A New Hope

In Defense of Star Wars: The Last Jedi’s Least Essential Plot

A spoiler-free examination of the film’s most disposable sequence.
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Courtesy of Lucasfilm

This post contains no major spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi—but it does include some aspects about the film already known to the general public, through marketing material and interviews. If you want to go into Episode VIII pure as the driven salt on the mining planet Crait, now is your time to leave. If not, let’s dive into whether this movie earns all 152 minutes of its very lengthy run time—or if there is some intergalactic fat that needed trimming.

In the two years since The Force Awakens debuted to rave reviews, crowd-pleasing cheers, and a record-breaking box office, there’s been some shift in public opinion about the J.J. Abrams-helmed return to the Star Wars franchise—led by those who think The Force Awakens is a little too much like Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. (That’s the gentler version; some harsher critics will call it a beat-for-beat remake.) And though that’s not an opinion I share, it should come as no surprise to either The Force Awakens fans or detractors that The Last Jedi—the second installment in this new trilogy—shares plenty of D.N.A. with The Empire Strikes Back. If you’ve followed any of the marketing around this film—including the Vanity Fair cover story—you’d know that Rey (Daisy Ridley), like Luke (Mark Hamill) before her, will spend a good deal of the film separated from the action of her rebel friends, training in a remote location with an eccentric Jedi. Just swap the swamps and caves of Dagobah for the foggy cliffs and caves of Ahch-To, and you’ve got Luke and Yoda born again—only this time, the Skywalker student has become the master.

The great news about The Last Jedi is that every part of this plot sings. Star Wars is always in danger of losing its light-adventure-loving fan base when it dives too deeply into the mystical world of what Han Solo once called a “hokey religion,” a.k.a. the Force. But thanks to a number of factors—including the best live-action performance of Hamill’s career, a parade of delightful new critters, some very light and self-aware fan service, Rey’s earnest, muscular devotion to what she believes is right, a critical examination of a light and dark philosophy, and a final, crucial element of the Ahch-To scenes that I won’t spoil—everything involved in this story line feels tight and never drags.

But the successes of Ahch-To cause problems elsewhere in the film during the first watch. Whenever the action strays from Rey, it seems impatient to return. There are urgent mysteries for her to solve: the identity of her parents, what happened to force Luke into hiding, and whether we will ever seem him play hero again.

In The Empire Strikes Back, while Luke was spelunking sleevelessly in Dagobah, the other half of the film followed Han, Leia, C-3PO, and Chewie to Cloud City, where Lando Calrissian led our rebel heroes straight into Darth Vader’s clutches. To quote Stefon from S.N.L., the Cloud City plotline of Empire had everything: the salty will they/won’t they of Han and Leia, the fussy fright of C-3PO on a mission, space capes, daring hallway-blaster fights, and surprise Vader.

The Cloud City equivalent in The Last Jedi, however, suffers in comparison. The rebel fleet—including Leia, Poe Dameron, Finn, and newcomers Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern) and Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran)—is trapped in a glacial game of intergalactic cat and mouse with the First Order, led by Domhnall Gleeson’s General Hux and Andy Serkis as Supreme Leader Snoke. Without diving into details as to why, it’s been revealed in marketing material that Rose and Finn go on a side mission to the glitzy city of Canto Bight—and here, as several dozen fans, journalists, and critics at The Last Jedi premiere agreed with me, is where the movie risks losing its audience. Yes, Canto Bight was controversial even before The Last Jedi premiered to general audiences.

It’s fitting, actually, that if there’s any excess to be trimmed from The Last Jedi, it would come from the plotline involving the über-rich and fabulous denizens of a high-class casino. Slice this part (and, in fact, a lot of what Finn and Rose do) out of the story, and the end result of the film wouldn’t be all that different. Impact on plot isn’t, of course, the only reason for scenes to exist; this is certainly what we should say to those who think Raiders of the Lost Ark didn’t really need Indiana Jones. But there also seems to be a lack of emotional growth in the Canto Bight plot. A lot of characters go on inner journeys in The Last Jedi and come out the other side changed in some way. Finn, I’m pretty sure, is not one of them.

Why not cut this side quest entirely, then, and bring the movie down to a trimmer run time? After all, at two and a half hours, The Last Jedi is the longest film in the entire Star Wars saga. The prequels all clock in at around the 130- or 140-minute mark, while the films in the original trilogy hew closer to 120. The Force Awakens was a cool 136 minutes—and with The Last Jedi, those extra 15 minutes are definitely felt.

But Rian Johnson and the rest of the powers that be at Lucasfilm were also in a tight spot here. In 2015 when The Force Awakens debuted and nothing was known about John Boyega’s stormtrooper, there was an assumption that he might be the front-and-center hero of the Star Wars franchise’s next generation. He was the one clutching the lightsaber in the trailers and on the poster. This, it turns out, was a bait and switch hiding the real hero: at this point, it’s impossible to deny that the light and dark swirl between Rey and Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren is the driving story of this Star Wars trilogy.

While a female hero like Rey may excite fans who have long been waiting for a woman to take on the role of lead hero in this franchise, Finn being pushed to the sidelines has been a source of frustration for others. In a 2015 piece for IndieWire, Andre Seewood wrote that what happens to Finn in the final battle of The Force Awakens (he’s knocked unconscious while Rey fends off Kylo) is “hyper-tokenism.” Why promise audiences a black hero only to take him out of the running when it really matters? Now imagine if Finn had been given even less to do in The Last Jedi. Imagine if that Force Awakens concussion became a full-blown coma.

It’s impossible to know which aspects of The Last Jedi began as reactions to fan responses to the first film. Johnson was writing Episode VIII long before Episode VII hit theaters—but Lucasfilm has, in the past, seemed to react swiftly to fans wanting more inclusion. J.J. Abrams’s decision to cast Gwendoline Christie in the potentially male role of Captain Phasma may have had nothing to do with the controversy over the gender imbalance of the initial Episode VII lineup, which had Daisy Ridley and Carrie Fisher as the only females in a cast of 13. But online feathers were considerably less ruffled as soon as Christie and Lupita Nyong’o joined the cast a month and a half later. Significantly, both of their roles—one obscured by a masked suit, the other by C.G.I.—could have been played by men.

The Canto Bight sequence—though considered a bit bloated—does provide two non-white characters, Finn and Rose, a rollicking adventure of their own. That representation has already had its impact on audiences, with L.A. Times critic Jen Yamato getting a lot of favorable traction on her initial tweeted reaction:

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It’s difficult, then, to argue in favor of hacking back Rose and Finn’s roles in order to streamline The Last Jedi. Seeing a young Asian woman and a black man on a mission to save the galaxy is very much a part of what Star Wars can offer a new generation of filmgoers. To complain that it dragged in places compared to the angsty drama of white characters Luke, Rey, and Kylo is to miss some of the aspirational purpose of Star Wars. In fact, Canto Bight does, in the end, deliver a surprising moment of inspiration (a result of later re-shoots) that, without spoiling anything, winds up being one of the film’s most stunning and hope-filled shots.

Additionally, Canto Bight opens up the Star Wars universe in exciting new ways. “What we’re going to see in The Last Jedi,” Lucasfilm Story Group creative executive Pablo Hidalgo previously told V.F., “are some people who have managed to carve out a life for themselves where they can live apart from the galactic struggle. They found a way to live above it or beyond it. There’s a class of wealthy that have helped build all sorts of loopholes in society that will always ensure that they’ll survive or even thrive no matter what else is happening out there.” As Johnson summed it up in our cover story, Canto Bight is “a playground, basically, for rich assholes.”

This is a Star Wars realm we’ve never really spent time in before. Neither rebels nor imperialists, the Canto Bight residents lend shades of gray to the universe in a way that’s explored in every corner of The Last Jedi. In fact, it’s the promise of Canto Bight—the break from the Skywalker saga and the never-ending struggle between dark and light—that offers a glimpse into Johnson’s planned new trilogy. “My pitch was basically, ‘Let’s give ourselves a clear, blue, open sky. Let’s say we can set this anywhere, and it’s not gonna be dealing with the characters that we’ve already established,” Johnson recently explained in a new interview with StarWars.com. “Let’s create a whole new group of folks, a whole new set of circumstances, and let’s go to new places and let’s create a mythic, beautiful, emotional, fun Star Wars story over three films.’”

In that way, Canto Bight is the spark that can light the flame of hope for the survival of the Star Wars franchise beyond the Skywalker legacy. And the best news of all of this? The second time I saw The Last Jedi, without the distracting, desperate curiosity of wanting to know what Rey might discover on Ahch-To, I learned to relax, stop worrying, and love Canto Bight. On a second viewing, so might everyone else.