Chat corner 47: The Last Jedi

[annathecrow]

Welcome to this week’s chat corner!

Optional prompt

This week’s prompt is “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”, the second movie in the Sequel trilogy.

Just as with the first Sequel movie, I remind you to use The Dark Side post as necessary, so there’s some space left for people who enjoyed the film. If you did, the floor is yours ;)

 

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

I heard virtually nothing about the movie before seeing it because I don't like to be spoiled and I went to see it with friends, so saw it in the theater. I thought the opening section was great, with the tension of Rose's sister's sacrifice and the humor with Poe's approach. And having Leia turn that around and show what an awful decision Poe made was unexpected and intriguing!

But then I found it disappointing for a few reasons:

a) I was expecting to get more adventures of all three of our new heroes together, which did not happen
b) Since the first movie didn't do a great deal of explaining what had happened since the previous trilogy, I was amazed that the resistance was on its last legs after all that time. It made me even more baffled about what was really won at the end of RotJ.
c) I had assumed we'd get Luke training Rey which didn't really happen. I found that pretty disappointing because we never saw Luke himself get much training and I'm not keen on this idea that everyone just becomes a Jedi during summer camp.
d) I think my entire group found the whole casino section rather boring. OTOH I think that, canon-wise, it was one of the few things we see that actually addresses life in the new Republic. We sort of touch on this with Rey's introduction, but clearly Jakku is so much farther out in nowhere than Tatooine that we could be excused for thinking that her experience is more just living in what amounts to a company town of gig workers.
e) The film is back-loaded with all the exciting parts -- the throne room battle, Holdo's stand, Luke's appearance and scene with Leia, etc. It felt like a slog getting there.

So once I heard about the negative reaction to the film, I assumed it had to do with how it just seemed emotionally barren, given that we were now invested in the new characters as well as the older ones. But instead the reaction to the themes in the movie seemed to be the big sticking point and I actually liked those. It made me feel like they were trying to do something new with Star Wars which, after the copycat setup in the first film, seemed like a really good idea to me.

BUT. I think it ended up being a bad idea as part of a film trilogy. Star Wars films were always very lightly sketching out the verse in favor of action and thrills, and it seemed to me that questioning Poe's approach and Rey not turning out to be of some special bloodline were already enough of a twist in the story. I liked Rose just fine and wanted to have Finn get a significant storyline. But their quest just didn't seem to have the same overall importance and it seemed like it belonged in another movie or (and here's the key point) in a series.

Star Wars, since Clone Wars, has made its TV series do the heavy lifting in terms of world building and addressing issues in Star Wars. The closest we came to that in movies was in Rogue One (which is my favorite of the new films) which also had issues with back loading all the really high tension, exciting developments. So I felt like Rose and Finn's adventure was both too much and not enough.

Also, I'm amazed anyone was surprised at the boom in Reylo after this film, because one of the few ongoing threads that paid off was to see where this whole psychic connection was going with them.

[annathecrow]

I put my reply on the Dark Side post.