Posted on 01/01/2018 1:10:56 PM PST by Kaslin
Having fallen in love with Star Wars from the time that I first saw it in the late 1970s, it brings this 45 year-old no pleasure to concede that, for various reasons, the latest installment in the SW saga is simply not a good film.
Much has already been written about The Last Jedi’s poor story-telling, sorely underdeveloped and misused characters, and rampant Political Correctness. Most of the commentary has been spot-on in these respects. However, little to no attention has been drawn to that which is most disturbing about TLJ:
It is the first anti-Star Wars Star Wars movie.
TLJ essentially deconstructs the whole SW saga.
The classic tale of the perennial battle between Good and Evil collapses in on itself, here being revealed as an epic delusion begotten by the monumental arrogance of those—the Jedi—who thought themselves heroes.By insisting upon a hard and fast distinction between the dark and light sides of the Force—by insisting that morality is an objective feature of the universe—and positioning themselves as guardians of the Light, the Jedi, in their “hubris,” as Luke Skywalker says, gave rise to all that had gone wrong in the galaxy.
In other words, it is the Jedi Order that is the “root cause” of evil (if we can even coherently speak of evil in connection with TLJ). To put it more exactly, it is civilization, its traditions and institutions, from which all corruption springs.
Freedom, Equality, and every other virtue can come about only after the old civilization has been razed, burnt to the ground along with its literature, those Jedi texts to which Yoda takes the proverbial match in TLJ.
This idea that civilization is corruptive of nature extends back centuries in Western thought. Its most prominent representative is the 18th century French philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau. It was Rousseau who famously remarked that “man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.” Civilization enslaves. Specifically, the institution of private property, the cornerstone of civilization, is the origin of all cruelty, vice, and horror. Rousseau’s remarks on this subject say it all:
“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine’, and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by…crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”
Private property engenders material inequalities and hierarchies, the “chains” that enslave. The Jedi, to hear TLJ’s Luke Skywalker tell it, created and perpetuated hierarchy and inequality vis-à-vis the Force inasmuch as they were either delusional or deceptive enough to presume that they alone had the right to protect it, as if it somehow belonged to them.
And herein lay the true significance of Daisy Ridley’s “Rey,” the chief protagonist of Disney’s trilogy:
She is a Rousseauian Hero, the Great Leveler, the quintessential champion of Equality.
Rey is the most sagacious, potent, and capable of Force users, exceeding in these virtues even Yoda; yet she is no Jedi—at least she is not a Jedi in any traditional sense of this term. The criteria that aspiring Jedi were expected to satisfy before they could be recognized as “masters” by guardians of the old order have not only been relegated to the dustbin of history, but that history itself both the heroes and villains of TLJ agree also needs to be erased.
Rey herself has no history or, what amounts to the same thing, no history worth talking about. This trilogy’s main villain, “Kylo Ren,” wayward son to Leia and Han Solo, nephew and former student of Luke, and grandson of Darth Vader, has a history; but, as far he is concerned, it is inconsequential, a thing to be unequivocally repudiated. As he tells Rey: “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.
The heroes agree.
The little green Socrates of SW, Yoda, emerges for one brief scene in TLJ to beat Luke to the punch by destroying all of the ancient Jedi Scriptures.Yoda tells Luke that all that Rey needs to know regarding the Force she already knows. “We are what they [students] grow beyond.”
Rey already outstrips even Yoda in sagacity.
In The Last Jedi, Light and Darkness, the Jedi and the Sith—these are for all practical purposes dismissed as relics of a bigoted past. The Resistance indeed promises to continue fighting against the First Order, but unlike the misguided Rebellion and, before it, the Jedi Order, it is not concerned with restoring balance to the Force or the freedom that existed during the days of the Republic.
No, the Resistance is about as interested in conserving the past as is Kylo Ren. It would appear that its point in fighting is to hit the reset button, to wipe the slate clean and write anew.
This is no slight deviation from the SW mythos. The Jedi and all of the heroes of the Old Republic were akin to the men of the American founding generation inasmuch as they fought for the sake of conserving an inherited way of life. In glaring contrast, the Resistors are more like the French Revolutionaries, radical egalitarians inspired by Rousseau and against whom Edmund Burke defined what would become known as conservatism.
The radicals of the French Revolution were zealots who, for the sake of leveling the inequalities and hierarchies that were the legacy of the past, fiercely and indiscriminately used the guillotine against the members of the Ancien Regime that they sought to purge from their midst.
Most decent folks today, regardless of their politics or religion, share Burke’s assessment of the French Revolution. The radicals were many things, but they were not good.
This, then, is another respect in which The Last Jedi underscores the arbitrary, the arguably artificial, character of our conceptions of right and wrong, good and evil:
The Resistors are not good in any objective sense of this term.
And neither is The Last Jedi a good film.
People get old; their characters either die or get recast.
What do you do with a generational classic like Star Wars? I was a high school movie theater usher when the first film came out -- at MY theater! I can't tell you how many times I saw that movie, forwards, backwards, inside-out...
But here we all are, 40 years later, Alec Guinness, Peter Cushing, and Carrie Fisher are dead, Peter Mayhew has chronic arthritis, Harrison Ford has had some recent high-profile incidents with judgement, and the remaining actors aren't getting any younger.
So, what do you do when a beloved cast becomes too old to maintain the characters? Either the characters age with the actors, or the storyline remains fixed in time and the characters are recast, or the characters are killed off and replaced in the epic.
Star Trek offers a comparative glimpse. Before the actors became too old, the franchise handed the baton to "The Next Generation." In my mind, the only flaw was in how they handled the death of Kirk. If Star Wars fanatics are forming a petition to remove the latest movie from canon, why not petition to redo the death of Kirk, too? Of course, I'm being facetious, but the similarities remain: Scotty, McCoy, Spock, Nurse Chapel/Computer, are dead (in their actors), only Kirk, Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov remain from the principle cast. Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford are still with us, as well as Billy Dee Williams and Anthony Daniels (as active performers), but that's it. And for how much longer?
So what is a franchise supposed to do about it?
-PJ
I think everyone liked the first Star Wars, after that they get kind of lame.
Yeah - I agree with most of that. But that’s how it is with movies and music these days. The people that create it are liberals with crap agendas.
That doesn’t stop me from going into a theatre, ignoring their leftist agenda and enjoying the sheer action entertainment though. Same thing with music. I don’t allow liberals to keep me from having a good time. I USE and discard their work as I wish.
A Taoist's Dream
I saw the movie on someone else’s dime, for which I am thankful, and frankly enjoyed myself. At the time, I was more surprised by the emasculation of Chewbacca. In my Star Wars, Han shot first and Chewbacca ate that porg.
worldwide 1 bill 56 million school back in session tomorrow.
Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney. So he had nothing to do with the storylines of the most recent star wars movies.
Oh, BTW, Rey saved The Books. They’re on the Falcon.
Having seen it I agree it is a great film -- just from a look and feel, despite the new requirement that the lead hero be a chick.
It also has a flaw as fatal as the one in the Death Star itself. Rather than expose that flaw here, I will send you to the hilarious ('cause it's true) EWW:
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Rogue One was good, but no one survived it to tell the story. I don’t mind that so many heroes were killed—that’s the tragedy of it. But you needed someone who was “there” to “live” to tell the story we were told. If someone had survived the it, even the droid though I’d prefer someone else, it would be in my top three Star Wars movies.
I am so cynical about how awful these movies have become (R1 an exception but Force Awakens should be on a poster in Planned Parenthood) I am expecting a "reboot" of A New Hope starring Justin Beiber as Luke, Beyonce as Leia, and Keanu Reeves as Obi-Wan.
Sorry but I disagree completely. I could care less about making like cynical or killing off the old characters, SW was good v evil and if you think this movie “returned” sw to that, I don’t know what movie you were watching.
This movie left nothing that binary anywhere.
No one is evil and even Rey, who is “good” comes across as simply less cynical and naive than purely good.
There movie leave the audience with literally no reason to come back.. because it’s just going to be more shades of gray and nihilism.
About the only concept that isn’t completely destroyed is some vague notion of “hope”.. but even this is somewhat ephemeral.
There are plenty of execution issues that can be ripped apart, but the real problem is SW is no longer Good V Evil as of this movie...
Somebody did. But who, why, and how (like so much else in this clusterbomb) are left to the viewer to not care about.
The pantless teddy bears was the third movie (after "Empire Strikes back") and yes, you did the right thing. The pantless teddy bears is where the franchise jumped the shark. "Star Wars" just proceeded to get stupider and stupider with each iteration. It became so bad that Mr. Plinkett's reviews were actually far more entertaining than the horrible movies.
Saw the first one when it came out. Thought it was a crappy cartoon (manipulative, dishonest, shoddy), never went back.
George Lucas’s first installment of Star Wars, was masterful. Let’s face things, he literally forever changed the world with that installment. But, let’s take a moment to identify why we could so easily learn to “love” each major character.
Lucas spent time describing Luke as a farm boy, living with his loving Aunt and Uncle. We watched him work, and yearn to leave home. We watched him get sucked into something bigger than himself, against his will. By the end of the first movie, we knew things that Luke would do, and would never do. We knew that Han was a scoundrel, but one with basic principles of loyalty. We knew things that Han would readily do, and what he wouldn’t do. The same can be said for Leia.
By the end of movie 3, we knew these charctes very well. We knew how they could work together, and form a team, that they could depend upon one another. Alas, the 30 year lag between the first installments of SW, caused Lucas to lose this storytelling capabilities.
In every installment from that point, there is NO CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. We have no clue what any of the charcters in the last several installments care about; and we generally do not care about them. Rey, who has starred in the last 3 SW installments has absolutely NOTHING to endear us to her. She stands for nothing, but what she FEELS at any given movment, and that can be from slicing Kylo to pieces, to taking falling madly in love with him - depending upon her mood at the time.
There is nothing engaging about ANY of the new characters, from the bug-eyed old woman who apparently is in pistol battles for reasons unknown, to Kylo who seems like a spoiled Milleanial who didn’t get his nap, to the droids who exhibit more personality and charisma than any of the living creatures. The Black Stormtrooper offers NOTHING to the movie, other than he is a black character.
All Disney is doing, is shaking the money tree.
The teddy bears Star Wars was the third movie and the end of the original series. It ended with the Jedi winning.
In the same respect that this is just a movie.
What could be more anti-Star Wars than the prequel trilogy?
True that! TLJ didn’t introduce, thankfully, any characters on the level of Jar Jar Binks.
I thought the movie was better than I was expecting going into it based on many reviews I read. This being the 8th movie, ninth if you found Rogue One, it is difficult to come up with new plot lines or twists. Many of those who voiced disappointment in their reviews are disappointed in that the film didn’t go in a predictable direction. I personally thought that made it more interesting. The movie left enough question marks to bridge to the 9th chapter.
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