Rian Johnson’s new galactic blockbuster isn’t quite the same thing from old fans’ childhoods.
Spoiler alert: The following discusses plot points for Star Wars: The Last Jedi so beware if you haven’t seen it yet.
George Lucas created the toys of the Star Wars saga — literally and figuratively — and fans have gotten used to them over the last 40 years. People with lightsabers. Troopers in battle armor. Spaceships that make no practical design sense but ignite the imagination anyway.
In 2015’s The Force Awakens, director J. Abrams introduced new action figures to the universe in a formula hewing closely to the original — a wise move considering pop culture hadn’t seen a really memorable Star Wars movie since 1983’s Return of the Jedi. But it seems fans on social media aren’t in love with Rian Johnson breaking those toys a little bit with new film The Last Jedi.
The movie hadn’t even been out for 24 years before people on social media made their gripes known. Some of it is just the fact that hating things is cool (and has been for a while). Some of it is complaining that Last Jedi’s not enough like the originals. On review-aggregate site RottenTomatoes.com, the critical score is a not-too-shabby 93% approval rating but the audience score is 58 — one percentage point below the one for Lucas’ first prequel The Phantom Menace, considered the worst Star Wars film of all time.
The movie that introduced Jar Binks is thought more highly of by moviegoers than Luke Skywalker’s (arguably) finest hour. Let that sink in.
Upon first viewing, Last Jedi is overstuffed with personalities and space battles and plot threads. General Leia (Carrie Fisher), who in the past four decades has never shown any superhuman abilities, gets blown out of her ship in space, somehow survives and floats back into her ship like in an outer-space Mary Poppins sans umbrella. When compared to Star Wars movies past, the moment’s totally weird. So is a completely silent slow-motion destruction of a humongous star cruiser and a lightsaber battle that seems more Kill Bill than Darth Vader killing Obi-Wan Kenobi.
On second and third viewings, floating Leia is still off-putting. But the spaceship explosion is one of many simply astonishing and emotional action sequences in Last Jedi, and that lightsaber battle is cemented as the best in Star Wars history, period.
Luke says it’s time for the Jedi to end, and maybe no one asked hardcore fortysomething fans who had carried around both their farmboy Luke and X-wing Luke figures like prized possessions as children. But Johnson kind of agrees with the old Jedi master. Usually put on a pedestal, both the Jedi Order’s legacy of failure and Luke’s status as galactic living legend are held up to a microscope for the first time in a real way.
Bad guy Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) implores fellow youngster Rey (Daisy Ridley) to let go of the past, the Jedi, the Sith, the Skywalkers. True, he’s doing so as a sales pitch because he wants them to rule the galaxy together, but it’s also a bigger-picture call to move on to new adventures. When Luke hesitates to let the Jedi religion symbolically burn to the ground, the ghost of Yoda arrives to giddily torch the whole thing.
The Last Jedi is still Star Wars to its reactor core. Signature bits like Han and Leia’s “I know” exchange, the battle of Hoth, the Luke, Vader and Emperor throwdown, and multiple Death Stars are all borrowed from and tweaked to find a new balance in the franchise’s Force.
It’s not the same as it used to be, but that’s OK. It’s always tough putting away the old toys. Thing is, the new ones are pretty cool, too.
