Star Wars: The Last Jedi - On Balance

This post contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Extremely spoileriffic. Spoilers all the way down. SPOILERS.

So. *deep breath* I think The Last Jedi is the Star Wars film I have waited for and will stand the test of time better than The Force Awakens.

It is immediately clear that this is not a consensus. Talking to friends after the midnight screening, first reactions were very divided: a couple of them threw up “disappointing”, an assessment I so vehemently and indignantly disagree with I am actually a-quiver, others were much more positive but cautiously so. Compare this to The Force Awakens: at least anecdotally among my peers, the response was overwhelmingly positive with a few notable outliers. So how is this so different?

Well, first of all, I will concede with pleasure that the film is completely, utterly extra. Everything is at eleven all the time. There are about three movies worth of Star Wars in there. It’s A Lot. The Last Jedi is the Schroedinger’s Cat of the franchise. It is a film full of slapstick, peppered almost constantly with humour of every stripe, and some moments that are so earnest they slip into cringe. It is also a film that casts itself out into the furthest and darkest reaches of what the saga actually is, is visually the most stunning of the series (I don’t think this one is in doubt, only Empire comes close), and the very same moments that are so earnest come hauling a huge load of character development for just about everyone involved.

I loved it. In a complicated way.

Don’t get me wrong, I think The Force Awakens is a delight. It is exactly what I wanted from the rebirth of the franchise; it is 99% fan service, and I wanted to be fan serviced (further explanation: I am a very simple fan who is always on some level pleased by the existence of new Star Wars content). The vast majority of the beats come from A New Hope, reshuffled mostly very well*. But The Last Jedi goes back and asks what the original Star Wars trilogy is about in the first place, and does it by interrogating the most ill-defined yet fundamental part of it: the Force. It’s ambitious, and obvious, and unexpected, and I love it.

The Force - as many have noted - does not really make sense. We are repeatedly told it is about balance, yet the original trilogy is very much about the triumph of one side, and not just the Light side in general, but specifically the (Return of the) Jedi, a religious order (who, in turn, are apparently charged with preserving balance and like I said, it doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny). Yet here we have Luke Skywalker - the last Jedi, the Jedi - disenchanted by years of failure at trying to make old authoritarian systems work and rejecting those systems outright, which is not dissimilar to antagonist Kylo Ren, a structural choice that is as smart and complex as I want a Star Wars film in 2017 to be (something something alt right). That Kylo ends the film declaring himself Supreme Leader, and thus not breaking the cycle at all, is properly distressing (as well as a necessary levelling up in order to take on the primary villain role). That Luke ends the film accepting his failures and passing on the baton to the future - the promise of hope, the arc word of the film - feels both tonally different to the straightforward (and more epic) good vs evil victories of A New Hope, Return of the Jedi, and, yes, The Force Awakens, yet entirely in keeping with the essential promise of the original series, whose great climactic moment is the redemption of Darth Vader: no-one is good or evil, Dark or Light. Everyone fails but everyone can be turned. Balance.

I will admit that a lot of my thinking about Luke has been disproportionately influenced by this meme.

It is key that Luke gives up his life in an act that seems almost futile - allowing a straggling handful of Resistance to escape one last desperate time - far more so than if he’d gone out saber to beautifully choreographed saber with Kylo Ren for real. It is part of the emphasis on small, hopeful community-orientated acts of resistance and rebellion that is repeated again and again throughout the film. It feels like it’s taken a lot of tips from Rogue One (“Rebellions are built on hope”) and it’s all the better for it. It’s the defining theme of all of those disparate character arcs: Poe Dameron’s coming of age story is couched in terms of Not Blowing Shit Up, which is both very literal and very entertaining. Finn and Rose - two characters, both played by POC, who have experienced very direct oppression under the First Order - face almost certain death but “it was worth it” because they got to put that fist through a society of war profiteers first (if this is not Star Wars at its most directly anti-capitalist then…well, it is. It is exactly that). Admiral Holdo is prepared to look like a coward and traitor if it means the ultimate survival of the movement.

The emphasis on the Resistance - what it means, and those who make it up - is timely and really a new thing for Star Wars in its mainstream canonical films, yet, again, very Star Wars-y, with the Extended Universe practically built on the premise of wanting to know more about all of these people with cool names.  In the opening sequence, many die but we really get to meet them first - Paige, Rose’s sister, most prominently but others too: Billie Lourd’s character, the female pilot with the gold helmet who I fell instantly in love with, all of Poe’s backup troupe on board the cruiser. Our acquaintance is fleeting but the storytelling gives you their faces, allows you to touch base with the same people throughout the film, feel the cost of more loss at an already dark time (it allows us to feel along with Leia in particular, for whom loss is foregrounded in this film. It means more than I can say for Leia to be the audience’s touchstone for the original trilogy, despite Luke’s elevated screen time). I don’t think Star Wars is ever concerned about making overt parallels with the real world - nor should it be - but The Last Jedi is extremely conscious of the global context in which it is being made. Hope is a spark, and if you guard it, it grows into a blaze. And, to tie two threads together, part and parcel of that guarding is being flawed and failing and living with failure rather than (in Finn’s case, literally) self-immolating at the first chance. (Holy shit, did Star Wars just make a film about self-care in the face of global politics? Maybe.)

I am actually sparing you the brunt of my Rey/Luke/Kylo Ren feels but just picture me looking at this image whispering "can't even" a lot.

In the interests of balance, of course there are things that didn’t work for me as well, and I’ll probably feel them more on the re-watch: I could take or leave the casino planet as a concept (“Prequals-y,” was my partner’s entirely correct assessment) and Benicio del Toro left me kind of cold, despite evidently having a lot of fun**. I would have liked more Phasma, but I’m also not sure what else they could have done with her narratively, other than just have her hanging around the bridge and I guess they wanted to keep her in the wings for the third act. I think some of its pacing will feel more stumbling when I watch it again - there are a lot of plates spinning and they don’t all stay in the air all the time - and even though I’m a huge fan of what it means for Kylo Ren’s character, boy did they ever not give a shit about explaining Snoke.

And on the other hand, everyone from here to Jakku is going to talk about the visuals, so let me add my voice: the light-speed warp through the Star Destroyer, Rey’s hall of mirrors, and the moment when Kylo and Rey’s fight in the throne room against the red-clad henchmen (Knights of Ren, I want to say?) went into slow motion are some of the most beautiful things you will ever see in a Star Wars film or fuck it, maybe any film. Everyone is nailing their performances - John Boyega has less to do in this one but is never anything less than insanely great to spend time with. Oscar Isaacs sells Poe’s growing up and his instinctive impulsive charm. Daisy Ridley has matured a whole lot since The Force Awakens and, despite the occasional odd line delivery (and even that I now think of as an intrinsically Rey-ish thing) radiates a pureness of heart and conflicted need to belong that is too painfully Original Trilogy Luke for words. Laura Dern pulls off the stupidly difficult job of being a one-shot character that is tonally very new to the series (and has LILAC HAIR, and I could do a whole other blog about the presentations of femininity in this film). Kelly Marie Tran is instantly right in the universe in the most Rogue One-ish role of them all and nails the tricky Ascended Fangirl thing with utter charm (cf also Ingrid Oliver as Osgood in Doctor Who).

A word though for Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher. I think it’s fair to say that Mark Hamill’s acting ability is a (very loving) matter of some debate. (Personally, I’ve always been pro-Hamill - he’s not amazing in the original trilogy, but he is Luke, in the way that Ringo wasn’t the best drummer but he was the best Beatle. And besides, his voice work.) But I would say that here Hamill is undeniably, properly actually good. He’s funny, he’s gruff, he’s in pain, he’s completely over the top (Do I hate or love the bit where he brushes his shoulder off after they turn the guns on him? I JUST DON’T KNOW) but he also kisses Carrie Fisher on the forehead with just the right amount of weird romantic tension and Skywalker sibs, I die. I don’t need to say how sad it is that we won’t have her back. I don’t need to say how gutting it is that this film was so obviously teeing up for Episode 9 to be The Leia Film***, in the way this one was The Luke Film and Force Awakens was The Han Film. I’ve written before about the skill of elevating the role of Princess To Be Rescued, how much we feel the loss of her, and The Last Jedi is a punch in the gut, not least because it feels like here is a woman - authoritative, a leader, snappy, hard-edged, inspirational, weary, powerful - finally and completely getting the respect she deserves. It’s hard to watch for a number of reasons.

Not least because we'll now never get to see Leia using a lightsaber.

Above all though, I keep coming back to this film’s care - care for the characters whose story it’s telling, care for nudging those stories off on different vectors. Judging by the early reaction, I think some people feel that it was careless, and it may be the case that tonally it remains unresolved in places, the light and the dark unbalanced. But the flaws are a result of ambition, not laziness, and I was thrilled, and excited, and I’ll take that every single time.


Other assorted thoughts:

- I cannot believe Rey and Kylo Ren spent the whole film Force Sexting. “Join me on the Dark Side. P.S. Send nudes.”

- My wish for the Porgs to have some kind of narrative significance and not be blatantly there to sell toys did not come true, but they were cute and good for a handful of laughs so we’ll let it slide.

- A tip of the hat to Adam Driver’s control over his own face. I particularly covet the ability to look handsome at will when the narrative demands that we sympathise, and like a kind of mad wet cat the rest of the time.

- Mark Hamill and That Bit With The Blue Milk: A Play
   Me: So that’s where the blue milk comes from
   Mark Hamill: *drinks grossly, winks at camera*
   Me: I IMMEDIATELY REGRET THIS EASTER EGG

- How to be Poe Dameron:
  - older ladies
  - constantly pleased to see people
  - just, like, appallingly handsome
  - explosions.


...
*not well done - the First Order/Resistance. Which came first? What exactly is the First Order? Who actually was Snoke anyway? Who the fuck cares, I guess, is the film’s answer.

**I think I actually felt it was too close as a performance to his role as The Collector in Guardians of the Galaxy, which is tonally a very different film. A weird sense of deja-vu, maybe.

***Prediction: Episode 9 will open with Leia’s funeral. Massive ceremonial goodbye, eulogising Leia’s in-universe importance to the Resistance and Carrie Fisher’s importance to the series. And if they do it right, she can still remain a central presence to the film - referenced as the inspiration to keep going in the rebuilding of the Resistance/fight back against the First Order that will presumably make up a lot of Ep 9. She (both shes) deserve nothing less.

Laterblogs: Pew Pew: The Best Blowy-Uppy Films of 2016: A Careless List

Laterblogs #1: I wrote this AT THE END OF 2016 and then didn't post because I didn't know how to end it. I've just re-read it though, and I think it's solid.

...

Look, there's going to be a ton of film blogs and listicles out there right now telling you how Son of Saul was incredible and La La Land is going to sweep the board at the Oscars but honestly, I just want to watch things blow up and try to forget about literally everything that happened last year. 

So here, ranked worst to best, are some of those films. Spoilers.

8) Suicide Squad

Boo-icide Squad, more like, what a terrible - no, I didn't see it. No plans to. 

7) Batman vs Superman

Look, you don't need to me to list all the reasons why this film was bad. The internet has done that again and again and again. In fact, skip all of those links and just read this open letter to Warner Bros that poses the greatest question of our times: why are you still letting Zack Schneider make films? So I won't go into great detail on this one, but for god's sake, Batman branded people. They shot Martha Wayne IN THE FACE. Which feels like some kind of harsh metaphor.

6) X-Men: Apocalypse

Oh man, this film was so bad. I straight up laughed when Michael Fassbender's wife and child got killed. I did. I laughed right out loud in the cinema. I'm not proud of it. But I'm not ashamed either.

James McAvoy, heroically flying in the face of all logic, was still having the time of his life though, so for that simple bit of human joy it ranks higher than Bats vs Supes.

5) Deadpool

Billed itself as an "alternative" Valentine's Day movie, and it sort of was but, like, in the way that Hot Topic is "alternative". It was funny and Deadpool spoke to the camera and swore a lot, and there was lots of creative violence, and at one point Ryan Reynolds regrew his hand and for a while he had a little hand like a baby, but it obviously wasn't actually *subversive* in any way. It's still basically the tale of a white man trying to dude-punch another white man while a white-passing lady (Morena Baccarin) wears not many clothes.  Also there was this whole bit where Morena Baccarin wanted to fuck Ryan Reynolds in the ass because it was International Women's Day and truly, that is what the feminists want, and then he didn't let her. Like, come on Ryan, just let Morena Baccarin fuck you in the ass.

4) Captain America: Civil War - April 29

Cap Mur Civ War was, essentially, very entertaining filler in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It does a job. It gets us from A to B. From a united group to a disunited one. From a world of structures and binaries (SHIELD v HYDRA) to a world of chaos where anyone could be the bad guy, even when - psych - they think they're the good guy. 

AND IT'S ABOUT THE TIME YOUR GAY DADS HAD A REALLY BIG FIGHT. I think at least 60% of the film was just Tony Stark and Steve Rodgers looking at each other soulfully and sometimes shaking their heads a little in a manly, soulful, world-weary way. It's actually better to think about the film as a big old domestic because if you try to engage with the politics of it (Tony wants the Avengers to sign some accords saying they'll be accountable to the fictionalised UN and Steve doesn't want to do this because...'Murica? Idk. They do debate this. They debate this thorny, complicated, divisive issue for a whole scene before the punching starts. Again, feels like a harsh metaphor.) for one single second, you end up going "wha-bu-OBVIOUSLY YOU SHOULD BE ACCOUNTABLE. YOU HAVE LITERALLY KILLED INNOCENTS, HOWEVER INADVERTENTLY. EVEN NOLAN'S BATMAN USED HIS EXECUTIVE-POWER-BUSH-ADMINISTRATION-METAPHOR-PHONE-SATELLITE-SPYING THING VERY, VERY RELUCTANTLY." But don't think that, because Cap is the hero.

Anyway, it there was a scene where all the Avengers plus Spiderman just beat the crap out of each other, so it scores higher than Deadpool.

3) Doctor Strange

*surprised Jerry Seinfeld voice* This was really good! This was a really good movie! Because the trailer looked dumb af. Actually the things about the trailer than worried me were still the things that worked least well in the actual movie (casting of Bendytoots Cumberbritches, TSwints all dressed up in vaguely orientalist garb, Mads Mikkelsen as the same character he's played since Casino Royale) but it was also offbeat and wry and trippy and seemed to hold actual levels of, like, disdain for its main character before he enrolled on A Better You Through Tibetan Magics course. 

And tbh it was worth the price of admission for the stinger alone, which promises that in the future Bothering Cummenpatch will team up with Chris Hemsworth (Thor) and Tom Hiddleston (Loki) to find Antony Hopkins (Odin or maybe Loki pretending to be Odin so maybe Antony Hopkins doing an impression of Tom Hiddleston that I hope made him cry), and my soul rejoiced.

2) Ghostbusters

AKA THE GREATEST FILM OF ALL TIME THIS YEAR. *ducks* Oh man, I do not laugh out loud in cinemas (except when Michael Fassbender's family gets it, obvz) but I was doing my embarrassing Alone Laugh through the whole of this. Look, I'm not a diehard fan of the original - it's a classic and it's enjoyable and blah blah Your Childhood but it shits on its (two) female and (one) POC characters. I inevitably here have to say that the 2016 film's treatment of Leslie Jones, both onscreen and offscreen (a thundering silence surrounding the campaign of Twitter abuse she received, orchestrated by real life B-list Disney villain Milo Yiannopoulos) was shitty. And we shouldn't be afraid to hold things we love to account, and I did love this. I loved Melissa McCarthy, I loved the smart bundling of Kristen Wiig into a straight man role so she couldn't do too much damage, I loved the world discovering a whole new sexuality in Kate McKinnon's queer-coded maverick Holtzmann licking her guns. And I loved Leslie Jones too, and it breaks my heart that there will be no sequel because I think she would have got a more central role out of it. 

1) Rogue One

ROGUE M'FUCKING ONE. Eh? EH? Yeah. Let's end this shitshow of a year with the tale of a group of *forgotten misfits* who ALL DIE in the service of a greater cause. This film should be the model for your 2017: no-one gives a crap about you but you should do good stuff anyway because you might end up taking down the Death Star, inadvertently, after you have died. And then be the subject of a movie where people come out going, "That was really good but I really thought we were going to find out about the Bothans? Where were the Bothans?" In Episode VI, as it turns out, which I obviously knew and didn't have to Google because I'm a bad Star Wars fan. Anyway, Rogue One is probably the best war movie I've ever watched.

Carrie Fisher: *points to my mental state* You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought.

There is a tendency among Star Wars fans to assume that you came to it as a child, sitting wide eyed in front of worn out VHS tapes, soaring plastic x-wings through the air in chubby fingers. It didn’t happen like that for me. I watched Star Wars for the first time at the age of seventeen - my immediate family thought sci-fi and fantasy was a bit silly, a bit weird, and the nerd renaissance hadn’t happened yet so if you could reel off too many facts about lightsabers it was still a sign that you were dangerously unsocialised. But Star Wars saturated my consciousness. How could it not? It was Darth Vader advertising sinus-clearing gum, it was references in Spaced, it was a kind of proto-meme. It was too big to ignore, and so many people I liked seemed to like it, so it was time to do something about it. Accompanied by two of my best mates, I rented the trilogy from Blockbusters.

I can’t remember how exactly that instant love felt - I think I remember (though isn’t this how I feel ever time?) the swooping of my stomach at the crawl text, the first triumphant blast of the overture, the satisfaction of finally being part of this massive, culture-consuming thing. I think we watched all three films in one sitting, spurred on at my delight. I demanded that we talk Star Wars, exclusively, insistently, in the same way that we talked Harry Potter and Doctor Who and Lord of the Rings, with forensic exactness and affectionate mockery. We were, in 2007, just about touched by the internet as a daily part of our lives (no smartphones, this was get-home-and-log-on-to-Messenger time) and there was a definite net-inflected language to the way my shippy heart took to Han and Leia, the meme-ish smart-alecky snideness of the way we used the same Whiny Boy Voice to impersonate both Luke and Hamlet and their daddy issues (a school set text, plus we’d just discovered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and the notion you could get paid to do fanfic was properly life-changing). My Livejournal entry (haha, like I’m giving you the link) recording the momentous occasion is all “OMG”s and “made of win”. I was seventeen, and I was young enough to be delighted. 

One of our regular rainy lunchtime chats was to ‘cast’ members of our friendship group as characters in a film; my friend turning to me and saying “You’re probably the most Leia-ish, sort of like, ‘why aren’t things happening? I have told them to be happening’” was, to my teenage self - fuck it, to my adult self - the most cherished of compliments. I was of an age where you begin to form Views About The World, and Leia provided a model for me: no-nonsense, smart but never dour, always open, happy to bestow a hug or a wounded comment. In retrospect, so much of that is Carrie Fisher’s performance. Leia as written is all of those things but a different actor - someone more guarded, more trope-aware - might have found them harder to synthesise. Fisher’s great strength in those films is her vulnerability, the way everything shines out of her face, and when coupled with her precise, scornful authority becomes a character that is instantly familiar, iconic for more than her hair. Leia was me, and she was who I wanted to be. In her publication of her teenage diaries that came out this year, Fisher wrote about knowing that she felt things too deeply, that there was something “too much” about her; she also writes about how carefully she cultivated a worldly persona, hiding how nervous she was through filming. It’s always tempting to apply new information after the fact, but I think it comes through in Leia, or I want it to at least - a public figure barely out of adolescence, fighting a war, falling in love: she’s all front and she’s all honesty, all at the same time.

The other thing that shines through, deliciously, is Fisher’s wit. She is undisguisably clever. She nails her comic moments, she gives a sense of wheels turning in her brain, all the time. Comedy was her forte, both as a performer (a minor appearance, but her episode of 30 Rock is a serious favourite) and as a writer. But others will eulogise her talents in these areas better than I can. I would come to learn more about her life later on, her honesty, her coolness, her charm, her openness both about her mental health and Hollywood’s sexism, and it would cement her as something close to a hero for me (by which I am not damning with faint praise - I find it very hard to use the term without feeling like a knob). Once again, she gave me a model to live by, not as Leia but as herself. She was a gadfly stinging away at the hide of a dinosaur, irritating the right people and refusing to shut up, and that is a great thing to be. As Harrison Ford told her, “You have the eyes of a doe and the balls of a samurai.”

But for now I am thinking of myself almost a decade ago at the age of seventeen, very much a child in very many ways. In the end, of course, it doesn’t matter than I never watched Star Wars as a kid - as though there’s only one way to love something. I watched it when I did, and it was shaped for me, as so much of my consumption of fantasy and sci-fi was then (god, it still is), by a desire to know how to achieve good in the world. How to take down the empire. Princess Leia was testament to that. Of course, real life rarely parcels the fight into handy quests, metaphorical colour-coded missions of good and evil, and Carrie Fisher was testament to that. In my mind, the two are inextricably intertwined, as I think they were for Fisher herself. Only last month, she wrote to a fellow bipolar sister, “We have been given a challenging illness, and there is no other option than to meet those challenges.” It’s a line that would do any heroine proud.