Star Wars Episode 8: The Last Jedi
Directed and Written by Rian Johnson
Episode 8 picks up right where The Force Awakens left off back in 2015. The Resistance was able to blow up Starkiller Base after spending less than one minute planning their strategy and now the First Order wants payback which leads to one of the slowest drawn out chase plots in all of Star Wars film history, perhaps in all of film entirely. For some reason, the First Order doesn't have fast enough ships to catch them? Kylo Ren wants to prove himself after being beaten by a girl. Meanwhile, Luke Skywalker wants nothing to do with Rey or the Resistance. He just wants to be left alone. Poe thinks he's smarter than the Resistance leaders and is bristling for more autonomy, while Finn still wants to do his own thing and take care only of himself and Rey.
The first moment I knew this movie was going terribly wrong was when after two years of waiting we find out Luke's reaction to Rey's arrival and being handed his father's lightsaber for the second time in his life. It's a minor spoiler, but it happens in the first five minutes of the movie. Luke literally tosses the lightsaber over his shoulder and goes and locks himself in his hut. He tosses the lightsaber so casually and so deadpan that I was immediately reminded of some slapstick comedy like Dumb and Dumber. That's when the tone started to go totally off the rails to me.
There were continuous attempts at being funny and the characters are all spouting one liners and witticisms. It immediately brought to mind the weirdness of Thor Ragnarok. Like all of the sudden, every character from the Marvel Cinematic Universe is now Spider-Man. Thor just had this weird, awkward feeling from its beginning. I was like "This isn't Thor's character. This is Spider-Man". It feels like all the Disney movies are becoming the same movie and I fear this is the beginning of the Star Wars movies being absorbed into that formula. Ha Ha funny witticisms and humor and behaviors the characters have never exhibited before.
And don't get me wrong, after the initial weirdness, I actually liked Thor Ragnarok. Same thing with this movie. Problem is, at some point you had to recognize this isn't a Star Wars movie. It's a Disney movie. There's a reason 50% of the new Star Wars movie directors have been fired. I really enjoyed Episode 7 until it got to the blow up the Death Star again climax and liked the darker edge of Rogue One, but this episode just wasn't up to snuff in my opinion.
Another thing I haven't liked about the new movies have been the inclusion of the original big three. They don't really have anything meaningful to do in these new episodes. In episode 7, Han just really showed up to die. Something Harrison Ford had been dreaming about since the early 1980s. He didn't really have any purpose to serve. They're just plot tools. Leia really hasn't done much either except be on screen with Han to this point. I mean, if Luke, Han, and Leia are just there for eye candy for old people, then don't even have them in the movies. I had much the same problem with the new Star Treks. Don't drag the old actors in. Just start afresh.
Oh and at one point in the movie the new AT-ATs are referred to as "big ass". Go figure. When did profanity become a thing in Star Wars? Not that I'm a prude...it's just not part of that universe.
The last thing that disappointed me about this movie was there was anticlimax after anticlimax. Just picture this. Whatever events were foreshadowed in Episode 7 or whatever fights or confrontations or meetings you are looking forward to in this episode are going to fall flat. Johnson just didn't have enough imagination to pull off all the situations and explanations that JJ Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan set up in the last movie. They had the easy part. They just set up everything on the fly and didn't have to explain anything. Johnson does and you won't like the answers.
As for John William's score, he's pretty much a hack now and the only good parts of the score are when it hearkens back to the original trilogy. He hasn't come up with a memorable music sequence since The Phantom Menace. None of the new characters has a good theme. Did Finn even get one? Rey's is a throwaway and Kylo Ren's is totally generic, like most of Williams's music nowadays.
What did I LIKE about this movie? Well, I guess it's a Star Wars movie. The new actors are good, especially Daisy, but to me they just didn't have a good script this time around. With the return of JJ Abrams for the last film, I will have higher expectations.
But at this point, I'm beginning to think that Disney should have left well enough alone and called it a day as far as this storyline with the ending of Return of the Jedi. At some point in this movie so many bad things are happening to the Resistance good guys that it almost becomes torture porn. It's almost like Disney had to paint this bleak future after the last movies just to justify making more movies. I want to know what George Lucas's original story ideas for Episodes 7-9 were. At this point he doesn't really have a soul as a director, but he's good at coming up with premises. All I've ever heard was that his characters were going to be young kids and the old Star Wars actors were just going to play supporting roles. I hope we find out some day how HE would have continued the Skywalker story.
My Grade: B
No comments:
Post a Comment