Here’s the shameful truth I’ve been carrying with me for all my years as a Star Wars fan: I just don’t like The Empire Strikes Back as much as I’m supposed to. Sure, its stunning opening battle—relentless AT-ATs looming on the snowy horizon—is an all-time highlight of the franchise. But after that, we have to spend so much time with Luke in the swamp with Yoda, talking about the Force and all his hang-ups about his destiny, his place in the world. It’s all a bit of a snooze for me. I’ve just never liked the mystical aspects of Star Wars as much as I’ve dug the rollicking rebellion, the space opera of it all.
Inasmuch as 2015’s new trilogy opener, The Force Awakens, modeled itself (heavily) on the original Star Wars film, the second installment, The Last Jedi, is the Empire of the current batch. It opens with another assault on Rebel forces, writer-director Rian Johnson beginning in medias res and setting a tone both witty and serious, exploring the familiar physics of the Star Wars galaxy and figuring out what new things can be done with them. (He keeps doing this throughout; it’s ingenious.) The opening is terrific—suspenseful and sad and brilliantly staged.
But then, of course, it’s time to get all spiritual with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill, in fine grizzled form) and budding young Jedi Rey (Daisy Ridley, magnetic), a possibility that filled me with that familiar Empire Strikes Back unease—the sense that I’m meant to be into all this metaphysical stuff, while really wanting to just get back to the blaster fights. To my surprise, that moment never really arrived as The Last Jedi laid out its long and intricate plot. There are moments in Rey’s journey toward enlightenment that are genuinely thrilling, from the sweeping shots of the rocky seabound island where she does her training to her intense mind-meld conversations with Kylo Ren (Adam Driver, deepening and clarifying his conflicted villain), which come laden with a troubling, intriguing chemistry. The Force is, to me, still silly Star Wars mumbo jumbo, but Johnson finds a way to underscore it with humanity, with a classical Greek rumble of true pathos.
On that front, The Last Jedi is a pure success, accessing the molten core of its drama and grappling with it in nuanced ways. Johnson expands the psychology of Star Wars, bringing shading and moral ambivalence to this mythic tale of dark versus light. No Star Wars has ever made a better case for the Force than this film, which finally mends the damage done by the midi-chlorian humbug introduced in the disastrous prequel films. One could make the corny assessment that Johnson himself has tapped into this elemental magic, has learned how to tease out its true power, the ways it can manipulate and enrich the film without drowning it in pseudo-religious pretension. That’s no easy feat, and for achieving it, The Last Jedi will connect with many a die-hard and newbie alike, I suspect.
The narrative involving Luke, Rey, and Kylo is so big and consequential that the film’s other plots—involving Oscar Isaac’s hotshot pilot Poe Dameron, John Boyega’s former stormtrooper Finn, and new characters played by Laura Dern and Kelly Marie Tran—sometimes struggle to hold their own. I’ve no doubt that Johnson understands a crucial Star Wars balance—the calibration between goofy creature gags, starship melees, and high-minded fantasy. But that doesn’t always mean he gets it right. Or maybe he’s just made one section of the story so good that all others feel that much less weighty in comparison.
With last year’s Rogue One and now this film, Lucasfilm—meaning Disney—has admirably followed through on its initiative to introduce more diversity into the main casts of its films. That Boyega and Tran, who plays a Rebel tech named Rose, get an adventure together is exciting. Seeing a black man and an Asian woman put toward the center of a huge franchise film like this is encouraging—because representation matters, yes, and because it gives a more thorough sense of what a rebellion like this might look like. It’s wholly more inspiring to see an array of different faces (and bodies, and species) banding together to fight oppression. That’s how it should be.
It’s a shame, then, that the righteousness of Finn and Rose’s place in the film is undermined slightly by the limpness of their mission. Perhaps feeling there had to be some kind of Mos Eisley–esque sequence in the film, Johnson sends the pair to a casino city full of all kinds of creatures. It’s fun, sure, but the whole operation ultimately turns out to be a red herring. At least there’s some nice musing on liberation during this stretch, reminding us of the real stakes of this long story—freedom is, after all, what the Empire denies and the Rebel Alliance promises. And in a gorgeous third-act sequence—which includes the film’s true Empire Strikes Back homage—Finn and Rose finally get the emboldened moments they deserve. I just wish they fit more integrally into the central thesis of the film, that they were just as special, in their way, as Rey is, glinting with messianic power as she ascends.
That’s not really how Star Wars movies are built, though, is it? The ordained ones do their desert walks and garden praying, while everyone else—scrappy, winning—scrambles below. I normally prefer the scrambling. But The Last Jedi flipped that equation for me, which is maybe what an inversion or a reflection of an older film should do. The Last Jedi feels less slavish than The Force Awakens did. It challenges the structure it’s intended to imitate, expanding here and contracting there to make a differently shaped film that nonetheless has the evocative, comforting hum of the familiar.
And it’s full of small pleasures. There are two moments of sacrifice in the film—both involving tenacious women, I’ll add—that are downright beautiful, fiery and tragic and stirring. They bring to mind the moving denouement of Rogue One, which gravely illustrated how many of the heroes in the fight against despotism are the ones who won’t live to enjoy the world they’re struggling to create.
I’m also in love with two of the film’s new species. There are, of course, the heavily touted Porgs, chirruping little chipmunk/puffin things that are adorable and amusing and employed with just the right amount of restraint. But there are also these fish creatures, nun stewards of Luke’s island—wimples and all—that are, in their weird way, perhaps the film’s most clever invention. They’re rendered with such character and care, giving off the humble, dignified bluster of life carrying on—of principle and tradition surviving—amidst the rot and ruin of war. They’re also just really funny.
The whole movie is funny, from Domhnall Gleeson’s nerd-rage General Hux to Oscar Isaac’s suave delivery to good ol’ BB-8, given nearly as much agency as the human characters in this one. It’s hard watching Carrie Fisher in the film, knowing that she’s gone now; it’s also a joy. She gives a spirited final performance, flinty as ever, getting a particularly great one-liner toward the end that’s perhaps more in character with Carrie than it is with Leia—but who the hell cares. She more than earned it.
I suppose I should end this review with allusions to Trump and the energizing, inspiring sight of people going to battle against cold and consuming fascism, because that’s where so many movies lead us these days. And all that rousing spirit is in The Last Jedi, in ways accidental and, probably, deliberate. But rather than let those real-life ghouls once again suck up all the air in the room, I’ll instead close on a more positive note: after all the tumult and horror of this year, here at the bitter end of it, we get to see Laura Dern do something really cool in a huge space movie, creating perhaps one of the most indelible Star Wars images of all time in the process. For whatever issues I may have with this ever-so-slightly lopsided movie, that alone is enough to make The Last Jedi a classic.
