THE LAST JEDI - Just as Good as I Remembered!
Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2022 11:51 am
3/10
I was forced to sit through this again for the third time -- first since it came out -- since Theo is all STAR WARS all the time and we've nearly reached the run of the movies. Tried to go in freely again, hoping it wouldn't be that bad. Stayed off my reviews and old posts of it, just to clear my head.
Let me be charitable: this film is an unmitigated disaster. And the fact the film doesn't feel like anything related to STAR WARS is a big part of the problem. After scores of STAR WARS movies in a universe that had been well established, characters start talking in a way they never had before -- like they were in a snarky Joss Whedon screenplay. The quipping humor seems totally out of place, the interaction between them comes out of an entirely different aesthetic, like Rian Johnson hadn't even watched the previous films. The new powers of Princess Leia that manifest in her galactic resurrection remain an incredible WTF moment that my wife rolling on the floor this time (she didn't even remember she had seen it before -- either that or she fell asleep on it). "THIS is Star Wars?" she asked at one point. Which shows you this film failed with CASUAL viewers, not just hardcore series nuts like most of us here. Weird subplots like "rescuing the casino animals because they're funding the sales of guns!" smack of a plot line that belonged in some other franchise together -- or the bizarre "Jedi Kids" final scene, which now seems like something that would be right at home in one of the misfired Disney+ series that bear the franchise moniker. (Perhaps it says something this movie feels like a "Disney+ product", as Kennedy's fingerprints are all over it).
From the bloated-ass run time to cringe worthy scenes like Laura Dern dressing down Poe Dameron -- speaking of that, this movie's feminist agenda is laid on with a troth -- Rian Johnson stumbles on nearly every conceivable level. Conceptually it's a dud, beyond even framing Luke Skywalker as a fuddy duddy "Old White Guy" jerk turning his back on everything he stood for. Why was there a need to introduce new characters? John Boyega's Finn wasn't a strong enough character to carry his own water? People hated Rose Tico not because she's a "woman of color," but because this movie couldn't stay on the narrative track of the 1st movie. There was no need to start adding new characters and pull apart the group dynamic that FORCE AWAKENS established (which Abrams would reconnect in the still-flawed yet infinitely superior follow-up, which tried to correct all of Johnson's missteps here). No wonder why Boyega was pissed at his character's arc through this series -- like the other males in this film, he's relegated to secondary status for another female lead shoehorned in undoubtedly at the insistence of Kathleen Kennedy and her transparent political agenda.
Williams' scoring, as we've said before, can do little to elevate this film. The constant "motion"/pacing of these modern Disney STAR WARS means his scoring is basically reduced to the level of a cartoon -- going up and down with "sad" or "heroic" flourishes in sync with what's going on in the film. There's no room for grand themes (listen to how simplistic his "First Order Theme" is compared to the Empire March), just a lot of frantic "action" that someone else could have written. But to be fair, some of his scoring is inferior here -- the "Casino Planet" is just a painful sequence in its execution as well as the scoring -- and the hysterical rendering of Leia's Theme is some of the worst dramatic scoring of his career, one where he seldom performs a misstep.
The Rey/Kylo scenes don't really work, but at least they didn't piss me off as much as the revisionist "Luke's No Hero, it's Leia Who Saves The Galaxy" narrative twerking Johnson performs here. Overall the only scene I really enjoyed was Yoda, reappearing in puppet form, and with the same personality he had before. In the film's most entertaining moment, he bonks Luke Skywalker on the head and tells him to wake the hell up. Too bad he couldn't have done the same for every creative talent involved in this sorry mess -- a picture that will rightly live on forever as one of cinema's all-time misguided sequels.
I was forced to sit through this again for the third time -- first since it came out -- since Theo is all STAR WARS all the time and we've nearly reached the run of the movies. Tried to go in freely again, hoping it wouldn't be that bad. Stayed off my reviews and old posts of it, just to clear my head.
Let me be charitable: this film is an unmitigated disaster. And the fact the film doesn't feel like anything related to STAR WARS is a big part of the problem. After scores of STAR WARS movies in a universe that had been well established, characters start talking in a way they never had before -- like they were in a snarky Joss Whedon screenplay. The quipping humor seems totally out of place, the interaction between them comes out of an entirely different aesthetic, like Rian Johnson hadn't even watched the previous films. The new powers of Princess Leia that manifest in her galactic resurrection remain an incredible WTF moment that my wife rolling on the floor this time (she didn't even remember she had seen it before -- either that or she fell asleep on it). "THIS is Star Wars?" she asked at one point. Which shows you this film failed with CASUAL viewers, not just hardcore series nuts like most of us here. Weird subplots like "rescuing the casino animals because they're funding the sales of guns!" smack of a plot line that belonged in some other franchise together -- or the bizarre "Jedi Kids" final scene, which now seems like something that would be right at home in one of the misfired Disney+ series that bear the franchise moniker. (Perhaps it says something this movie feels like a "Disney+ product", as Kennedy's fingerprints are all over it).
From the bloated-ass run time to cringe worthy scenes like Laura Dern dressing down Poe Dameron -- speaking of that, this movie's feminist agenda is laid on with a troth -- Rian Johnson stumbles on nearly every conceivable level. Conceptually it's a dud, beyond even framing Luke Skywalker as a fuddy duddy "Old White Guy" jerk turning his back on everything he stood for. Why was there a need to introduce new characters? John Boyega's Finn wasn't a strong enough character to carry his own water? People hated Rose Tico not because she's a "woman of color," but because this movie couldn't stay on the narrative track of the 1st movie. There was no need to start adding new characters and pull apart the group dynamic that FORCE AWAKENS established (which Abrams would reconnect in the still-flawed yet infinitely superior follow-up, which tried to correct all of Johnson's missteps here). No wonder why Boyega was pissed at his character's arc through this series -- like the other males in this film, he's relegated to secondary status for another female lead shoehorned in undoubtedly at the insistence of Kathleen Kennedy and her transparent political agenda.
Williams' scoring, as we've said before, can do little to elevate this film. The constant "motion"/pacing of these modern Disney STAR WARS means his scoring is basically reduced to the level of a cartoon -- going up and down with "sad" or "heroic" flourishes in sync with what's going on in the film. There's no room for grand themes (listen to how simplistic his "First Order Theme" is compared to the Empire March), just a lot of frantic "action" that someone else could have written. But to be fair, some of his scoring is inferior here -- the "Casino Planet" is just a painful sequence in its execution as well as the scoring -- and the hysterical rendering of Leia's Theme is some of the worst dramatic scoring of his career, one where he seldom performs a misstep.
The Rey/Kylo scenes don't really work, but at least they didn't piss me off as much as the revisionist "Luke's No Hero, it's Leia Who Saves The Galaxy" narrative twerking Johnson performs here. Overall the only scene I really enjoyed was Yoda, reappearing in puppet form, and with the same personality he had before. In the film's most entertaining moment, he bonks Luke Skywalker on the head and tells him to wake the hell up. Too bad he couldn't have done the same for every creative talent involved in this sorry mess -- a picture that will rightly live on forever as one of cinema's all-time misguided sequels.
