This is a not review. I’m not here to give you a thumbs up or thumbs down for the new Star Wars movie because, like me, you almost certainly don’t give a #### what some ####### critic has to say. No, I am at a level of Star Wars fanboyism that goes past mere evaluation, wherein I cherish the ritual of seeing these movies but also cherish, on a strange level, the opportunity to nitpick them to death. And in The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson has made probably the weakest of the Disney Star Wars movies, but he also made a movie that is also WORTH nitpicking. So let’s be fanboys and do that now. Please note this post is ALL SPOILERS. Don’t read the rest of this if you ain’t seen it.
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Star Wars: The Last Jedi: The Spoiler-Free Review
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GOOD: Porgs. Star Wars has an iffy track record when it comes to introducing characters intended strictly as kiddie bait. But the Porgs were funny and they also looked DELICIOUS. I would have eaten the #### out of a Porg in front of another Porg. No hesitation. I would smoke one of those bad boys and gnaw on it like a quail.
BAD: Poe Dameron. You want a hot take? Here it is: Poe sucks. I love Oscar Isaac and would watch him in anything, but the more you see of Poe Dameron out of a cockpit, the less interesting he becomes. They gave him one funny moment at the outset of the flick and then took away most of that hotshot charm after that. I only wanna see Poe executing deft skid turns in his X-wing, blowing crap up, and then giving me an Abrams one-liner as he speeds away.
GOOD: Snoke. Snoke was arguably the lamest part of The Force Awakens, especially since his name is so dumb. But when I finally got to see him resplendent in his gold bathrobe and nasty teeth, all my little fanboy fears went away. He was a proper sleazebag, so much so that I was kinda dismayed when he got chopped in half. Good villains are in short supply. Ask Justice League.
BAD: Leia somehow surviving getting sucked into deep space. The #### was that? That’s not how the Force works. If you’re gonna kill a character, kill them. Don’t have them miraculously Force Breathe their way into surviving the great black void. IT’S LIKE THE FORCE DOESN’T MEAN ANYTHING ANYMORE. Everyone knows that Carrie Fisher passed away prior to the film’s release, so toying with her demise seemed weird on a lot of levels.
GOOD: Yoda. I cannot overstate how badly the Prequels ####ed up Yoda, turning him into a somersaulting lightsaber monkey and having him backwards talk every ####### sentence. So they brought him back as a Force Ghost and made him more like the original Puppet Yoda, with the old man walk and weird stray hairs, and that was nice. I cried. I also cried when Luke saw R2-D2. Oh, and I cried whenever Rey's Theme kicked in. I cried many times. Shut up.
BAD: The dialogue. Given that J.J. Abrams enlisted Lawrence Kasdan as his script wizard for The Force Awakens, it was surprising to see so much clumsy exposition in the follow up. I swear Rey told Luke that the Resistance needed his help, like, eight times. And the entire flashback stuff with Luke and Kylo Ren could have been shown in much greater detail, instead of just having both sides awkwardly narrate snippets of it. I need a whole movie out of Luke pulling an Obi-Wan and ####### it all up. That was where the gold was, and they whiffed on it.
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GOOD: Mark Hamill. Given that Hamill hasn’t been allowed to headline a major studio movie in over three decades, it wasn’t a guarantee that he’d be up for this. But not only was he pretty good, they also let Luke be funny! I like Sassy Luke, hucking lightsabers and what not. They should have made him sassier in the originals.
BAD: Luke’s weird death. When Luke fights Kylo Ren on the red salt planet and you realize he’s not actually there, I thought they were going the full Sixth Sense and make him a Force Ghost, meaning he’d been dead the whole movie. Which would have been cool! But that isn’t what happened. Instead, Luke wasn’t there because he could, like, Force-throw himself from eight solar systems away. And then he just disappeared into the beyond after that. I was sitting there like, “Wait, did he die?” That’s probably not the reaction you want when you kill off one of the most famous characters in movie history. I get giving Luke a peaceful ending, but no one told me a Jedi could up and die if he felt like it.
They also killed off General Ackbar in a strange, cursory moment where most of the audience was still reeling from Carrie Fisher’s trick death. In general, this was not a movie that handled big moments well.
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GOOD: Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley. How ####### great are these two? If anything, I approve of the greater message of The Last Jedi, which is that we’re moving on, and that this will probably be—spare a few obligatory fan service moments—the last of the new Star Wars movies to be about the old Star Wars movies. This series belongs to Ridley and Driver now, and that’s a good thing, because both of them are terrific. I wanted them to bone! How could I want that? HE KILLED HAN SOLO, MAN! Whenever those two were on screen, the movie kicked barrels of ###. The throne room scene alone justified the price of admission. The guards had, like, LIGHT AXES!
BAD: Most of the new, non-Porg characters. Laura Dern and Benicio Del Toro are both wonderful actors, and yet both of them were stuck in this movie essentially to act as needless roadblocks for everyone else. I swear I thought Del Toro’s character would reveal that he had also a red brooch thingie and was actually the master codebreaker that Finn and Rose were trying to find. But no. No, he was just his character in the Heineken ads for some reason.
GOOD: The milk. OH GOD THE ####### MILK! How gross was that? I am ready for all the alien milk memes to come outta that moment. I scouted this movie for my kids (mostly because I wanted to watch it alone) and I’m gonna have to cover the five-year-old’s eyes when the quad-nipple scene comes on.
BAD: Finn almost dying. I really thought they were gonna kill off John Boyega, and I would have been extremely mad about that, because I love Finn, and because they had already stranded him in a CASINO PLANET subplot that ended up being a red herring (which, on some level, is fine… every Star Wars movie features a scrappy band of rebels infiltrating an area they shouldn’t to go turn off something, so it’s okay to see them fail at that for once). Then they made his thing with Rose, who was otherwise delightfully spunky, into a love story even though nothing in the movie really foreshadowed that moment.
Also, every Star Wars movie also features characters surviving despite insane amounts of gunfire and ship crashes going on around them, but The Last Jedi really stretched it into absurdity. One second, we see Rose and Finn surrounded by an army of Stormtroopers. The next, ALL of them are dead while Rose and Finn are just groovy, leaving Finn to go one on one with Captain Phasma, who was wasted for the second straight movie. [nerdlinger voice] Am I simply to believe they avoided all that shrapnel?
GOOD: BB8. He ####### rules. You could make the whole movie out of BB-8 and Chewbacca and I’d be fine. Knowing Disney, that spinoff is already in the works.
BAD: Kylo’s helmet is gone! I know they had to get rid of the helmet because there’s no practical reason for Kylo Ren to wear it… but it was SO COOL, man. And it made his voice all deep and scary! I was hoping Ren would get mortally wounded in this movie and end up having to wear and even COOLER helmet with a voice thingie, but no.
GOOD: All the spaceship porn. I require very little to walk away from a Star Wars movie happy. Hit a few familiar beats with characters and sound effects and I’ll gladly fork over my dough. And gimme LOTS of ship porn. I cannot get enough of strange polygons suddenly appearing on screen from hyperspace. That’s my heroin.
And I needed it at times for this one. Like I said, The Last Jedi was clearly a movie about leaving the past behind and creating something new. That was not an easy trick for Johnson to pull off, and I wouldn’t say he was 100% successful. This wasn’t anywhere near as crisp a movie as The Force Awakens, and it was saddled with a great many subplots that only served to highlight the economy of The Empire Strikes Back, which remains the apex of Star Wars bridge movies and the franchise as a whole.
But this trilogy still has Driver, and it’s still got Ridley, and it’s still got the Porgs. So I’m still wrapped around Kathleen Kennedy’s finger for now, and likely forever. If I sound like I didn't like The Last Jedi, it's only because I love parsing every frame of these things, and I always will.
Unless they overdo it on the alien milk. That might be a dealbreaker one day.
