Movie Review Star Wars The Last Jedi

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Watched this today, after avoiding spoiler saturated conversations over the weekend. Spoiler alerts for those who may not have seen it yet. Someone did say on Saturday that it isn’t like The Empire Strikes Back, but in many ways it inverts the themes of the middle film of the original trilogy and breaks the karmic cycle and unfolding family destiny of the Skywalkers. Rey is not a woman of great noble but tragic birth, she has no family ties to Luke or Kylo. Snoke, aka Emperor Darth-Voldermort has little to do except boast that he can anticipate Kylo’s every move right before being halved by a move the audience sees coming from a mile away but Snoke doesn’t. We get to see the Imperial Guards in action and they are great – after standing about like the Yeoman Of The Guard in previous films. Why not train all the Stormtroopers to that standard? They would be invincible. Luke tells Rey that trying to draw Snoke to the Light won’t go as she expects which really tells the viewer exactly how it is going to pan out, namely very similar to what they did with the Khan reboot in Star Trek Into Darkness – he’s evil, he’s good, no, he really is evil. Various characters attempt to kill themselves to save everyone with varying degrees of success or failure, Rose’s Sister goes out just short of riding the bombs Slim Pickens Dr Strangeglove style. Finn tries to kill himself to stop the big microwave gun that looks like the Star Trek Doomsday machine only for Rose to near kill herself to stop him, while Luke does sacrifice himself with a supreme wave of Jedi energy to project himself from his hermitage island. Carrie Fisher’s scenes have a heart-breaking poignancy given the fate of the actress, but her miraculous self-propelled angelic magic flight from space just looks deeply silly. Some twists are clearly obvious. DJ’s betrayal seems rather inevitable, though Holdo’s real plan being almost scuppered by Poe’s well intentioned mutiny is neat. The various battles of the final act all seem so climatic they ought to be the final scene; Rey’s fight with Kylo and Snoke, the escape of the shuttle ships to the nearest planet, clearly in full view of the First Order, the siege at the final fortress, Luke’s death and transition to ghost guide for Rey, and the real finale, the Oliver Twist street urchin giant greyhound grooms admiring the stars and dreaming of being future players in the whole saga. Luke’s meeting with Yoda is lovely but why has it taken Yoda 40 years to tell him that failure is part of learning to win? Luke’s secret about almost murdering Kylo in his bed is an attempt to have a big dark shock moment on par with Obi Wan lying about Vader’s fate but Luke caves in and reveals the truth very quickly. We don’t have to wait for the next movie to discover the truth. Finn gets an out of the blue quest message from a minor character from the previous film about getting a codebreaker to help the fleet escape but they settle for another code-breaker instead. We couldn’t get Alan Turing but this bloke did a Suduko once. Will he do? Apparently not, but then, the code becomes the most irrelevant mcGuffin ever anyway. Luke as a hologram projection is impervious to an entire artillery assault and Kylo’s light sabre, but does hug Leila, suggesting that he might have been the real power behind her rescue from space manipulating events from much earlier on than we might have originally thought. A lot of characters who have great chemistry together as seen in the other films are seperated for much of the film, especially R2D2 & C3PO, Rey and Finn,(with Finn getting a new chemistry for Rose), Great set pieces, the casino (with Hamill playing the drunk who treats DV8 as a slot machine), the obscenely rich arms dealers in the casino, the stampeding greyhounds, Chewbacca’s Meercat friends, the hall of mirrors, the opening attack on the Dreadnought, with the only real negative, Leila’s Peter Pan flight – shame Admiral Ackbar had to just float off into space and die though. Arthur Chappell