jedi-and-Sith. He has come to resent the idea that the Jedi and the Sith hold the only claims to be able to speak for the Force, which penetrates all living beings in the universe. In an interesting moment, Luke openly acknowledges the events of the Prequel Trilogy (how that must have rankled some fans), noting that the Jedi at the height of their power still failed to notice the rise of Darth Sidious in time to keep him from utterly destroying them. He gets this wrong, of course (the Jedi of the Prequel era were not at the height of their powers; far from it, actually). But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that Luke is sick of the cycle of Light-to-Dark-to-Light again. He wants a new paradigm for relating to the Force, and in the absence of that, he’s content to let the old paradigm die.

The only way to win the game, for Luke, is not to play.

Luke’s story in TLJ isn’t just a second Hero’s Journey; it’s a redemption story. Luke blames himself for Ben Solo’s fall to the Dark Side (more on that whole story, which is one of my least favorite aspects of these new films, in a later post). It takes an appearance by Yoda to make Luke realize that he has a chance for his own redemption, and it is not by somehow redeeming Kylo Ren. Instead his task is to truly serve as a Master for Rey. She is already tremendously powerful, beyond even Luke’s abilities. Yoda takes Luke to task for not actually passing on what he has learned, and for being stuck himself in the very paradigm that he is trying to move beyond. Yoda acknowledges that the old ways of Jedi-dom should probably end, but he also points out that this doesn’t mean ending the entire thing, forever. He also makes one of the film’s wisest points in one of its finest moments when he says to Luke: “We are what they move beyond. That is the burden of all true masters.”

So, in light of all this, what should we make of Luke’s final actions? Are they pointless? All he really does is buy time for the handful of surviving Rebels to escape. But he has a much-needed confrontation with Kylo Ren, and thus he confronts his own past. There is a peaceful kind of determination about him in these moments, and even a bit of cockyness in the wonderful moment when he flicks an imaginary bit of dust from his shoulder. He is by design driving Kylo Ren to a distracted rage, and he leaves his former student with the bitter taste of a victory that was not a victory at all. The Jedi will endure after all, as will the Rebellion. And all this from Luke walking out with a laser sword to face down the entire First Order.

Luke Skywalker’s journey in TLJ is a very layered one. He has been a Campbellian hero before, and now he is the Campbellian mentor figure. But he is also still a hero, and he must walk his own path even as he helps Rey embark upon hers. He has to pass away in this film, because Rey’s final steps must be taken alone. Luke completes his job on Ahch To, sending a copy of himself to face Kylo Ren; then, the job done, he sees the binary sunset of his youth one last time as he goes into the Force and as the Force welcomes him home. He goes, as Rey tells us, with “peace and purpose.”

Luke’s path has always been unique. He was the Jedi who shouldn’t have been, the Jedi who arose outside all the old traditions and structures of the Jedi Order, the one who mostly had to figure it all out on his own. Even at the end, when he is planning to the the Jedi die with him, he does not bow to Jedi orthodoxy; it turns out that he has never read those “sacred Jedi texts,” and indeed he has cut himself off from the Force. But when he returns, when he lets the Force back in, he does so spectacularly, projecting a physical copy of himself across the stars. (And he is physically there, at least partly. He embraces Leia and puts the dice in her hand. Kylo Ren picks them up…before they, like Luke, disappear.) The film does suggest that maybe it’s the sheer effort of this that has led Luke to die, and maybe that’s a part of it. But it’s probably also partly that he knows that his work is done and that he can let go.

Perhaps it’s both.

So, with TLJ, the “Adventures of Luke Skywalker” come to their end. Only two Skywalkers remain, and one will sadly have to die off screen before the next episode begins. But meantime…what of Leia Organa, the last of the original trilogy heroes still alive when TLJ ends?

More on her in Part 3, “We fought to the end.”

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So here we are, more than six months after the release of STAR WARS EPISODE VIII: THE LAST JEDI, and I’m only just now working out how I feel about it. I suppose this is is how it’s going to be with me and Star Wars as it moves forward in its post-Lucasian era. I expect that I will feel a bit conflicted about every successive movie that comes out. My feelings on THE FORCE AWAKENS took a long time to crystalize, until I generally settled on the view that it is two-thirds of a great movie followed by one-third of a terrible one. ROGUE ONE I liked considerably more, especially on the rewatch when its fine qualities stood out even more and its minor flaws receded somewhat (still, my only real objection that that film lies in its final two minutes).

Leading up to TLJ, I was in a strange place. I was looking forward to the film because I liked the new characters established in TFA, even if I didn’t care for a lot of the writing behind them thus far. I knew that we’d finally get to see Luke Skywalker again, and I expected some very emotional stuff involving Princess and General Leia Organa, made doubly poignant by the awful fact of Carrie Fisher’s passing after she completed filming. Other than that I genuinely had no expectations regarding the movie. As the TLJ release neared, a week or two out I suddenly realized that I knew less about this movie than I had about any Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back. I went into TLJ knowing almost nothing about the story, which was a really interesting sensation. All I knew, literally all I knew, was what I saw in the teasers and trailers.

TLJ makes a lot of interesting choices. Some of its developments are clearly telegraphed, but in such a way as to conceal the telegraphing. Other times, Rian Johnson–our writer and director–seems to be telegraphing things, only to have them never come. Surely I can’t be the only one who, catching that throwaway glimpse of Luke’s X-wing submerged in the Ahch-To sea, expected a scene later when he would Force-raise it from the water, easily and effortlessly, just as Yoda once did for an unbelieving younger Luke. That didn’t happen. The film does contain call-backs to The Empire Strikes Back, but not that one. (In fact, TLJ calls back to nearly every episode thus far.)

For the first time we have a Star Wars film that literally picks up where the last one left off, an interesting nod to one of George Lucas’s most famous influences, the movie serials of his youth. We have a Star Wars film that points out gray areas in the established moral fabric of the Star Wars universe, and we have one of the most narrowly-focused Star Wars films yet. For a film with such an initially epic feel, what results is the most intimate Star Wars film ever made.

TLJ also takes what is perhaps the most elegiac tone yet in a Star Wars film. Revenge of the Sith was pure dark tragedy, and there was quite a bit of darkness in The Empire Strikes Back, but with TLJ we get our truest farewell to the Star Wars of old. We’ve already bid farewell to Han Solo, and now it is time to do the same for Luke Skywalker (at least in the physical sense). All that remains at film’s end of the Star Wars of old (aside from C-3PO and R2-D2) is Leia Organa, and given what’s gone before in this trilogy already it’s hard to imagine that Episode IX would not have depicted her death as well had Carrie Fisher not awfully and finally settled that issue by dying in real life. I imagine Episode IX may well open with Leia’s funeral. The feeling is of a conclusive passing-of-the-torch, an ending to the story that George Lucas began. Whatever stories come now are totally new and of a piece with Star Wars but not a part of it. In some ways I left the theater after TLJ with the same feeling that I left Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country way back in 1991, after seeing those actors’ signatures animated on the screen.

Back in the early 1970s, George Lucas appended a subtitle to one of the early drafts of a script he was working on for “a little science fiction project”: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker. But those adventures are now ended, and this final trilogy in the Skywalker family saga feels perfunctory in many ways. Kylo Ren, Ben Solo, is now the only remaining Skywalker blood relative (barring some sort of JJ Abrams bombshell that keeps the Skywalkers going, and honestly, we can’t really rule that possibility out, now can we?).

If George Lucas’s original concept was an epic space opera combined with a closely-focused family saga, then this trilogy, despite being cast as Episodes VII, VIII, and IX of that story, feel less like that tale than an appended three-film epilogue designed more to set the stage for other stories than to the completion of this one. I suspect this is borne of a desire to have it both ways: to please the existing fans, but also to start moving Star Wars into the post-Lucas and post-Skywalker era. This approach is not always successful and may explain a lot of what I see as the questionable creative choices of these films. The best of these post-Lucas films thus far, for me, has been Rogue One, but even that film was severely hampered by a closing two minutes of awful fan service after two hours of very compelling storytelling in which the word “Skywalker” was never uttered.

TLJ ultimately suffers from the issues that afflicted TFA, chief among them the saddening notion that after all the crap that our heroes endured over the course of the Original Trilogy–what Yoda once called “all for which they have fought and suffered”–their hard-earned victory amounts to nothing. Their lives basically go to shit anyway: the Republic never takes hold, a new Empire stirs, Han and Leia have a kid who turns to the Dark Side, Han gives up on everything and goes off to being a space loser, Luke gives up on everything and goes to hide on some planet with some really pretty islands, Leia finds herself right back leading a war effort.

Better, perhaps, if this story had been set not thirty years later but a hundred years later, when Luke, Han, and Leia are but beloved memories instead of the weary, haunted star warriors for whom we are less rooting in their elder adventures than to whom we are saying our slow farewells.

I’ve seen a bit of criticism of Star Wars in general (the films thus far, at any rate) for being too Skywalker-centric. People would speculate on Rey’s parentage, wondering if she was a “lost Skywalker,” and the retorts would come: “Why does EVERYBODY have to be related in Star Wars!!!” Well, everybody isn’t related, but more to the point, George Lucas’s saga was always a family saga. It was one piece of galactic history, told through the lens of a couple generations of this one family. This is nothing new. Dallas wasn’t about the city of Dallas; it was about the Ewing family. Dynasty was about the Carringtons, not Denver. Bonanza was about the Cartwrights, not the entire West.

TLJ is, for all intents and purposes, the real farewell to the Skywalker family saga. Luke and Han are gone, Leia must be, and it seems beyond the realm of possibility for Kylo Ren to carry on the line. Whatever comes of Star Wars now, it will almost certainly not be the story of the Skywalkers. Maybe you think that’s good, maybe not. I’m of mixed mind. I don’t mind the Skywalker story ending…but really, they do seem to have all gone out with more whimper than bang. The Skywalker saga is petering out. It’s a little as if the last season of Dallas follows the last Ewing, a guy named Pete whose last name isn’t even Ewing because of marriages, who has left the oil business, works in a call center in Fresno, and is also an asshole.

I am not saying that Star Wars absolutely has to be about Skywalkers forevermore, until the end of time. One of my favorite Star Wars stories ever is Claudia Gray’s amazing novel Lost Stars which follows two young people into adulthood as their lives carry them through the events of the Star Wars saga, with only a few tangential encounters with anything named Skywalker. I am not opposed to opening the Star Wars universe to new possibilities, new stories…but this approach, right now, does feel like a simultaneous offering to fans and a reboot, not unlike the also-Abrams Star Trek reboot of 2009. He couldn’t just start over from scratch with the characters and say “We’re starting over.” He had to make connections to the “real” Trek to keep the fans happy (jury’s out as to whether it worked), and now we have some of the same thing going on.

None of that is TLJ‘s fault, though–this movie had to start with the ending point left for it by its maddening predecessor. So, how did I really feel about TLJ? Indeed, it’s complicated. I don’t like where the film had to start, and I don’t like the baggage it was forced by the previous film to carry…but given those constraints, I actually did like the film a great deal. I may have even loved it, as unenthusiastic as I am about the general direction Star Wars seems to be taking right now.

Part 2: “It’s time for the Jedi to end.”

(BTW, one reason this review was so long in coming is that I wrote it out longhand first…and I kept writing…and writing…and writing. Seriously, look at this!

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