Rey (Daisy Ridley) is tasked with saving a shattered Resistance.
If you love movies with strong themes, I present The Last Jedi. This eighth chapter of the Star Wars saga has lots to say about sacrifice, legend, generational conflict, history being a matter of perspective and war being a matter of business. It openly questions everything we’ve been led to believe about Star Wars over the last 40 years while brazenly killing quite a few good guys to drive its points home. It’s an action movie and a philosophical debate, a combination that promises to be great in ways new to the Star Wars franchise. Sadly, theme suffers without good plot, pacing and dialogue.
Rey, Finn and Poe (Daisy Ridley, John Boyega and Oscar Isaac), the new squad of heroes from Episode Seven, spend most of the movie in different star systems, leaving no time to strengthen their relationships. Finn’s story bores while attempting adventure. Poe doesn’t do anything but argue with General Leia about how to outrun the Empire. Rey is off luring Luke Skywalker back into the fight, while also trying to save the soul of bad guy Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). Her story has flashes of fun, but drags in redundant arguments with both of her acting partners. The movie flops from one storyline to the next for the first 90 minutes before getting off its butt and becoming a Star Wars movie for the last 45.
But two great battles bookend the film, both hinging on one man’s willingness to take on an army. The interactions between young Rey and Kylo Ren create this year’s most dynamic cinematic relationship. We get one beautiful fleeting scene of Luke and Leia on screen together, made more poignant by the real-life death of Carrie Fisher.
The dialogue is problematic. The early Star Wars scripts were sci-fi jargon with quasi-classical intonations, a combination that shouldn’t have worked but somehow did. Here, writer/director Rian Johnson errs too far on the side of the modern, most jarringly when Finn calls a silver-helmeted adversary “chrome dome” — which caused me to yelp an audible “Nope” in the movie theater.
As distracting as the dialogue is, the most unexpected and human moment of this film — and perhaps of the never-ending story that is Star Wars — is one character’s quiet “Please.” The fate of the galaxy might hinge upon that little word. It’s frustrating to know that someone smart enough to write that moment would flail for so much of the rest of the film. Let’s hope Johnson and his team, like a crumbling Resistance, will regroup, learn from their mistakes and win the next time.
