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s-cornelius · 6 years

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Everything that I loved about The Last Jedi

Y’all. Y’all. Star Wars was good. I spent most of the movie alternately cheering and crying and yelling (on the inside as to not disturb the other moviegoers), because holy shit.

As soon as I saw it, I wanted to see it again. There’s a lot going on in this movie, and I love (with few exceptions) all of it.

Everything that I loved (and all the spoilers) below!

Rey having to face the darkness on the island and (therefore metaphorically) face the darkness within herself.

Rey and Kylo’s force talks, which were beautifully shot/scored/sound designed to give you such a feeling of connection, and they only showed them physically together on screen once. The final time they talk and she closes the door on him, thus cutting off their connection and signifying that he’s too far gone, was perfect.

Kylo’s arc and the way that Kylo lets his pain and insecurities rule him. Rey faces the darkness in herself and looks for answers, but the darkness doesn’t overtake her, despite her lingering anger, resentment and need for vengeance. Kylo’s abandoment issues lead him to want to be appreciated and accepted and he feels like he gets that from no one. So he has to prove his worth constantly: prove it to Rey (killing Snoke--which is a bonus for him because he also gets out from under the thumb of a man who belittles him), prove it to the First Order (grappling for control with Hux), prove it to Luke (killing/defeating his former master). But he fails every time because his motivations come from hatred and resentment, etc. and there is no balance in him. Rey hasn’t completely dealt with her own abandonment issues, but she is looking at them (metaphorically in that weird mirror thing), and that’s a start.

Also, re: balance, notice how Luke wears white (for most of the movie), Kylo wears black and Rey wears grey. That’s not an accident.

Yoda’s Rafiki speech to Luke and Luke coming to grips with his own shortcomings/failures, which tie into the whole Skywalker legend story. Legends can’t have failures, but men can. Balance means successes and failures, and acceptance of both. (Also: Puppet Yoda! Frank Oz! I cried so hard during this scene)

The parallel between Luke’s desire to burn the Jedi books/tree and Kylo’s desire to burn down the First Order and Resistance. I wonder if by the end of this trilogy we’re not going to see a New New Republic but something completely different from before.

Poe’s arc was gr9, and I will hear no arguments. Poe, for all his coolness in TFA, doesn’t have much of his character sketched out. We know he’s “one hell of a pilot!” and he’s generally a pretty affable guy, but beyond that he’s sort of a blank slate. But TLJ picks up on the hints that he’s a little reckless and foolhardy (which are there in TFA) and builds a clear, well-defined arc for him, while also fleshing out his relationships with other rebels, but especially Finn and Leia. He wants to lead, a desire we get to see with only a well-timed shot to Poe’s face when they’re naming Leia’s temporary successor, but it’s clear that he’s a much better pilot than he is a leader. He gets three chances to make leader-type decisions, and in grand storytelling fashion, he doesn’t get it right until the third try. Also, arguably, his second bad decision, his mutiny, is way worse for the Resistance because it (indirectly) puts Benicio Del Toro’s DJ in place to betray the escape plan, which causes the destruction of those last transport ships. I wonder if Poe is going to think about this again in the next movie (tho it’s clear it was on his mind when he made the decision about the cannon).

But Leia, and Holdo too as she’s saying goodbye, never stop believing in Poe’s heart or Poe’s potential. Poe’s commitment to the Resistance is unwavering, and with his final decision to have the skimmers pull away from the cannon, he’s stepping up to be a leader in whatever comes next. It was beautiful and I loved every moment of it.

(Poe being a shit on the comms with Hux)

And Finn, whose first instinct is always to run, has to learn to fight for the right reasons. I love Finn and Rose Tico so much in this movie. Finn has been alone his whole life, and every connection that he makes makes him a better person. There’s still so much about the galaxy he doesn’t understand, and I love that he is shown the world through other characters’ experiences. It makes him very grounded, while still letting him marvel in the cool stuff in the movie.

I don’t know if a force sensitive Finn arc was dropped, or if they’re going to come back to it, or if it was never intended in the first place. But Finn is struggling with finding balance just like Rey is. Finn (like Rey, like Kylo Ren) has some abandonment(ish) issues, and he is angry, he wants revenge, and he doesn’t really know what to do with those emotions. If this movie allowed Rey to face her deepest fears, it showed us that Finn is still running from his. He still has to learn that action and motivation are important, something that Rey and Kylo Ren are also struggling with in their part of the movie.

And Canto Bight is a great visual metaphor for this--it’s a beautiful city built on a foundation of slavery, war profiteering, animal abuse, and I’m sure other crimes. Finn thinks it’s beautiful because he’s never seen anything like it before (action), but Rose hates it because she knows how it got built (motivation).

Speaking of Canto Bight, having the force sensitive kid in the last scene was awesome.

I also think it’s easy to point to Canto Bight and say “this is flab and should have been cut, and also Finn and Rose’s mission fails so what was the point?” But I think if you take out Canto Bight, you take out a big chunk of Finn’s arc, all of the character information about Rose (other than she had a sister and she’s a mechanic), and all of that good stuff about Canto Bight’s place in the galaxy (and how it’s a metaphor). And the kids, but I’ll come back to them. Canto Bight, even if the mission is doomed, is a crucial moment in the story, and it ends up doing a lot on what superficially looks like a simple heist (adjacent) plot.

Luke’s “you may strike me down” callback gave me chills even though I saw it coming.

Leia being a BOSS in the force was unexpected in some respects (we’ve never seen her actively use the force so much) and totally expected because Leia is hella strong in the force.

Speaking of Leia, when R2-D2 played the “you’re my only hope” clip, that was another time that I wept.

The story wasn’t about Luke or Leia--it was firmly, decidedly about the new generation (Rey, Finn, Poe, Kylo Ren)--but Luke and Leia got a lot more screen time than I was anticipating going in. Most of the choices Luke and Leia made that really affected the plot are in the past (and tied up in Kylo’s/Ben’s story), but their relationships with the new-to-this-trilogy characters are so rich. Poe and Leia have a history, and you don’t have to read the comics to know it. It’s in the way he touches her hand when she’s in the med(?)-bay(??), the way she slaps him, the way she’s the only one who can stop his mutiny, the way she finally tells him to lead the way at the end.

And Luke and Rey are both a Yoda-Luke redux (with Luke now as the hermit master), and not. Luke’s history, both the history that we the audience are intimately familiar with and the history that we learn slowly over the course of the film, make Luke less of a goofy, inscrutable mad teacher than Yoda. This makes it all the more appropriate that we see Yoda again, I think, there to impart one more lesson to Luke. Luke is not the wise old mad man in the swamp; he’s full of conflict and messy contradictions and doubt about his choices and guilt. Basically, he’s the farthest from any Jedi master we’ve ever seen before. But he still has things to learn, both from his old master, and from his student Rey, who makes the same choice he made in Return of the Jedi.

And Luke and Leia’s reunion scene was perfect. Everything about it was perfect. They played the love theme when he gave her the trinket from the Millenium Falcon and I cried.

Also, I do hope the Rey’s parentage mystery is really put to bed and this isn’t a red herring because this is sooooooo good. Great power and great destiny doesn’t have to concentrated in one or two families--it’s everywhere in everyone, and Rey’s proof of that. TBH I came out of TFA thinking that Rey was a secret Skywalker, but this is so much better.

Rey is a nobody, and that’s not a bad thing. Finn and Rose and Poe are all nobodies too, and so is that kid in Canto Bight. But they still have potential to do big, galaxy changing things.

And also showing us the kids telling the story of Luke standing up to Kylo Ren is so important. Luke, the legend, lives on to inspire another generation of nobodies exploited and oppressed by the powerful. This moment of kids sharing a stories tells us if those nobodies (Luke, Rey, Finn, Rose, etc.) could get out from under the thumb of the Empire and the First Order, why can’t these kids, and maybe they will. Because the power to affect change isn’t concentrated in the hands of just a few powerful families or of the senate or of the next fascist regime--the power to affect change is in all of us, if we only make the choice to do so.

These kids are the hope of the galaxy, the spark of the revolution, and just like Rey, they come from nothing. Great power and great hope can come from anywhere and it is in all of us. It’s a fantastic way to end the film.

If you want to read more about the ways this movie rules, I recommend the following two pieces:

The Force Belongs To Us: THE LAST JEDI’s Beautiful Refocusing of Star Wars by Film Hulk

THE LAST JEDI: A MIRROR, SLOWLY CRACKING by Chuck Wendig

Chuck Wendig lays out some complaints/criticisms in his article in the comments, and those are probably my four criticisms as well. But they are relatively minor imo, and the very very good definitely outweighed the minorly bad.

#star wars #tlj #tlj spoilers #all my thoughts #for now #i keep thinking about this movie #i think there is still a lot to unpack #i need to see it again :)

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