'The Last Jedi' is better than the hate

Perhaps you've heard of this movie

When Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens came out in 2015, it brought a perhaps unprecedented level of hype and subsequent critical and commercial attention. There hadn't been a Star Wars movie in 10 years, and the last time there was one, it was the concluding chapter of the largely-loathed prequel trilogy, which also did not move forward the story last updated in 1983's Return of the Jedi.

The Force Awakens was also the first Star Wars movie to be released in what I call the "take economy," that large sector of the Internet (and other places, I guess, but mostly the Internet) powered by fans and obsessed with dissecting, reviewing, critiquing, and theorizing about pop culture. As a result, The Force Awakens generated a heretofore-unseen level of takes (some of them on this very blog). A large portion of these takes seemed critical of the movie, which I thought was mostly misguided, for reasons explained here.

The one criticism I granted some merit was that The Force Awakens seemed a bit...familiar. This critique deserves many, many qualifications. But the most important of them was that it would be impossible to judge The Force Awakens on its own merits, in isolation from the new trilogy of which it would be a part. As the first installment, it reacquainted us with the universe while also establishing the possibility for significant creativity and novelty in future installments. It would only be possible to judge The Force Awakens, then, and the new trilogy as a whole, upon its completion; too many critics were trying to judge aspects of its narrative best seen in conjunction in isolation, and in comparison with a trilogy already completed in 1983. This seemed unfair.

You may remember this movie

But with the release of Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi, we have a better sense of how to judge this new trilogy. The Last Jedi has many of the trappings of a Star Wars film: there are lightsabers, wars in stars, Force powers, etc. But in many other ways, The Last Jedi actively subverts what we've come to expect from Star Wars, introducing new characters, new themes, and new scenarios and setpieces, and taking the story in surprising new directions. It is not entirely successful at all of this, largely due to a somewhat unfocused, flabby narrative (at 2 hrs and 30 minutes long, The Last Jedi is the longest Star Wars movie), and some creative risks that do not pay off. Yet the successes in this regard definitely outweigh the failures of what ultimately remains thoroughly a Star Wars movie.

The Last Jedi begins with its first subversion: It seems to take place immediately after the end of The Force Awakens (whereas all previous Star Wars movies have at least some gap between them), with the Resistance (the reduced successor to the original trilogy's Rebellion) on the run from the First Order (the not-much-reduced successor to the original trilogy's Empire). Meanwhile, Rey (Daisy Ridley) has arrived at the hideaway of Jedi Master Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), seeking his wisdom and his aid in the fight.

This setup seems at least somewhat redolent of The Empire Strikes Back, The Last Jedi's original trilogy equivalent. But The Last Jedi quickly takes this framework and moves it in strikingly different places. On the Resistance-First Order side of things, the Resistance, led by Leia Organa (the late Carrie Fisher) is in more dire straits than the Rebellion ever was, with a tiny fleet, led by brave but reckless pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), and hounded by the First Order's relentless ships. And Rey finds, in seeking the counsel of Luke, that he has essentially given up on the Jedi (whom he considers failures), the Force (from which he has cut himself off), and the Resistance (which he thinks no one can help). And Rey, the seemingly eager pupil, finds herself mysteriously connected and drawn to the tormented villain Kylo Ren, a.k.a. Ben Solo (Adam Driver), who is likewise drawn to her.

They have a history

To reveal where The Last Jedi goes with all of this would be to ruin a movie you should definitely see for yourself (and perhaps more than once; it took me two viewings to appreciate fully). But it is not a spoiler for me to reveal that the movie takes the raw materials of its plot in unexpected and subversive directions. And perhaps the most impressive direction is a narrative theme that is more mature and complex than any previous Star Wars movie: failure. Virtually every character in the movie confronts failure in some way. Their reactions to their failures determine the directions of their characters: some learn from them, others take the wrong lessons from them, and still others fail to grow at all from them, to their own detriment and folly.

It would also not be a spoiler for me to reveal that the movie does new things with the trappings of Star Wars that keep its universe interesting in a fashion I no longer considered possible. You'd think there are only so many things to do with the Force, with lightsabers, with space battles, and with the basic dynamic of good-vs-evil. But The Last Jedi does fresh things with each of these archetypes, a testament to its creative risks.

Not all of The Last Jedi's creative risks pay off, however. It is too long and somewhat disorganized, a noticeable contrast to the clean, clear, three-act structure of The Force Awakens. It is somewhat too packed with ideas, many, if not most, of which are intriguing but not all of which get full exploration. Many of its deliberate subversions of fan expectations served to keep the story surprising, but some of them seemed a bit unfair, and deserve at least some addressing in Episode IX - The Spark of Hope (or whatever it's called). The Last Jedi also does not seem to know really what to do with Finn (John Boyega), who gets a bit lost in the sprawl of its narrative.

But these flaws do not add up to a movie that deserves the hatred many seem to have given it. It is absurd to claim it is worse than any of the prequels, or that any character in it is worse than Jar Jar Binks, but many have claimed precisely this. If these and other critics, in overabundant supply in the take economy, are angry at The Last Jedi for straying from their expectations of what should have happened, or deviating from their own fan fiction or fan theories (something to which I could have related, having written some fan speculation of my own), then they are misguided. If Star Wars only conforms to preestablished expectations, then it will stop being interesting very soon, in a galaxy very, very close to us. There are criticisms to be made of the The Last Jedi, but a failure to be interesting is certainly not one of them.