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Star Wars Mishandled
I’m going to start this post with a spoiler alert, like I did last week. The Last Jedi came out a little over three months ago and most, if not all, people in America have seen it, but I’m still giving this warning.
Last week I wrote about Rose in The Last Jedi and said that she was one of the two biggest problems I have with the film. And while some of the things that she does in it are terrible and just bad storytelling, it isn’t the biggest problem with the movie.
The biggest problem is that it either forgets or doesn’t care that it’s a Star Wars movie. And I’m worried that it’s the latter.
I didn’t have a problem with the humor or the different look that it had, like a lot of people did. I’m all for movies looking and feeling unique. But when I say that it doesn’t care that it’s a Star Wars movie, I mean it all but throws out so much about we know about Star Wars lore from seven previous films. And nothing shows that it doesn’t care more than when Luke throws the lightsaber over his shoulder. To me, that was Rey saying, “Here’s this lightsaber that represents everything that has come before. I’m giving this to you so that you can pick up where we left off and keep going.” But Luke responds to that with, “I don’t care about any of that. I’m just gonna do my own thing.”
Since A New Hope first came out, the main Star Wars episodes have all been about the Skywalker family and how influential they are in the galaxy. The prequel trilogy’s main character was Anakin and the original trilogy’s was Luke. In Episode VII, we meet Rey and Kylo Ren (who obviously ends up having Skywalker blood) and we are led to think that these new characters would somehow be related to the characters we already know. I don’t think that it would have been predictable, boring, or more of the same if Rey had turned out to be Luke’s, Obi-Wan’s, or Han and Leia’s daughter. It would have been keeping with what Star Wars is.
Part of this is definitely due to the fact that different people are writing the movies in this trilogy. J.J. Abrams set up certain things in The Force Awakens that were set and ready to have a cool and interesting payoff. Who are Rey’s parents? How did Maz Kanata get Luke’s lightsaber? Who the heck is Snoke? How did he get so powerful? What is he? Where did he come from? (I also didn’t like how Snoke was handled in this film, but that’s a topic for a different time)
A lot of people talk about how it’s J.J. Abrams’ style of storytelling to hint at things that even he doesn’t know the answers to. But I firmly believe that he does know the answers to the things he set up in Ep. 7 and he was just waiting for the people who were coming in to make the next movies to handle them well. But Rian Johnson didn’t seem to care about cohesiveness between movies and completely changed the tone and ideas about what would be coming. I know that Abrams was a producer on this movie, but its IMDb page shows Rian Johnson as the sole writer. So it’s on him.
About ¾ of this movie was alluding to and setting up the fact that Rey’s parents would be revealed. But when it finally comes, it’s a huge letdown, because we learn that her parents were no one. I felt manipulated and cheated and extremely disappointed. The main characters are supposed to be connected to people we know! It’s a good message, that anyone can be special, but just like the line that Rose says to Finn, it’s misplaced. I hope that what Kylo told Rey turns out to be either a lie or him being misinformed. That would make the surprise of this movie worth it. And with Abrams directing Ep. 9, I feel like there’s a chance for that. But I’m not holding out too much hope.
My biggest disappointment is to find out that we might have a main Star Wars episode where we dive more deeply into the mystery and lore of the Force and learn that it might not be as special as it seems. Seeing some random kid use the Force to get a broom opens up so many possibilities that scare me. There are enough other Star Wars projects in the works that can explore that. But please, oh, please keep the focus on the Skywalker saga on the Skywalkers.