I was late to the, "Star Wars" party in my youth. My mom loved the original trilogy and always wanted the three of us to watch it. My brother did but wasn't blown away. The sister and I didn't get into it until the prequels came out, but I've still never loved the first three movies. Still, I do consider myself a fan of the franchise and was excited when I heard they were adding to it a few years ago. I loved, and I mean loved, "The Force Awakens". I saw it three times in the span of a month and thought just about every minute was perfection. It respected the old while bringing in a bunch of new. My one gripe was that Kylo Ren's casting was not done very well. He doesn't resemble Han or Leia or anyone else in the Skywalker clan. The movie is full of attractive people and then there's him. He didn't really fit the role. But I looked past it since I knew he would be a integral part of all three movies. Like many others, I waited two years for the next installment of the franchise and debated with friends and family over who Rey might be related to. I was rooting for her to somehow be a Skywalker, being that all of the movies are the saga of that family. That was the only thing that made sense to me, otherwise Kylo is the last of the Skywalker bloodline and...well, I'm not crazy about that.
When the final trailer of, "The Last Jedi" premiered, it was an event in our household. We watched in multiple times the night it was released and discussed what certain scenes and the story might be about. And then the movie came out last December and reviews were mixed. It wasn't the, "That was amazing" reaction that the first movie almost universally received. But I figured it's the second half of a trilogy and those tend to lag. And then I saw it. And I didn't know how to feel. But I didn't have the desire to watch it in the theater a second time, so there was that. I didn't watch it again until this weekend on DVD and now I'm starting to sort out how I feel about it.
I remember sitting in the theater watching TLJ for the first time and waiting for the big reveal of Rey's parentage. And I remember being underwhelmed when it was some random people we don't know or care about. It doesn't even take up five minutes of movie time to find it all out. It's just, "Oh, they were drunks who sold you, come join the Dark Side.". While I understand the director saying the point of the movie as a whole is that anyone can wield The Force, I take issue with the amount of red herrings in the first film. There were many, many moments in the first one with knowing glances from main characters and nods to the fact that Rey was someone important. The set up was that we'd get an, "I am your father" type moment at the end, a payoff that was worth it. It turns out she is someone important in that she's strong with The Force and will bring balance to it, but there was a whole lot of setting up to a moment that amounted to nothing. I assume since we all already cared about her and knew she was serving up some Force, we were supposed to not really care about where she came from. But it comes off as lazy writing to me. It feels like the director just wanted to get that whole thing outta the way and move on to other stories he wanted to tell in the film. In hindsight, a large part of my dislike for the movie comes from the fact that there were two years of set up and speculation for what became zero payoff. I was genuinely sad she didn't tie into the Skywalkers. I think that was a mistake.
Rose...*sigh*...I liked Rose from the minute she came on screen. I like the character in general, but I don't like she was used. The side mission with Finn didn't work for me. I thought the chase sequence was way too long and didn't care for the cameo by Jennifer Aniston's latest ex-husband. It felt forced, like he was friends with the director and wanted to be in it and so they put him in it. I think this whole storyline could've been avoided if they'd used Maz Kanata as the codebreaker, rather than having her only briefly in the movie. And what the hell was that kiss at the end of the movie? I had so much secondhand embarrassment from that that I cringe just thinking about it. There were no romance vibes at all between them all movie and then she randomly kisses him? That scene played like a fanboy who gets no action and wants to see some on screen. I didn't understand it, nor do I feel it had a place in the movie. I fast-forwarded past the whole Canto Bight thing (and the kiss).
I know a lot of people had problems with the mighty Luke Skywalker being so defeated throughout the movie. But I found the old (or young) Luke to still be in there. He still had his humor and he still had his naivety when it came to thinking that if he just sat on the sidelines, all of the conflict would go away. It was very young Skywalker to think that if he stopped training anyone in the use of The Force, he could make the decision that the Jedi were gone for good. The one thing I did not like was the way that he used The Force to intervene at the end of the movie. I was hoping he and Leia would be reunited, especially knowing that they couldn't be in Episode 9 because of Carrie Fisher's passing. They didn't truly reunite, he just did a fly by while using The Force. And I feel like Luke deserved a better death than he got. An actual showdown with the nephew that turned to the Dark Side, not some faux fight. It would've been better for both he and Kylo. Instead, it's just going to fuel Kylo's hate because his uncle was more powerful than he's likely to ever be Force-wise. And he never has to face anyone else in his family to give in to the darkness. Teacher and student never got to finally settle up. Other than that, I didn't have any trouble with who we found Luke to be on that island. Time and battles do a lot to a person over the course of many years. When we last saw him, he was partying with Ewoks and believed the worst to be over once he turned Vader and found his sister. He was too young to realize that, as Snoke said, when one side rises, the other will rise to meet it.
Speaking of Snoke, I was not upset that we didn't get into his backstory. It doesn't matter who he was or where he came from, or how he rose to power. The point was that dark will always rise to meet light and when a Skywalker in involved, hope springs eternal that they can be turned. Hell, the patriarch of the family was the biggest baddie in the galaxy for eons. In the original trilogy, we didn't know who The Emperor was or where he came from, nor how we rose to power. Once we found out his backstory in the prequels, I don't think it really added much to the narrative. Politics are politics and he used them to manipulate his way to the top. Politics aren't exactly a thrilling thing to watch in a galaxy a long time ago and far, far away. While I absolutely loved the scene where Snoke dies and the battle between Kylo, Rey and the guards, I found it a bit hard to believe that Snoke didn't anticipate Kylo would be his end. Clearly, he'd done his homework on the Skywalker clan, so how did he not realize Vader had planned to off the Emperor several times over the years to take power for himself? How did he not consider that Kylo might be a little more like his grandfather than anyone realized? He had doubts about Kylo's ability to fully embrace the Dark Side, even killing his own father wasn't good enough for Snoke to buy into him. Kylo realizing just how powerful his bloodline was should've been the last thing Snoke wanted, because it's also the key to him realizing he doesn't need a master. In fact, he can be a master himself with someone like Rey in the fold, even just the possibility of her turning was enough for him to say, "Fuck it," and turn on Snoke.
I did like some parts of TLJ. I liked the humor, particularly between Luke and Rey. I loved that BB-8 was a badass. I thought the play between Kylo and Rey was well done in that you were never quite sure which one was going to turn, and then neither of them did. I kind of like the concept of anyone can be a Jedi, though it flies in the face of everything we've been told in the past by the franchise. And I don't think anyone we saw in the movie, ie. the kids at the end, are going to be old enough to factor into Episode 9 in any way. I'm not nearly as excited for the next chapter as I was for this one. I've heard TLJ didn't undergo many rewrites and was basically the same script the director began with and I think that was a mistake. It usually isn't a good thing when a script doesn't change from development to release. TLJ kinda watches like that and maybe it would have benefited from a few more looksees in a different light. I also don't think it was the best idea to hire three different directors for three movies (which will now only be two because the director of Episode 9 was fired). J.J. Abrams did a fantastic job with TFA and I think he would've done great with TLJ. I don't know if even he can make much of Episode 9 with the clusterfuck of circumstances he's been given from TLJ. I'm half-hoping he erases some of what was done in the last one. And I'm sad that we won't get to see mother and son reunited, as was apparently planned. But at this point, I think it would be redundant for Kylo to turn toward the light. He's too angry, to drunk on his new power. Plus, if Luke is really dead, he has nothing more to fight for, except wiping out the small section of the Resistance that remains. If he turns, it will mimic Vader's storyline too closely. And we know Rey won't turn because she's already resisted it twice (why he thought she'd turn because she's the daughter of two drunks, I don't understand but okay). "The Last Jedi" had a lot to live up to after, "The Force Awakens" set the bar. Fortunately for Episode 9, the bar is pretty low. Let's hope that produces a better movie.
