Sturr Wurrs, or I Hate The Last Jedi

^-sigh-

I love the original Star War trilogy. They were a major part of my childhood growing up in the 90’s, and I had the overwhelming pleasure of seeing them re-released on the big screen in special edition form after watching the movies on TV growing up. I loved it. So imagine my surprise when the new films turned out to be an unrestricted, merciless dumpster fire.

Now, fair disclaimer, I enjoyed Rogue One in spite of its faults in writing and pacing (though I was quick to point out that Jyn’s transformation into Rebellion mascot made zero sense). I also enjoyed Solo, in spite of its lackluster plot and poor character development and writing. They were both enjoyable because they were standalone movies that had different aims than continuing the story found in the original trilogy of movies.

I also want to point out that the original trilogy is not without its faults. There is plenty of cringe-worthy writing in all three films, and you can see the difference between A New Hope, which was originally thought to be a B-film that maybe breaks even by its creator, and Empire and Jedi, which were high-dollar productions. However, where the original trilogy succeeds is in creating a classic hero story arc in a new and marvelous setting. The hero’s journey was made all the more enticing because there were starships and lightsabers. Han Solo was an amazing character that I wanted to be more than I ever wanted to be Luke Skywalker. The characters had amazing development that persisted through the films. It was a grand opera with three distinct acts, each with its own beginning middle and end. They were good stories, and they were told pretty damn well. I’d go so far as to say they’re timeless.

Which is not at all what the prequel trilogy was, and those were better than the slop coming out now.

I could go into the issues that plague The Force Awakens, but honestly, a lot of the same problems carry over with the writing, and The Last Jedi is arguably even more brutal to its characters and story than the previous film was. So, without further ado…

Ma-Rey Sue

I think this pretty much goes without saying. For those that don’t know, a Mary Sue character is a character that has no flaws and is, for all intents and purposes, all-powerful and perfect. A Mary Sue (or Gary Sue, if the character is male; take that, Daisy Ridley and your stupid “sexism” nonsense) doesn’t have to put in work to achieve anything, and a Mary Sue has no room to grow because she is already perfect.

Enter Rey.

Rey being a Mary Sue was readily apparent in The Force Awakens. She pilots the Millenium Falcon as good as Han Solo does after admitting she’d never piloted a starship before. She shoots pinpoint with a blaster after never having handled a blaster before, and she takes on a dark-side Force user who’d trained under Luke freaking Skywalker the first time she turns on a lightsaber. All of these problems become immediately worse in The Last Jedi.

There are multiple issues with Luke that tie into this but I’ll be covering that in a minute. She manages to master the use of the Force immediately and beats Luke in mock combat. She can lift tons of rocks without trying, after we watched Luke struggle to stack a few stones in Empire Strikes Back. She is so powerful that Luke is afraid of her. Luke Skywalker. The man that destroyed the Death Star, defeated Darth Vader, and led to the demise of Emperor Palpatine. And after one non-lesson, Rey is able to best him in mock combat and prove herself a more adept force-user than Luke.

And Kylo Ren, for that matter. Spoilers ahead, but it’s been sixth months; if you haven’t seen it yet and you want to, there’s really no excuse at this point. Kylo Ren and Rey fight back to back at the end of the middle act of the movie, and she schools Snoke’s guards like its her business. She’s so good with a lightsaber and with melee combat, as a matter of fact, that she saves Kylo Ren. And this is after she’s been using a lightsaber for a whole week, maybe. This isn’t helped by the awful fight choreography and the noticeable instances of royal guards pausing or deflecting blows because Daisy Ridley was off position in the fight. Terrible all the way around.

The problem with writing a Mary Sue character is that they do not experience character growth. They literally can’t. They’re already more powerful than everyone else, they have no human flaws, and they have no particular goals that lend any sort of interest to the character. What are Rey’s goals, you ask? Doing the right thing and finding her parents. The first is so nebulous as to not be worth mentioning, and the second becomes a moot point in The Last Jedi. Then she has to find some kind of goal--anything to justify her existence--so Rian Johnson latched onto turning Kylo to the light side as some sort of end goal. Which, of course, makes zero sense, as there has been no emotional investment by either character (except what Johnson forced onto his poor audience) to justify it. At least Darth Vader was Luke’s father. Who the hell is Kylo Ren to Rey except a guy who has murdered tons of people and then abducted and mind-raped her?

Admiral Holdo

At this point, I’ve started to think that Johnson was just trolling everyone. I think this was an intentional troll to see just how much he could get away with. He might argue otherwise, but I disagree. My evidence? Admiral Purple Hair.

First of all: an evening gown? On the eve of evacuating your main base while under attack from the enemy? Really? This was the brilliant idea that Johnson and the costume designer had? This was idiotic. To the extreme. Second of all: why bother with the purple hair? Yeah, great, she’s hip and edgy. In the extended canon of books it’s explained she dyed her hair since she was a girl. But she is literally the only person on film to dye their hair a funky color. Maybe I missed an extra somewhere, but as far as supporting cast goes, who else dyes their hair as part of their character? Anyone? Bueller?

Character composition flaws aside, she is an insanely stupid character. Her whole plan the entire film relies on outrunning the First Order until, once the whole fleet is destroyed, everyone else will evacuate the flagship and then slam it into the First Order super cruiser as she enters lightspeed. I’m going to cover the hyperspace maneuver, but my problem with Holdo (and Leia, for that matter) is: why did you go out of your way to not say a word of it to anyone? Your people are dying, and Poe is desperately asking for information, and you just chastise him. He mutinies on you, and you make some snarky, self-righteous comment that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. You could have avoided this entire problem by simply explaining the plan. Instead, she keeps up her stupid plan and allows more and more people to die and more and more materiel to be lost, without telling a single person what’s going on. She is not only incompetent, but she is incredibly stupid. I’d mutiny against this stupidity in a heartbeat.

The usual retort is “well she was afraid there was a mole on board.” Really? Point to me where in the script of the movie this was ever indicated, to anyone, in any capacity. I’ll save you the trouble: it wasn’t. And this seems to be an issue with people that claim to like these new movies. They write in the gaps for the creators and pretend they saw a much better movie. I’m an author, so I know the power of show don’t tell, but that doesn’t excuse you from including elements in there that literally are not there. That’s called a plot hole, and it doesn’t spring from a lack of understanding. It springs from a lack of competent writing.

Supreme Leader Snoke

Remember all the mystery surrounding Snoke following The Force Awakens? Who was he? Maybe he was Darth Plagueis! Maybe he was an old Jedi Guardian who had become pragmatic and would shed light on the whole balance of the Force thing that was made so much more ambiguous in the prequels! We were totally going to find out in The Last Jedi.

Except we didn’t. We didn’t find out a thing about him. Instead, we went from “time to complete Kylo Ren’s training” to talking down to him like a douchenozzle and being completely oblivious to technology his own flagship has (looking at you, hyperspace tracker). His overconfidence wasn’t earned at all. In his final scene, he’s so stupidly confident that he has control that he’s literally narrating his own death. This would be fine, except for the fact he was made out to be stronger than Emperor Palpatine! Just kidding, folks, he’s a dweeb that gets cut down without any explanation whatsoever to who he was or what his motivations were. Garbage.

The Rest of The Supporting Cast

Kylo Ren is written into oblivion. He’s obsessed with killing the past, and then...he becomes the Supreme Leader. This comes on the tail of Snoke talking down to him and treating him like garbage. I guess he had a thing for Rey and she turned him down, so he goes full emo and does the exact opposite of what he was saying he was going to do. Imagine my shock.

Finn is used for laughs, pretty much, except in the end where he stands up to Captain Phasma. Good job, Finn! Except somehow he was also a janitor on the First Order flagship and was working in the tracker room. And when it became clear that somehow the First Order was tracking them through hyperspace, he didn’t think to tell anyone. There is nothing satisfying about Finn’s character arc in this story. He does go from wanting to run away to wanting to stay and fight, but that is completely undermined by the next supporting character’s stupidity.

Rose Tico. She is in the running for the worst character in this movie. Rey is a Mary Sue, this is true, and Snoke was a complete let down, but at least they sort-of make sense. You know what they are. Rose? Rose is just stupid, just like Holdo. She spends the movie picking on Finn for wanting to run away and save Rey because the Resistance is hopelessly doomed, and then, just when Finn decides to take a stand and save everyone, she cuts him off, takes away his ability to save the Resistance base where everyone left is holed up in by sacrificing himself, and delivers the stupidest line in the movie.

“That’s how we win. Not by destroying what we hate, but by saving what we love.”

So wait, you want Finn to stand and fight, but when he does, you deliver some stupid line while allowing the First Order to effectively destroy the last of the Resistance? There’s a Ryan Gosling meme that fits this perfectly. Then there’s a stupid, awkward kiss that makes no sense, and she gets put out in the ensuing attack. Garbage. Straight garbage.

Carrie Fischer’s Leia was demolished and turned into...well, I dunno what. I love Carrie Fischer. She is intelligent, articulate, witty, and can handle herself with the best of the industry. She was a woman whose phenomenal success with Star Wars didn’t turn her sour. She was a good soul, and I’m sorry she’s left this Earth. There was no development whatsoever of Leia’s character history; nothing about learning about the Force from her brother, nothing about the Resistance she’s in charge of, nothing about her life after Return of the Jedi. We know she and Han had a son, who became Kylo Ren, and that they weren’t together. We know she’s the leader of the Resistance. That second statement has zero context and no meaning outside of the immediacy of where she is and what she’s doing, so it’s almost entirely irrelevant.

So what happens in this film? The bridge of the flagship she’s on gets blown up and she’s blasted out into space, along with Admiral Ackbar and a few other people. What a sad and tragic dea-oh wait!!! Here comes Space Mary Poppins! As she’s quickly freezing to death in the vacuum of space and the air in her body is evacuating, she can Force magic her way back to life and glide into the ship again in time to be saved. Rian Johnson makes me want to shoot myself and then shoot others.

Luke Skywalker

I think if you ever want an example of poor writing and poor storytelling using pre-existing characters, look no further than Luke Skywalker. Anyone who’s seen the original trilogy knows Luke. He’s the wide-eyed farmboy who blew up the Death Star. He’s the crack pilot that led the charge on the doomed defense of Echo Base. He was the brash, young Jedi that decided he had to save his friends, no matter the cost to himself. He was the last Jedi Knight who risked his life to bring his father back from the dark side. The core of his character was hope. It was optimism. He was the guy you could always trust in the darkest of times to keep pushing for the light at the end of the tunnel. He was the good guy. When I saw him at the end of The Force Awakens, looking stoic after having Rey hold out his father’s lightsaber, I thought for sure we were going to see a Jedi Master that, through his wisdom and his struggles, had held onto hope his entire life and would rally the troops.

What did we get? Pessimism. Luke Skywalker actually says that he came to his island to die in solitude because he failed to keep his nephew from turning to the Dark Side. Then there’s a flashback where Luke is considering killing Kylo because of his fear of him turning dark. He constantly derides Rey and treats her with fear and caution because...reasons. He feels like he hates living entirely, which fits in with his earlier line about him wanting to die alone on this island. Rian Johnson managed to completely gut Luke Skywalker and replace him with a crotchety old hermit that hates living and apparently doesn’t care about his friends or family at all. Rey tries to appeal to him to come back and help her, to save the Resistance which his sister leads, and he tells her to go away. And Rian Johnson didn’t even do him the service of giving him a scene to come to grips with Han’s death in the last film. Not that it mattered in the long run, since even after Rey presumably told him what happened, Luke didn’t seem to care. At all.

I don’t know who Mark Hamill played in The Last Jedi, but that wasn’t Luke Skywalker. It was slop dreamed up by Johnson to kill whatever goodwill was left in this franchise.

The Story

All of the issues about writing characters aside, which are beyond numerous and which I’ve only begun to scratch the surface, the story is garbage. There are more than a few reasons for this. However, I’m going to focus on three things: lack of continuity with the previous film, hamhanding an agenda, and pretending that subversion makes up for pitiful storytelling.

Lack of Continuity
The Force Awakens was full of problems. It was a lackluster Star Wars movie that did a disservice to old characters and made stupid decisions with new ones. The writing was sub-par, and, rather than even attempting to flesh out the brave new world that should have resulted from the end of Return of the Jedi, it assumed a number of things, told the audience about them, and then promptly moved on. The characters that returned from the original trilogy were sad, withered people that only vaguely resembled their old characters.

Still, it attempted to link itself to the original trilogy from which it sprang. It retread the old story beats, but at least it felt like there was some continuity with the stories we grew up with and loved. The Last Jedi? It’s like Rian Johnson decided that The Force Awakens simply wasn’t far enough removed and just ignored most of what happened in that film, subsequently ignoring the characters from both The Force Awakens and the original trilogy. He went in there with a blank slate, some character names and vague ideas about who they were, and just cobbled it together. The Last Jedi feels like a poorly written fanfiction for what someone wanted to happen with the characters, not as a viable sequel to The Force Awakens or the original trilogy.

When writing from pre-existing material, continuity is vital. Remember that hyperspace maneuver I mentioned earlier? Its inclusion in the film opens up so many problems that it cripples the final act of the film. I’m not going to dive down into it because I could spend days analyzing just how nonsensical this addition is to canon, but suffice it to say this decision to add something without any consideration to the previous canon wrecks the previous canon. It makes every space battle before the final battle in The Last Jedi moot, because, well, why not just have hyperspace kamikaze ships piloted by computers to destroy everything? Why bother with a Death Star trench run? Just load a transport up with some heavy material and lightspeed it into the Death Star. Boom. Problem solved.

Hamhanding an Agenda
The movie’s middle act takes place on a planet whose name I can’t remember because it’s less than memorable. It revolves around Finn and Rose trying to find a codebreaker to help them break into the First Order’s flagship and shut down the tracker that the Order is using to track the Resistance fleet. While they’re there, they discover a bunch of fabulously wealthy people who traffic in arms “for the bad guys” but also, we find out, sell arms to “the good guys.” They also encounter child labor slaves and penned racing animals that are abused. By the end of this part of the film, Finn and Rose rescue all the animals (but not the child slaves) and ride one of the horse-things to get away from the authorities. They dismount outside of the city they’re in, and Finn comments that it was worth it. Rose retorts by releasing the horse-thing onto the plains and remarking that “now it was worth it.”

So, just to review: capitalism is evil and animal cruelty is evil. The first is so stupidly backwards I won’t justify it. The second is so laughably juvenile in its delivery that it destroys whatever message was trying to be sent. Anyone who has worked with trapped or abused animals can tell you that what’s depicted in this film is an absolutely awful way to save abused animals. In both cases, Johnson literally hits the audience over the head with the message again and again, as if he thinks viewers are too stupid to get it on their own through solid storytelling and nuance. No no, folks, you have to be told these are bad things. That’s to say nothing of the fact that somehow freeing domesticated, abused animals into the wild but ignoring the fucking child slaves is somehow altruism. There isn’t enough bleach to drink on this planet.

”It’s Subversive.”
This is something that Rian Johnson has repeated over and over when being asked to clarify the various shortcomings in his storytelling. He seems to champion subverting audience expectations at every turn. There’s nothing inherently wrong with subverting audience expectations. Anti-heroes are the perfect examples of this. Hell, Han Solo’s return at the very end of A New Hope was a subversion of the audience’s expectations for his character, expectations that were played up throughout the entire film. So is having the protagonist fail rather than succeed. There are many ways to be subversive and pull off a brilliant twist.

However, that requires not only good writing, but exceptional writing. None of this is present in The Last Jedi. Instead, what Johnson passes for subversion amounts to stupid jokes and character assassination, dressed up in a “subversion” cloak to deflect criticism. Luke tosses his father’s lightsaber away after Rey hands it to him for cheap laughs? Oooh, subversive. Finn wakes up from an injury that should have killed him and stumbles all over the medbay? Ooooh, comedy is totally subversive. Poe trolls General Hux on comms and Hux plays into it? Oooh, subversive because the audience expects a competent commander to shoot down the pilot. See where I’m going with this?

It’s stupid. It’s beyond stupid, actually. This is the same threadbare justification that poor writers use when they try to be edgy and their ideas fall flat. “Well you just don’t understand it because it subverted your expectations for the characters and plot.” No, I don’t understand it because it doesn’t make any sense. You can’t have tone-deaf scenes and expect anyone to sit there and enjoy them. They’re tone-deaf. They’re disjointed. They do not belong. This is a sign of incredibly weak storytelling, not innovation.

There’s so much more to pick at, but I’m honestly at the end of my patience. If I keep going on, I’m going to start causing myself harm. It’s not hard to ruin a franchise as beloved as Star Wars, but when you see it done with such utter contempt for both the source materials and the fans of it, it’s hard not to be pissed off.