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.
What I thought would be kinda neat for the various expanded universe and origin stories is if they would take a classic film or story and use it as a loose template for a Star Wars movie. I mean, imagine a Star Wars movie showing how Han meets Chewy while a bounty hunter chases them that’s loosely based on The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly! Or maybe a movie where Obiwan guards a young Luke on Tatooine based on Lone Wolf and Cub?
No, the last two movies have been Disney productions based on screen-writer and director fan-fic. But while he was doing them, despite all the woof-woof that they were all plotted out, George Lucas was making it up—and changing it up with the Special Editions—as he went along.
Me either, I streamed the thing.
The premise that there never was any "good guys" has long been a staple of left propaganda. The thing they hated about Reagan was his unwillingness to see "gray", drawing instead a stark contrast between "good" and "evil."
Rather than being an epic battle between the forces of light and darkness, this movie recalls the immortal words of Homer Simpson.
Killing off an Original Trilogy character is the least problematic part of this movie, aside from how it happened.
Heresy! the Force definitely will not be with you.
This is a really well-written article.
Hollywood is the abode of a population dominated by criminals and perverts. Of course they support a world view where all is gray. They are then justified in their corruption and perversion. No one dare criticize them. There is no right or wrong, just wealth and power.
They are too foolish to understand that in such a society they themselves would be slaves. They don’t have the stomach to fight and would fall to the first Stalin who would inevitably arise in a society without right or wrong.
The original Star Wars was a space story using the Dungeons and Dragons alignments of Lawful Good (Jedi), facing Lawful Evil(Sith), with a Chaotic Neutral(Han Solo) thrown in for good measure.
After that, it lost the original charm, and became “The Great Quest for TOY SALES!”
There are some REALLY, REALLY good books out there from the SW Universe, but Disney doesn’t own them, and would have to pay actual royalties to the creators of them. Which WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
And the money tree is delivering. $500 million domestic, $1 billion worldwide so far.
The issue is that George Lucas sold the franchise as a piece of private property, and the new owners of said private property have new ideas on what to do with it.
The fans are stuck on Lucas' vision of it, but it's not Lucas' property anymore. What's the word for forcing the owner of private property to do something with it against their own desires?
-PJ
“So, what do you do when a beloved cast becomes too old to maintain the characters?”
That was the problem with Casablanca 7, when Rick and Ilsa’s illegitimate son becomes a communist in reaction to being illegitimate, and we find that Victor Laszlo became a transvestite at the end of his life when he realized that Ilsa really preferred Rick.
Why couldn’t they let the first 3 Casablanca films stand on their own?
I agree with most of this... except... the books were NOT destoryed... Ray has them! they showed them near the end of the film in her room. Ray had already taken them when yoda burned the tree.
-PJ
We have a bad guy who is “bad”, because he has daddy issues. If he was a female he would have been a stripper at “Cantina Royale”.
As far as I remember only one Jedi thought Anakin was the chosen one, until Obi-wan called him that in Episode III. Nothing about Palpatine screamed Sith Lord until Episode III, to the characters in the movie. The Jedi actual acted on the side of good for the Republic, because of the actions of Count Dooku and the manipulation of the Trade Federation. It was pretty straightforward and simple.
Now we have a Star Wars that has way too many unanswered questions and huge “leaps of faith” cause “reasons”. Rian Johnson has managed to outdo the ridiculousness of the mitichlorian disaster, by having anyone have force powers, and be able to master them without training (something Abrams pushed the envelope with in TFA).
FIRST SW was good vs evil. Then Darth became Luke’s father and Ben’s student and it all started getting grey. Then you get the prequel trilogy and midicholorians and the chosen one and raw Jedi incompetence and the Jedi screwing over Anakin. By the time Darth screams NOOOOOO it’s all grey. This movie bring back binary, and a big part of that is acknowledging that the Jedi just ain’t all that.
There’s plenty of evil folks in LJ, Kylo Ren is full on evil by the end, they toyed around with him having an Anakin style redemption and he literally threw it away. Ren is evil, pure and simple. And Rey rejects it, she is good, pure and simple.
There’s plenty of reason to come back. And we all know you will. All this hollow posturing from whiney assed fans is so pathetic. 2 years ago the crowd was bitching about how stupid FA was and they weren’t coming back, and then they came back and are now bitching about how stupid LJ is and they’re not coming back. But you WILL come back, because you’re hooked. Also it’s going to be interesting to see how they handle it.
SW is more good v evil now than it has been in 37 years. And if you bothered to actually pay attention to what happened between “I am your father” and “nooooo” you’d know that.
They had new ideas to basically revoke the fundamental premise upon which the entire franchise was originally founded. I actually think this approach is fundamentally flawed as a form of entertainment. Going all the way back to Greek Theater, you pretty much have to have a protagonist and an antagonist. Making them equally odious would tend to have audiences wishing they could both lose. They are in "a pox on both your houses" territory here.
The fans are stuck on Lucas' vision of it, but it's not Lucas' property anymore. What's the word for forcing the owner of private property to do something with it against their own desires?
I don't think anyone is suggesting they don't have a right to wreck their own franchise. I think people are simply pointing out that they appear to be wrecking it. Perhaps subsequent fans will see the merit in what they have done, but a lot of existing fans think it was folly. (Also Mark Hamill seems to think so tool.)
Sounds as if the murderous Kyhmer Rouge of Cambodia would’ve loved this movie.
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