You guys are off your rockers. This is the best Star Wars movie.
I instantly fell for The Force Awakens. But The Last Jedi is growing on me minute by minute. Sure it's a bit cheeseball, and some things are a bit spelled-out, but that's Star Wars. This is the best-made, most visually poetic, most subversive, most thematically mature film in the entire franchise.
SPOILERSMy only major problem with The Force Awakens was the way mass casualty was handled, which is to say... barely commented upon. By contrast, in The Last Jedi the loss of human life has a sharply-felt cost, from beginning to end, over and over again. We are continuously confronted with that gut-punch of death as the rebels suffer loss after loss. I still love TFA, but this felt so much more real.
Truly bizarre to see the complaints here about the twists and swerves. I thoroughly enjoyed having my expectations upended. They played fair, and each one was meaningful and felt right. One of the themes here, obviously, is "out with the old and in with the new." The movie tells us quite clearly: Kylo is not the new Darth Vader, and Snoke is not the new Emperor. It even attempts to upend what it means to be a hero, or whether traditional heroics are even useful right now — Poe's actions were actually kind of reckless and cost lives (and he has to reckon with that), and they do not allow Finn to martyr himself. The Last Jedi is a self-interrogating machine that is also somehow emphatically true to Star Wars.
When I saw The Force Awakens, I argued that Rey was a better character than Luke Skywalker. Now they've sort of brought them to the same level — Luke has never been more interesting, and Mark Hamill (to my actual surprise) has never played him better. I was ready to groan at Luke rejecting the quest, but he did it in a fairly interesting way, constantly and increasingly torn about what to do with her. Funny that people think this was too long, because I could have used another 20 minutes of Rey. What we got was pretty great, though.
Everything with Luke at the end was completely magnificent. The two suns setting — that killed me.
Here's what I said about Rey's parentage after I saw TFA:
I very much hope that Rey is not Luke's daughter. That would be most boring and widely-predicted outcome. Shouldn't they upend that expectation? . . . I'm much more fascinated with the idea that there are a select few people out there with whom the force is strong, and that in the right circumstances they can awaken it. We don't need yet another descendent of Anakin Skywalker.
So obviously I'm very, very happy with this. It imbues with more meaning and fully crystallizes Rey's origin story, which is definitely one of the best stories in the saga.
I love this film so much, I honestly hesitate to engage with criticisms, but I'll do a little...
The First Order is just chasing fifty people across the galaxy, seeming really worried about powerless people...?
Clearly the rebellion is not powerless. The First Order correctly recognizes that the leadership has to be wiped out, because they have decades of experience running and hiding, and a lot of these people helped take down the Empire. The First Order also correctly recognizes that the rebellion's message is powerful, and dangerous if it spreads, and they already have allies throughout the galaxy who will activate if there is enough hope. That's all in the movie. I don't understand your argument here.
I mean, the Snoke thing shows that this First Order/Rebellion thing doesn't make sense and has no reality. I like that his death is basically Johnson saying: "Fuck that" to the mystery box Abrams opened. But you have that First Order things coming out of nowhere, being an abstract threat to the galaxy. What galaxy? They wiped out the Republic because they don't want to deal with any real fight. It's not even about the weird irony of the past haunting the future. It's pure abstraction.
Pure abstraction? Did you not see them blowing up planets in The Force Awakens? There are still plenty more populated planets in the galaxy. We saw one of them in this movie and several in The Force Awakens. I for one am glad they allowed for some serialization — the First Order is on a particular mission here. We don't need to be shown everything they do all over again in every movie.
Then: everything about Rey is great. The plot twist is also a way to escape the mystery box but it's great that she has no place in this story. It's also interesting.
Yikes. I think you completely misinterpreted that. Or are you joking?
Yep ... they didn't build much of any kind of world starting with TFA and there's really no motivation behind the First Order's actions other than being Bad Guys, so they're essentially fighting for no reason over a galaxy that practically doesn't exist. What am I supposed to care about?
The wonderful and perhaps unfair thing about Star Wars is that each movie can stand on the shoulders of what's come before. This universe is not built in one installment. You do understand it's the same universe you've seen in all the other films.
The First Order wants to dominate the galaxy for the same reason any conquering army ever takes over anything — resources, wealth, power, and the perpetuation thereof. As for why they're evil — there is a dark side of the force, Snoke wielded the dark side, and he built the First Order.
I'm honestly not sure which parts of these arguments are sincere.
