!SPOILER ALERT!
First of all: yes, it bore resemblances to Empire (escapes
from bases while under assault, Jedi Temple island as Degoba, a master who
evaporates, bringing before the master Sith). This was one of the things for
which some panned Force Awakens, for being self referential (basically, the
image of the star killer base being a repeat of the death star). That never
really bothered me. The historical context has to be taken into account. Star
Wars was a mythology for a generation, and Force Awakens was introducing it to
a new generation, but one that is familiar with it as a second generation, so a
little bit of that referencing being in the film as a tribute to the first
trilogy is acceptable. Basically, star killer base or death star … they’re both
the BFG (from the old days of online/first-person-shooter gaming: big freaking
gun) trope, which a million others have done too (including the dreadknot ship
in Last Jedi, although the actual form itself does not reference anything
outside of being bigger badder star destroyers). I was much more interested to
see if they made something new going foreward from that tribute, meaning this
film was going to be much more crucial to whether or not I thought they were
doing something good and redeeming the travesty of the prequels. And, based in
some of the things I say below, I think that they have. I think that what I’ll
say about having a new cast of character types changes things because it
changes the narrative, and I think that that is the important thing (for
instance, you never have Luke facing a counterpart at more of a same level at
the end of New Hope the way you have Ray facing Kylo at the end of Force
awakens because you don’t have a counterpart aspect to any character).
It was fun seeing Benicio del Toro in a Star Wars film.
The saber fight with Kylo and Ray against the guards is
simply pretty bad ass.
The broken light saber is nice on three counts: in the first
KotR game at least building your own light save was a stage you had to pass,
building your own light saber; it mirrors Luke building a new saber in Jedi:
and it symbolizes Kylo’s theme of letting go of the past. And probably one
should interpret whatever Ray has to do now as having to adapt that theme in a new
positive way. Overall, I think they have worked the light saber symbol well:
the continuity of it being originally Anakin’s and now having it’s breaking
symbolizing a forced (pun intended) break with the past, as well as the fact
that, at the end of the day, there is some basic incompatibility between the
sides.
The allusion to Return of the Jedi in Luke’s avatar entrance
into the underground fortress was a nice touch (it looks like when he entered
Jabba’s palace), and the reappearance of old man Luke after the avatar was, at
least for me, moving … it sort of put new lines of character into the face.
They managed to keep Luke in character better than I thought
they would, same as they did with Han Solo, with whom I thought they might have
had a hard time pulling it off after decades of playing a stock type that is
fairly different from Solo/Frisco-Kid/etc.
Possible weak points:
Could Kylo have fooled Snoke? Answer: it’s definitely a
possible weak point, but that would be based whether being that strong and
controlled is consistent with how they have portrayed Kylo up til now, because
they do provide a plausible mechanics of mental cloaking which is that he
focuses his force will, or force intention, whatever it is that you want to
call it that Snoke is reading, on “turning the light saber toward my enemy to
kill them by igniting it, like with Han” thing, which fits Snoke as well.
Could Luke have projected that well? Answer: yeah, it’s
plausible, as it is their own mythological place and they have established mind
tricks and force vision across distance [Snoke connecting Ray and Kylo] or
whatever “Star Wars sounding force power names” you want to put on it, if
you’ve played the KotR games and are into thinking what different force powers
are and can do etc … I mean, he’s on the ground of the first Jedi temple, that
has be a big force power booster right there, and then he does the Yoda vanish,
which could be having put forth all that force power that it totally consumed
him, and all those things that people who like to think about the “physics” of
magical/force type worlds like to think about … I think it’s believable as a
consistent part of the construct of that world.
Now the serious stuff.
The thing most impressing to me is that they have set up the
third movie to really be its own new Star Wars story by unmooring it in at
least ways: No more back story theories; the original trio is dead; a new
palette of character TYPES (not just individually new character, but new
character types). Those are what follows and then there is a big long belabored
nerdy thing at the end. So, for here, before I start that, lest I lose anybody
with my belaboring, I’ll say that the heart of my review on the first viewing
is that it is good, among many thing, for unmooring this trilogy at this point.
It allows continuity with the first trilogy, but now it also allows the finale
to be something really its own as well.
1.
No back story intrigue: One of the tropes of
“Star Wars” when defined as the larger phenomenon, including fandom, is
theorism. The same thing happened with Harry Potter coming up to book 7, and I
think it’s a fine thing and I hope that nobody’s feelings got hurt by theorism
being so roundly rejected by Last Jedi. But I think that it’s clear that there
will be no “theories” proven by the end and that that line of secret
connections and ciphers just isn’t what they’re doing (at least not Johnson,
who lists on the credits as both writer and director). The two biggies on which
a lot of youtube time was spent coming up to Last Jedi and ever since Force
Awakens are the questions of who Ray’s parents are and who Snoke is. In
addition to the obvious possibility that Ray is Luke’s daughter, there were
theories that Ray is the granddaughter of Palpatine (I have to admit wondering
about this one when watching Force Awakens again the night before because they
based this theory on the argument that her saber fighting style relies heavily
on a two-handed high thrust that has only ever been seen by Darth Sidious, and
it’s true that she uses that move a lot, and it’s not that ciphers make stories
bad, just that when there is nothing more than ciphers, it’s a bad story, and I
could see a possibility of a hat-tip cipher in the form of saber fighting style
… authors do give cipher clues, like Rowling using six mentions in book 6 of
the first ever potions lesson in book 1 as a clue that Snape was stoppering
Death for Dumbledore, since Snape mentioned “putting a stopper in death” in
that lesson in book 1 … other people did that sleuth work between books 6 and
7; I’m not that clever on that sort of thing by half), and theories that Snoke
was Darth Plagus and that Plagus was Palpatine’s mentor, or that Snoke was the
very first Jedi ever and secretly lasted all this time, or that Snoke was Mace
Windu secretly back from the dead and gone dark. All that goes out the window.
Ray’s parents were no-names who sold her into work to get money to drink, and
it doesn’t matter who Snoke is/was because … he’s dead. I honestly hope that
those who spent so much time on their videos on youtube aren’t offended,
because they seem like really good people and they’re upbeat in attitude, and
believe it or not (and this was especially the case coming up to Harry Potter
book 7), I think the prediction game is one valid avenue by which people
process what is there in the books/movies that are already out (making a future
story as a way to figure out what you think is important in a present story,
and even if the future story is the story of the future revelation of the past,
the theory often involves the revelation playing some role in the actual future
plot) … you just have to let go of thinking of being “right” about the
prediction as only if what you predicted is what winds up materially happening.
2.
First
cast dead: This is now the case de facto, with Fisher having passed
away, and they’ll have to have some exposition of the Leah’s death in the third
movie, but officially all three are gone, and that played into the present plot
in big way, albeit maybe subtle: Kylo killing Han and Luke spending his last in
the avatar fight that enabled the rebels to get away on the Falcon, and I am
guessing that they were saving Leah’s death for the third film on a plan of one
each of them dying in one each of the films in this trilogy … which is a nice
tie out. Now they’ll have to do her death through exposition and the plot of
Kylo and Ray squaring off in whatever form that takes will be the sole focus.
But they still got to keep a sort of structure of one each of the original trio
dying in one each of the films of this trilogy, which kind of gives a cool
structure feel to the relationship of this trilogy to the original, justifying
having these be 7, 8, and 9.
3.
Different slate of character types/tropes. … No
easy connections
a.
Luke from trilogy 1 is split out between Ray and
Po, but Ray is also a good pilot, but she’s also kind of a new Han, so a mix of
Han and Luke from the first trilogy (a la the main protagonist in Space Balls)
… the splitting and combining characters during compositional history or
between one work and another that maybe borrows elements is pretty common. For
instance: the Aragorn character used to be two characters, Aragorn the king and
Trotter the hobbit. Most importantly, it’s not just a matter of two plus two =
four; it’s the “whole that is more than the sum of it’s parts” thing. Instead
of just being the hidden king, Aragorn is now the king hidden particularly in
the disguise of somebody who is itinerant, quasi-outcast, and thought of as
suspicious. In Person of Interest, the fact that Jonathan Nolan was writing two
characters that are basically the two parts of Batman (which trilogy he cowrote
with his brother Chris), the recluse millionaire and the man in the suit, the
fact that they are now separate characters means that he has some possibilities
for exploring the tension in new ways (this didn’t happen as much, just I think
mainly due to the difference between the TV mode of storytelling and the big
screen, but the potential of new character arcs that embody character aspects
and handle them in new ways is always there with splitting and joining source
character types).
b.
Finn could map a little bit to Han in amoral
(not immoral) nature vis a vis the resistance, but he’s really a new character
type altogether … the character escaping from BEING a bad guy.
c.
The big one is the relationship between the main
protagonist and antagonist coming into the third and final film. In Jedi it was
a three-tier structure: Vader is Luke’s father and both Vader and Emperor are
over him, and they have had no real contact with him before final
confrontations (revelation of being Father at end of 2 and fight on the bridge
in 3), whereas Kylo and Ray are on more of equal plane and they have shared
Having a different palette of character types changes the
narrative, and the narrative is a big key for me when considering whether
something is derivative or how derivative it is or how much that impacts the
quality (the initial question of whether Force Awakens was self-referential to
a level that ruined it). There were only ever three original ideas in the
world: creation, sin, and redemption … and the only one of those for which
humans can claim authorship is the middle one. So everything is going to be
derivative to some degree, but there is such a thing as a difference between
creative derivation and cheap derivation.
The question of complete self referentiality with the new SW
trilogy to me flows along similar lines to those of looking at allegory.
Tolkien was known for disliking allegory, although in reality, I think he
thought it was alright in and of itself, a sometimes useful tool but a limited
one, and what he was really against was seeing it as the defining core of
“narrative art,” which was a very key term for him (in the essay on Fairy Stories,
he all but pits “narrative art” directly against modern drama in the
Shakespearean vein, and I say “all but” because I think he sticks within his
real concern which is that, again, like allegory, he sees drama as one among
many useful tools in doing narrative art, but a limited tool and definitely,
like allegory, not the core of narrative art, and what irks him, I think, is
that, whether or not it is the only effect of Shakespeare or whether there are
good effects of Shakespeare alongside this one, it is still definitely a big
negative impact of Shakespeare that everybody now thinks of drama as the core
of narrative art). I once saw a debate between two sort of niche celebrities
concerning the validity of Peter Jackson’s LotR films, and the one guy (who was
defending them) got sort of backed into a bit of a corner in a Q and A portion
of the debate on the question of allegory and Tolkien’s dislike and what
allegory actually is and he was sort of stumbling around not coming up with a
coherent definition of allegory, and I think it has to do with not getting that,
when Tolkien made such a big deal of “narrative art,” this was a very precise
formulation: he didn’t say “literary art,” he said “narrative art.” Narrative
is about plot, and I think it’s a pretty succinct and accurate working
definition of “allegory” to say that allegory is when you copy the plot. For
example, the scene in the book in which the fellowship arrive at the back door
of Moria and go through and Gandalf falls and the rest go on to Lothlorien is a
direct lift of Moses forfeiting entry into the promise land because he struck
the rock in Numbers 21 (I’ve not heard anybody else say this except myself, but
I haven’t read broadly in secondary lit on it, but the correlations seem to
many and to clear to deny) … but I think Tolkien is doing anything but an
allegory of Moses, and I think a key factor is that he is not straight copying
the plot (there are two strikings of stone/Rock in Moria; Gandalf’s action in
the second directly causes the ability of his friends to enter the golden land,
whereas Moses action simply bars his own entry; and it is Gandalf’s friends who
get to go, rather than a next generation [Moses symbolized the first
generation, both of them stuck outside the land, the first generation being
stuck outside because they failed to trust God via Joshua and Caleb in Numbers
13 and it was Joshua rather than Moses who lead the second generation into
Canaan after the 40 years wandering that Tolkien incorporated in the fact that
Moria is 40 miles from east gate to west door … a fact of which I think Fran
Walsh, and thus Peter Jackson, are aware, because I can see no other reasoning
to changing Gandalf’s “we stick to this course west of the Misty Mountains for
many days and many miles” in the book to “forty days” in the movie except as a
bit of a hat tip to Tolkien’s artistry from being aware of some of the ways he
used sources; I think the same thing is true of having Saruman say that the
nine riders crossed the fjords of Isen on midsummer’s eve, because the appendix
clear that they could not have done that on that day because on that day, they
were using an attack to retake Osgiliath as a mask for themselves setting out
to seek the ring, the thing being that, in both book and movie, the riders hit
a definitive stage in a quest for the ring on midsummer’s, and why even bother
putting midsummer’s eve in a screenplay unless you know that it’s symbolic but
in a way you couldn’t do well on screen, so you’re tipping your hat]).
Long and short of why bring all that up here is that, with a
new character palette in Last Jedi, I think it is difficult to press claims of
being derivative very far because, as with allegory, the chances of “derivation”
in a negative sense decrease when you’re not copying plot, and you can straight
copy plot only to the extent that you have the same palette of characters
because plot involves specific things doing specific actions, and if the things
are different, so is the plot. You can criticize it on other aspects, to be
sure, but criticizing it as particularly derivative gets harder when the plot
is different (although you do have some who, I think, try to use this very fact
as an excuse to claim non-derivation by basically mashing up several different
sources from which they are merely derivative so that it doesn’t follow any of
them exactly, but my personal opinion on the ones I have seen—namely, Eragon,
the Magicians, and American Gods—is that they come out being poor art at best).
But to close with a Star Wars: Last Jedi example of the
difference in narrative: in Empire, the saber was merely a loss, and it was the
father/over figure who did it … here it is completely broken and it as was the
two (sort of) equals who did it together in their struggle to get it.
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