Tag: the last jedi

After Luke reveals himself to be tricking Kylo Ren we cut back to Ahch-to where Luke is shown struggling to perform this new Jedi Force Projection trick that Kylo Ren alluded to earlier in the movie.  Kylo Ren reveals that by merely doing this trick you could die and Luke does just that.

We see Luke stare off into the distance at two suns.  We don’t know for sure if these are Ahch-to’s two suns or if it’s some sort of hallucination the boring miserable planet that Luke hated being on for the first twenty years of his life.  Either way it is a beautifully shot scene and call back to the original Star Wars movie.

Immediately both Rey and Leia seem to feel Luke’s passing.  There is not a lot of grief, mostly just calm reflection by both of them.

I’m not sure I really like this end for Luke Skywalker.  I can understand that what he did must’ve been some pretty advanced level Force use but how and why did it kill him?    I’m not sold on the fact that Luke needed to die, at least not in this manner.  If he truly wanted to help out, much like Holdo, wouldn’t he have been of much more use alive?

If Luke had died selflessly to protect Rey, Leia, or whoever else needed protection by sacrificing himself that would have seemed more necessary.  I just have a very hard time wrapping my head around why this would have happened this way.  Why does Luke, who always rushed to his friends’ side and believed in the redemption of anyone turn into someone who abandons his friends and loses faith in his own nephew at the first sign of straying to the dark side.

Seeing Luke die is tough.  It’s less jarring than the death of Han Solo but it is still tough.  Tougher, however, is seeing who Luke has become.  Han and Leia have not changed all that much.  They’re both the same people they’ve always been, just sadder.  Luke seems to go against everything that he ever stood for in the original movies.  The question remains: why?  Because of that one time he failed?  That seems like a really weak reason even for a young Luke Skywalker who was no stranger to whining.  That one failure just makes him say, “Okay, I’m done with that.”  Then he walks away from it all and allows Kylo Ren to just kill everyone?

And why does Luke die?  Is the exertion of this projection task just so much that it will kill anyone?  Does he die just because he feel like it and he’s had enough?  When Yoda dies you get the feeling he was just using the Force to extend his life to help Luke.  Luke is roughly 850 years younger than Yoda.

After Luke’s death Kylo Ren storms the base and makes eye contact with Rey just as she about to fly off in the Millennium Falcon.  Along with her flies off the possibility of there being a real lightsaber battle in this movie.  Kylo Ren finds the dice from the Millennium Falcon and picks them up only to see them disappear in his hands.  This leaves me with a lot of questions about how Luke’s whole Force Projection trick works.

On board the rebel ship Poe meets Rey for the first time and they have to comment on it because I don’t think any viewers of the two movies realize it until it’s brought up.

Finn goes into a drawer to get blankets for Rose and we see that Rey has stolen all the Jedi texts in a final act to really piss off the Force nuns.

Rey asks Leia, “How do we rebuild from this?”

Leia responds, “We have everything we need.”

The camera then falls back and we see everyone chatting, smiling, and laughing as if it were the end of The Return of the Jedi.  It’s unclear why anyone is doing anything other than suffering from intense levels of dread and despair.  Nothing has gone right for the Resistance and they’ve been cut down to about two dozen people at this point.  Things are bleak.  We all like an underdog story but unless some of those bums they were trying to call to help them on Crait show up it’s going to be impossible to believe any story line that leads this group to victory against the hugely powerful First Order.

The movie ends with the slaves back on Canto Bight.  We see a little boy use the force to bring a broom to his hand, something that would make Master Obi-Wan “very grumpy.”  We’re left to believe that the Force can be used by anyone, a bit of a departure from the genetically passed down Force trends of previous movies.  This is why Rey’s parents don’t matter.  This is, apparently, the hope Leia may be referring to.

Personally, I’m thinking they can’t wait for the slave kid with the broom to grown up.  They’re going to need to do some pretty intense planning before we can hope for a happy ending to Episode IX.

Next up: In Conclusion . . .

 

 

As the Resistance tries to make its dairing escape, Admiral Holdo watches in anguish as she sees The First Order taking out transports one-by-one.  She knows she must do something so she jump to the controls and prepares to turn the ship around and ultimately make the jump to lightspeed through Snoke’s ship.  There is a precedent for this from the first movie where Han explains the delicate nature of hyperspace calculations to a naive Luke.  This is interesting in that it is the first time we ever really see a hyperspace accident.

It does raise a question though: why was this not their plan all along?  The plan, I guess, was to just slowly run out of gas until the First Order catches up with them and destroys their ship.  If the ship was doomed to destruction then why not ram the approaching ship in hopes of doing some damage?  Additionally, is it possible to do this with just one person on board?  I don’t know or understand anything about the logistics of piloting one of these giant capital ships but I’d imagine there is a bridge with dozens of people for a reason.  I had the same questions about Anakin piloting the ship to a crash landing in Revenge of the Sith.

Aboard the ship Rey and Kylo Ren are straining to use the Force to claim Luke’s lightsaber.  This results in the lightsaber being torn in two and Kylo Ren being knocked unconscious as Rey escapes.

Just before Snoke’s ship is about to be torn apart from Holdo’s maneuver we see Captain Phasma preparing to execute Finn and Rose using some sort of sophisticated cattle prod.  She is interrupted as the ship is rammed and everyone gets thrown about.

The result is a lot of madness aboard Snoke’s ship.  BB-8 somehow commandeers an AT-ST that he uses to fire at the enemy while Finn and Phasma prepare for their final showdown.  I have to say that I find Captain Phasma to be a pretty underutilized, perhaps unnecessary character.  This whole battle between Finn and her doesn’t really hold a lot of interest for me.  Their interaction in the past has been minimal and conceivably the main reason Phasma is so keen on making Finn suffer is because they threw her in a trash compactor in the previous movie.

Before Finn finishes her off she announces that he is “rebel scum” as yet another tedious reference to the throwaway line in Return of the Jedi.

Hux finds Kylo Ren passed out and appear about to kill him before Kylo Ren wakes up.  After some bickering Kylo Ren quickly asserts his power of Hux and by default becomes the new supreme leader.

I’d always considered Hux and Ren to have a work dynamic similar to that of Tarkin and Vader.   Hux/Tarkin were the governmental and military arm whereas Ren/Vader were the spiritual apprentice to the leader.   It is an interesting dynamic which becomes destroyed when Snoke is killed.   Hux is no Tarkin.  He’s a little weasel and Ren is an impulsive brat.  It’s going to be interesting to see what their fates are in the coming movie.  The relationship is like what it would be like if Vader and Tarkin were immature little babies.

Finn, Rose, and BB-8 all escape in a Lambda-class shuttle and head to meet up with the Resistance on Crait.  Poe delivers one of the more humorous lines of the movie when he hopes that the “big ass door holds out” long enough for them to get help.

Then the plan is revealed.  They’re going to send out Princess Leia’s “personal code” to try to attract allies to the Resistance to come and help them.  It seems like a pretty pathetic plan but I suppose these are very desperate times and this is the best that they’ve got.

Rose and Finn enter and Rose says, “Is this all that’s left?”  It seems like an impossible situation.  We can certainly blame Poe for the reason that their ranks are so thin.  It’s a hopeless situation and we can only sit back and wait on the inevitable arrival of the cavalry, old friends of Princess Leia coming to join in the fight against the evil First Order.

Next up . . . the cavalry does not arrive.

No sooner have the rebels evacuated their cruiser than the First Order immediately opens fire on the transports, blasting the undefended ships to pieces.  So far this is shaping up to be a very poor plan.  Maybe being in a larger, armed ship and being tracked was a better alternative to being in unarmed ships and being blasted out of space.

Snoke, meanwhile, it tormenting Rey and telling her that when he is done with her he’s going to go to Ahch-To and completely obliterate the island Luke is on.  In anger Rey tries to get her lightsaber but Snoke smacks her in the head with it and reclaims it back at his side.  He then shares a view of the transports being picked off one-by-one with Rey to torment her, much the way that the Emperor torments Luke in Return of the Jedi.

Rey then steals Kylo Ren’s lightsaber and charges at Snoke.  He easily tosses her aside and tells her that she has the spirit of a Jedi and that is why she must die.  This scene continues to raise the problems I’ve had with all Star Wars movies since Return of the Jedi.  If the master is so effortlessly powerful why do they feel the need to have an apprentice at all?  If I was tasked with defeating 100 two-year-olds in a battle would I feel the need to enlist a six-year-old to do my work for me?  The six-year-old would undoubtedly be able to accomplish the task but with considerably more effort than I would.  What is up with these masters of the dark side?  Maybe they just like to watch the show.  Maybe they’re just lazy.

Snoke then goes on a hubris-laced rant about how he is so great and he has seen everything.  He can see Ren’s intent and he can see that he will ignite his lightsaber and strike down his true enemy.  By this point it becomes obvious that this is not going to end well for Snoke.  Even the Emperor was not this cocky.  Sure enough the lightsaber at Snoke’s side turns, ignites, and cuts the evil master in half, Darth Maul style.

I’ll admit that this scene caught me off guard.  It wasn’t a complete surprise as Snoke’s obvious pride and the wiggling lightsaber gave it away a few seconds beforehand, but the fact that it did happen was shocking to me.  Initially I thought that Snoke spouting off about how smart he was was just a little too obvious.  Then I thought it showed how skilled Kylo Ren was in clouding Snoke’s mind to the true facts at hand.

We then see Rey and Ren, back-to-back, face the Elite Praetorian Guard who snap into action, albeit a little too late.

While we’re on the Elite Praetorian Guard, again, I don’t quite grasp why the Emperor or Snoke need some vastly inferior bodyguards.  It’s like if I, and seven other scrawny, average height men were hired to be a bodyguard for The Rock.  I guess the fact that there would be eight of us would give us some sort of advantage in numbers but at he end of the day I think The Rock would be better served to defend himself.

Imagine if The Rock could use the force.

The battle scene that follows with the Praetorian Guard is really well done.  I think it may be my favorite thing about the movie but not because of the action.  I like the fact that Jedi are once again just warriors, not all-powerful beings.  In the original trilogy we see Luke struggle to take down a wampa.  We see him nervous as he deflects three laser blasts facing down a speeder bike.  We see him imperfectly defeat Jabba’s crew, getting blasted in the hand, tied up by Boba Fett, and struggling to climb Jabba’s sail barge.  Jedi were powerful, yes, but they were not the perfect.

The prequels show us Jedi who are carrying on conversation with each other as they absent-mindedly deflect hundreds of laser blasts per minute with their lightsaber.  We see them leap hundreds of feat, fall to near-certain death only to grab onto moving speeders, and defy physics at every turn, all while not getting a single scratch.

The new movies have done something great.  They’ve shown Jedi (if you can call them that) fighting as a real struggle.  It reminds me of the lift fight from Diamonds are Forever.  In that scene we see a fight that is a real struggle.  James Bond is not some all-powerful being who blocks everything thrown at him as if he were Neo in the Matrix.  He’s someone who is a good fighter who fights someone in a very real way.

In the prequels Obi-Wan or Yoda would simply have dispatched of all the Praetorian Guard in ten to twenty seconds, disengaging their lightsaber after the last blow was delivered, and hooking it back onto their belt before the final body hit the floor.  It made for flashy, overly stimulating and ultimately boring fight scenes.  In The Last Jedi Rey and Ren defeat he Praetorian Guard but it isn’t without considerable effort.  It would be unthinkable in the prequels that a Jedi would struggle against anyone that was not also a Jedi.

The fight scene it truly beautiful.  It’s beautifully filmed, exciting to watch, in a great setting, and suspenseful.  It has a lot of the elements that make the final confrontation between Luke and Vader so interesting to watch which is unusual because this a battle, not a duel.

During the battle there is this exhilarating feeling.  It’s like the end of The Force Awakens where you really think Kylo Ren is going to do the right thing and run away with his father to join the Resistance.  It seems like this is it.  He’s made his turn back to the light side.  We learn quickly that this is not the case and the scene makes reference to The Empire Strikes Back.  Kylo Ren wants Rey to join him.  He doesn’t want to join her in the Resistance.  He deosn’t want her to join him in The First Order.  He wants them both to die and for the two of them to start something new.

He then tells Rey the truth about her parents and what she already knows, they were nobody.  He tells her that she’s nothing but not to him.  This is delivered in the way you’d expect the captain of the football team to approach the nerdy girl who no one knew was beautiful until she took off her glasses and put on some makeup.  Thankfully, unlike movies of that genre, Rey brushes this “compliment” aside and it becomes apparent a truce between the two will not be reached.

They then fight over Luke’s lightsaber and, for the second time, Rey wins the battle and Kylo Ren is left unconscious.

It’s nice that we learn that Rey’s parents are not Luke or Obi-Wan or any of the other obvious shocking reveals we could have had.  It’s nice that not everyone needs to be related.  It’s nice that anyone can be a Jedi.  It opens things up a lot more in the future of the franchise as the Skywalker dynasty is hitting a sort of dead end.

What the final conflict between Rey and Ren is going to look like is not known but it is nice that Kylo Ren is so unpredictable.  I can see him being redeemed as easily as I can see him not being redeemed.  The dynamic between him and Rey is great and it’s great to see great characters emerging in Star Wars once again.

Next up . . . Holdo’s risky maneauver and the final showdown between Finn and Phasma!

 

On Snoke’s ship Rey tells Kylo Ren that she saw his future and she will help him.  He tells her that she will stand with him then he takes her before Snoke.By the way, we are now well past he half way mark in this new trilogy and I still haven’t gotten over how silly Snoke’s name is.

Meanwhile, Finn, Rey, and Benicio del Toro are on their mission to shut down the hyperspace tracker so that he Resistance may escape.  Unfortunately they are ambushed by Captain Phasma and the evil BB-8.

If they do shut down the tracker it looks like the Resistance will be too busy fighting among themselves to do anything as Holdo has begun fighting back ad there is a giant stun gun battle happening on the bridge of their command ship.  In the middle of the battle Leia walks onto the bridge in a white hospital robe and shoots Poe.

As they drag away Poe’s unconscious body Holdo tells Leia, “I like him.”  Leia replies with a smile, “Me too.”

Why?  Why does anyone like Poe?  He’s not even a lovable rogue, he’s an impulsive, insubordinate oaf who does nothing but get people killed.  He should have been killed by his own commanders years ago or at he very least locked up in the brig.  I’m not a military man but I can’t imagine that any amount of his recklessness would have been tolerated by any military that has ever existed even the results were largely positive.

Holdo tells Leia as they plan their escape that in order for the transports to escape that someone needs to stay behind and pilot he cruiser.  It’s not really explained why that is the case if they’re just going in a straight line and waiting to run out of fuel.  It’s also not explained why Leia allows her second in command to volunteer for this.  It serves the plot to show how brave Holdo is as a leader but doesn’t really make a lot of sense beyond that.  If someone was going to sacrifice themselves for this reason, why wouldn’t it be a lower level member of the Resistance.  Also, with the technology present it seems odd that they couldn’t program in some sort of autopilot.  Apparently Southwest Airlines has more advanced technology than the Resistance.

Back on Snoke’s ship he tells Kylo Ren that he though his equal in the Force would arise but he always thought it would be Skywalker.  Snoke also revealed that it was he that breached their minds and put them in communication with each other.  He then uses the Force to throw Rey into the air and announces that she will give him Skywalker.

Poe wakes up on the transport and Leia summons him over.  At this point she tells Poe the plan that he probably should have known since the beginning.  Sure, he’s an idiot, but they’re clearly huge fans of his so I’m not sure why they left him out in the first place.  It would have saved them a lot of trouble and a lot of people from being shot with stun guns.  Holdo is revealed as some sort of genius because she knew that the First Order was tracking the main ship but not the smaller transports.

As the ships blast away Holdo stands on the bridge watching and says, “Godspeed, Rebels.”  This bothered me, admittedly more than it should.  Godspeed?  If only the Star Wars universe had some sort of expression similar to Godspeed that it used in every movie for the past forty years.  If they’d developed some sort of word or phrase like that they could have had Holdo say it here.  Instead they decide to have her say, “Godspeed.”

Finn and Rose, for some reason, are brought before General Hux.  It’s not clear why until they trot out Benicio del Toro to reveal that he has betrayed them.  If you’re wondering if he’ll be a complex character like Lando Calrissian who was backed into a corner and had to make a difficult decision, don’t waste your time.  He’s not.  He’s just a double-crossing jerk and we’ll never see him again.  He won’t come flying out of the sun to save the day.  He won’t have his men ambush some First Order troops to release Finn and Rose.  He’ll just fly away.

Maybe we’ll see him again in the next movie but I highly doubt it.  He was just someone that further nullifies this entire dumb plan to shut down the tracker.

Next time . . . Snoke, Holdo, and Phasma all prepare for their roles in the final movie!

 

Aboard the SS Del Toro Rose is coaxed into giving Benicio her necklace as a down payment for getting them to the First Order ship.  Rose reluctantly does this and we know how important this is as this was part of a set she shared with her sister who was murdered by Poe in the first scene in the movie.

They find out that Benicio del Toro has stolen this ship and that its owners were supplying weapons to the First Order.  We know this because there are some holograms of TIE fighters on the ship’s computer.  Then we see pictures of X-wings as well and Benicio del Toro says he was supplying weapons to the “good guys” too.  He says, “It’s all a machine.”

This is potentially the largest problem I have with The Last Jedi.  We learn that  apparently this is all just one big money-making game.  Contractors are selling arms to both sides to profit.

Listen, I get enough of this living on Earth, okay?  Arms companies making profits, countries being overthrown for oil, the list goes on an on.  This is what makes living on Earth a real bummer.  I don’t need this kind of baloney in my Star Wars movie.  This could be a big plot twist in some sort of hard Sci-Fi movie but this is not hard Sci-Fi, it’s Star Wars.  This is why the taxation of trade routes was also not a compelling plot point for the Star Wars universe!

So what does this mean?  After eight movies we see that there is no good and evil?  They’re all just pawns of a secret society of wealthy elites trying to prop up a state of perpetual war so that they can line their own pockets?

Does anything that happens from this point on even matter?

After this revelation we rejoin Poe who storms onto the bridge and engages in his fiftieth act of gross insubordination but insulting Holdo and demanding answers form her.  She has him removed from the bridge but, somehow, still not sent to the brig.  At this point she probably should have just shoved him onto an escape pod and jettisoned him to the nearest (or farthest) planet.

Meanwhile Rey is getting ready to go meet Ren and turn him to the light side.  She says to Chewbacca, “If you see Finn before I do tell him–”  She is then cut off by Chewbacca roaring.  She responds with, “Perfect.  Tell him that.”  Tell him what?  Are they in love?  What is going on?

Rey then boards a tiny coffin which looks like she is preparing more for a trip to the Genesis Planet than to Kylo Ren’s ship.  She arrives very quickly at the ship and Ren is there to meet her, not looking as accommodating as she may have been hoping for.

Back on the Resistance cruiser Poe tells Holdo the secret plan they’ve been working on to deactivate the Hyperspace tracker.  Holdo is mad and Poe stages a mutiny, taking Holdo and some of her subordinates prisoner.

We are then taken to a scene with what looks like a giant ship resembling an iron coming in for a landing.  The camera pans out and it turns out it is actually an iron and they are in a never-before-seen Star Destroyer (or Dreadnought) laundry room.  Their irons look just like normal 1950s style Earth irons just on a robotic arm.  This was one of the most jarring moments of the movie for me.  I was initially tricked (as was the intention of the scene) but immediately was left thinking about Hardware Wars.  This was so blatant that it had to be intentional.  The result of this odd gag was that  I was so taken out of the movie that I didn’t even realize until the second viewing that the whole purpose of being in the laundry room was to show Finn, Rose, and Benicio del Toro stealing First Order uniforms so they could wander the ship.

Their brilliant plan for BB-8 is to put a laundry basket over him, a plan that was executed to much better effect in Paddington 2, not to mention being an overall better tonal fit for that movie.

They are spotted by an evil BB-8 who is not fooled by their terrible plan.

Overall this attempted break in begins on a largely comical note.  For some reason this whole thing plays out like a lighthearted heist.  I’m not saying there’s room for humor in the Star Wars movies.  The Force Awakens did a great job re-introducing humor into Star Wars after the serious prequels that were even less funny when they tried to be.

To me this whole scene seemed like if the prison escape scene in A New Hope had Yakety Sax playing the whole time.

Next time . . . CONFRONTATION!

Back on planet Ahch-To, Luke is getting more comfortable with opening himself back up to using the force.  He uses it to connect with Leia and it is a touching scene where, despite being incapacitated, she whispers, “Luke.”  We don’t get a lot of time to see these two interacting as siblings once they find out about their common ancestry at the end of Return of the Jedi.  It’s really nice to see them on screen “together” in this movie and see the love that they share for one another.

While he is connecting with Leia we see Rey and Kylo being mind-linked again, this time as Kylo is shirtless. She is immediately distracted and asks him to cover up but he ignores her and they start bickering.  She asks him why he hated his father and doesn’t really receive a satisfactory answer.  He then asks her if Luke told her what happened the night he destroyed the Jedi temple.  We then see the same scene again from his point of view, Luke clutching his lightsaber with a mad look in his eyes about to bring it down upon Ben Solo before he is quickly able to block the attack and escape.

He then tells Rey, “Let the past die.  Kill it if you have to.”

Rey then leaves and goes to the Sarlaac-esque pit by the ocean where she inspects the opening before being sucked in.  She emerges in some sort of underground cave where there’s a freaky mirror sequence with infinite Reys in each direction.  It’s a strange, interestingly filmed scene which reminds me of something that would have been in The Star Wars Holiday Special had The Star Wars Holiday Special been good.  It has that same sort of quality as an aside.  I kept expecting her to see Jefferson Starship playing a concert or seeing one of the Reys in the mirror morph into Diahann Carroll and sing a song.

The mirror sequence is odd.  It seems out of place in a Star Wars movie, though many will likely compare it to the cave sequence in The Empire Strikes Back.  The odd things about it is that it’s narrated by Rey.  Things aren’t really narrated in Star Wars.  The flashbacks are the same way.  This movie is dark and sinister and reminds me more of a scene that would be in The Lord of the Rings, not necessarily Star Wars.

She then returns to Kylo, explaining her experience in the pit and it feels like an odd romance is starting to brew.

As they reach out and try to touch hands Luke barges in and blows the roof off of Rey’s hut.  Rey is angry and asks Luke if he tried to murder Ben Solo.  They then engage in a brief fight with various weapons culminating in Rey nearly killing Luke with a lightsaber.

Luke then tells his side of the story, this time in more detail.  We get to see a third flashback to the event, this time with Luke not looking like a deranged lunatic but rather a sad old man who had failed his nephew and his student.  The ending is the same with Kylo destroying the temple and leaving it in ruins.

Rey then suggests that hey work together to turn Kylo to the light.  Luke warns her that this is not going to go the way she thinks but she, in young Luke Skywalker fashion, ignores her master and heads out to save Kylo Ren nonetheless.

This segment on Ahch-To ends with Luke marching toward the ancient tree, torch in hand, to burn it down and the ancient Jedi texts with it.  He hesitates for a moment then, ultimately, is interrupted by Yoda’s Force ghost.

“Master Yoda,” Luke says, perfectly encapsulating his annoyance and chagrin at being caught in the act.

Seeing Yoda again caught me completely off guard.  I was not expecting it in the least.  Much like seeing Han, Leia, and Luke again part of me was really thrilled to see Yoda again, even if he was acting like a crazy person.  Apparently thirty years of being dead starts turning Force Apparitions a little loopy.  I guess I can’t really fault him for that.

Yoda senses Luke’s hesitation at burning down the tree and the sacred Jedi texts.  Luke is like a child, looking to get attention by threatening to burn down the tree.  Was he doing this just to have Yoda swing by?  If that was his tactic it worked.  When Yoda senses Luke’s hesitation he summons some lightning and burns the tree down himself to Luke’s horror and befuddlement.  Yoda then cackles like an insane lunatic and does a little jig.

Luke and Yoda exchange some words, Yoda giving Luke some wisdom about learning from failure, and they just sort of watch the tree burn as Luke lies beside his former master.  The music, the lighting, the scene all feel odd to me but at the same time liberating.  Much like seeing Han Solo and Chewie together again in The Force Awakens, it’s hard not to enjoy seeing Yoda school Luke again on his bad attitude and poor decision making.

Also, Yoda doesn’t quite glow the way the ghosts did in Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi making me wonder if there is some significance to that.  You can sense the faintest blue glow around Yoda but it’s barely visible.

In the Timothy Zahn book, Heir to the Empire, Obi-Wan appears to Luke as a Force apparition a final time to say goodbye.  In that book it is stated that there’s some sort of time limit on how long you can come back as an apparition.  This apparently is not canon.  It also changes the stakes as Luke will no longer be able to gain wisdom and training from his deceased former master.

It makes me wonder if we’ll be seeing more of Yoda and Luke in the next movie.  I wouldn’t think Yoda would make an appearance but I could imagine seeing Luke one last time to coach Rey for one final confrontation.

I know that this is the eighth part of this review but SPOILER Luke dies.

Next time . . . BETRAYAL times TWO!

 

As Finn and Rose sit in their prison cell they lament about how they weren’t able to reach the master codebreaker.  Then, in the shadows, they hear someone say, “I can do it.”  The mystery voice is revealed to belong to none other than Benicio del Toro doing his best Benicio del Toro impression.

They brush him off as useless until he manages to open the cell and just walk out, a feat he was presumably saving for an audience.  He then helps them escape through a floor panel which they leave wide open for easy tracking by the police.

When they emerge from the underground they are in the stables where the fathiers are housed.  They are nearly reported by one of the slave children until they show him their ring with the symbol of the rebel alliance.

The children then help them set all the fathiers free and then the dumbest scene in the movie unfolds.  All the fathiers just rampage through Canto Bight, destroying everything in their path.  They are not only fast creatures but seem to be impervious any sort of injury as they barrel through breaking glass, stone, and wood.  All the while Finn and Rose are riding them, somehow not being thrown from the beast.

The dumbest scene in the movie leads, of course, to the dumbest single moment when they dash past a weird, multi-dozen-breasted woman who lets off an operatic tremolo-heavy shriek.

As I’ve said, this was the dumbest scene in the movie.  This got me to thinking, what are all the dumbest scenes in all of the Star Wars movies?  After a few minutes of consideration here’s what I’ve come up with:

Episode IV: A New Hope – The scene where Han tells them to let Chewbacca win the chess game.

There’s nothing wrong with the sentiment, it lets the viewer know that Wookiees are really strong as if that wasn’t evident already.  The part that always bothered me is when Chewbacca put his arms behind his head as if he were too cool for school.  It’s the equivalent of looking at he camera.  Even as a child this scene bothered me.

Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back – The scene where the Ugnaughts play keep away from Chewie with C-3PO’s head.

It’s hard to pick the dumbest scene in the best movie ever made but here you have it.  Seeing Chewbacca fumble around trying to get Threepio’s head back is more sad than comical.  Having him threaten to rip their arms off or just roar at them to scare them away would probably have been a bit cooler.

Episode VI: Return of the Jedi – The scene where the Ewok steals the speeder bike.

This moves the plot along but the seeing the Ewok for as long as we do and the chase that happens could have been left out.

Runner up: Chewbacca’s Tarzan yell.

Episode I: The Phantom Menace – The scene where R2-D2 saves the day and gets a medal.

This was a tough one but I still feel a tinge of embarrassment run up my spine every time I see R2-D2’s name read off of his frame and he is given an award even though he’s just a robot.

Runner up: Most other scenes in the movie.

Episode II: Attack of the Clones – The scene where they have to jump through the droid assembly factory.

C-3PO’s head and body getting swapped with battle droid parts are topped only by revealing that R2-D2 can suddenly fly!

Runner up: The dumb diner scene and the shape shifter.

Episode III: Revenge of the Sith – The scene where Bail Organa rides a hot rod.

Bail Organa, racing through Coruscant during this pivotal moment in galactic history should be a scene high on emotion.  Unfortunately it’s impossible to feel anything other than amusement as he races through the city in his 1950s style car with fins.  Even the most serious look on Jimmy Smitts’s face can’t distract from the unintentional hilarity of the moment.

Runner up: The scene where Obi-Wan rides that big, dumb lizard creature and any romantic dialogue between Anakin and Padme.

Episode VII: The Force Awakens – The Rathtar scene.

This whole scene played out like an episode of Red Dwarf.  don’t get me wrong, I love Red Dwarf.  However, like I want my science left of out Star Wars and left to Star Trek, I want my silly alien creature encounters aboard a ship left to Red Dwarf.  While watching this scene I felt like I’d already seen it 100 times and was eager for it to end.

Episode VIII: The Last Jedi – See above.

After all of this Finn and Rose are nearly a their ship when they see it blown up.  They quickly circle back until they nearly run off of a cliff.  Rose sets the fathier free and says, “Now it’s worth it.”

Just as they’re about to be captured BB-8 and Benicio del Toro fly by and rescue them.

If this class of people had ever been mentioned in any Star Wars movie prior to this one maybe this scene would make people say, “Hell, yeah!”  However, this entire thing is set up just minutes earlier to be knocked down.  Here’s a bunch of terrible people you can hate — and they’ve been punished!  Yay!  Finn doesn’t even have any idea what this place is and has to be told by Rose.  They trash the place just to trash it.  It’s sort of like the scenes in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation where they injure and destroy the personal property of the yuppies next door.  We’re supposed to be happy because it’s the 1980s and we hate yuppies but what did they actually do besides have overly modern (for the 1980s) decor in their house?

I feel the same way about Canto Bight.  I don’t know anything about these people and I don’t care about them either way.  All I know is that when Benicio del Toro and BB-8 showed up I felt like cheering.  Not because they were making their escape but because I was glad to never have to see this dumb place again.

Next up . . . we learn what really happened between Luke and Kylo Ren and the return of . . . YODA?!?!

This brings us to Canto Bight.  Canto Bight is the big gambling city (planet) where we see a bunch of wealthy elites hobnobbing and living the good life.  We learn that Rose hates Canto Bight because she may have grown up in similar surroundings.  She shows Finn that behind the shiny and ritzy glamour hides a darker side.  There are racing animals being abused and slave children being used to work as caretakers for those animals.

The Star Wars universe of the prequels and new trilogy apparently have a pretty big problem with slaves.  Given the number of slaves we see in the prequels and in this new trilogy it makes one wonder if the galaxy wasn’t better off during the Empire.  There aren’t really any slaves during the Empire with the exception of Leia for about a day and a half.

Rose says she wants to put her “fist through this big beautiful town.”  The whole thing just feels kind of cheap to me.  We have never hear anything about this place but then it just sort of gets thrown at us.  Here’s this thing for you to hate!  Aren’t the people here terrible!  This is the root of all the problems in the galaxy!  Don’t you want to see this place trampled?  They may as well have called Canto Bight MacGuffin City.

There was a brief point in the theater where they were wandering through the casino looking for the master code breaker where I thought, “Whoa, wouldn’t it be amazing if Lando was the master codebreaker?”

I started to get really excited.  I was actually almost nervous, waiting to see one of my favorite (indeed, everyone’s favorite) characters make his glorious return to the franchise!

Sadly this was not the case.  However I was pleasantly surprised when they revealed the master code breaker.  The character seemed like he was going to  be amazing.  We see him deliver a line of dialogue and then we never see him again for the rest of the movie.

Right after we meet this character Finn and Rey are arrested for a minor parking violation and thrown into prison.

Bach on Ahch-To Rey is practicing swinging her staff around and stopping just short of a rock on the edge of a cliff on the island.  After a minute of this she switches to a lightsaber.  She becomes a little too excited and accidentally slices the rock apart where a two ton section of it slides off the cliff and destroys a cart that two Force Nuns are pushing.  They already hate Rey for blasting a hole in the rock hut earlier so they are even more annoyed with her after this.  This whole scene is played off as a comedic break but in reality Rey almost killed those Force Nuns.

Later Luke is grumbling to Rey about how horrible the Jedi are.  “The legacy of the Jedi is failure, hypocrisy, hubris.”  Luke seems to forget that the only Jedi he every knew personally are ones that he personally trained.  It seems a little presumptuous for him to assume that all Jedi and there should never be another.

Luke Buzzkiller goes on to state that it was a Jedi who created Darth Vader.  I’m not really sure I understand the logic on that one but Rey adds that it was also a Jedi who saved Darth Vader.  Luke then gives her a look of annoyed acceptance.

Luke then goes on to deliver some of the most powerful dialogue in the movie.  He describes the night that he went to confront Ben Solo, having sensed the darkness in him.  He went to confront him, in the middle of the night when Ben Solo woke up, got he wrong idea, then somehow destroyed his hut, pushed Luke, and destroyed the temple.  He took some students with him and killed the rest.

Luke opens up about his failure to Rey and we see the pain in his eyes.  We see why Luke wants to give up.  Unfortunately I’m also left hoping that Luke would be stronger than that.  I’d always assumed that the Luke Skywalker I knew and loved would not have let a setback, albeit a large one, just make him give up.

It seems to me that he legacy of the Jedi according to the prequel trilogy and the new trilogy is a legacy of giving up and running away.  Yoda did it.  Obi-Wan did it.  Now we see Luke doing it.   I just have a hard time accepting that these Jedi who were such fearless warriors in the face of overwhelming odds would just give up.  How would the end of Return of the Jedi have been if Luke had just bolted out of the throne room and gone to hide on a remote planet for twenty years?

Sadly, the Rebellion/Resistance may have been in better shape by this same time had he done that.

Next up . . . The Great Escape!

Elsewhere on the ship Finn is sneaking through the engine room toward an escape pod.  There he stumbles upon a young woman who is crying as she clutches what looks to be the other half of a necklace worn by the buyer we see die in the opening scene of the movie.  We learn that she’s there to stun people who are deserting.  She quickly figures out that’s what Finn is trying to do and stuns him.  She must be held in some extremely high regard by Resistance leadership as she is there alone with no one to stop her from running should she choose to.

After Finn comes back to consciousness he explains to her that they’ve been tracked through hyperspace.  This sparks a conversation as to how the First Order could possibly have done this previously impossible feat.  Within about 30 seconds they offhandedly mention something that would work and not only figure out how the First Order did it but what they’d need to do to undo it so that the Resistance could escape.

So there you have it.  Two low level functionaries of the Resistance seemingly invented anew technology and a counter to it just by being told it had been done.  Here’s how this scenario would play out in today’s military:

Scene: Aboard USS Navy Destroyer USS Sullivans (DDG 68)

Petty Officer Third Class: Hey, did you hear that the enemy was able to destroy up our aircraft carrier by going back in time and blowing up the shipyard it before it was even built.

Petty Officer Second Class: What? That’s impossible.

PO3: Unless they could stabilize the dimension of timespace . . .

PO2: And create a sub-dimension that allowed them to . . .

TOGETHER: leapfrog the normal time process function!

PO3: But how do we stop them?

PO2: Well, we could always initiate a particle deceleration field around their base.

PO3: Then they wouldn’t be able to super charge the linear bypass dampers!

PO2: Now we’ll just need a master code breaker!

They bring this plan up to Poe who likes it so they contact Maz who tells them where they can find this master code breaker.  I’m not so sure that Maz is a character that really needed to be reprise their role in this movie but we see her in a holo as she’s firing a gun at unnamed foes.

Back on Ahch-To Rey suddenly wakes up and sees Kylo Ren.  She immediately grabs her blaster and fires a hole in the side of her stone hut.

He is not there, however, they are merely mind connected.  He seems just as surprised as she is and states that she could not be doing this because the effort would kill her.  This sets us up for the end of the movie.

Eventually he vanishes and the tension is broken by angry Force Nuns who we suddenly learn inhabit Luke’s island.  The weird milk creatures and Porgs are not Luke’s only company, there are also some very agitated Nuns.  They grumble in some alien language but it is not subtitled.  You have always been able to tell Star Wars’ respect for alien creatures by whether or not they are subtitled.  Apparently Force Nuns didn’t make the cut.

The next morning Rey is given her first lesson by Luke.  He tells her to reach out, she does, and then he taunts her for being an idiot.  Things quickly get out of hand as Rey tries again then immediately goes to a “dark place.”  Stones rise, rocks crack, Luke yells at her to resist and then it’s all over.

Luke says he’s only seen this once before, with Ben Solo, and that it didn’t scare him enough then but it does now.  Meanwhile, back on the Millennium Falcon, Chewbacca is trying to call the Resistance while the ship is being overrun by Porgs.  I really thought they were setting this up to be a Tribble Trouble sort of situation but that subplot never materializes.

This segment ends with Kylo Ren telling Rey about the night that he destroyed Luke’s temple.  He see a maniacal Luke drawing back his lightsaber to kill Kylo Ren and Kylo responding by somehow demolishing the temple and pushing Luke back through the wall.  It appears that Rey is beginning to sympathize with him as she hears his story and presumably shares in some of his emotional memory of the event.

Next up . . . it’s high stakes action in Monte Carlo Canto Bight!

 

Kylo Ren’s decision to not fire upon his own mother’s ship is a touching scene but ultimately meaningless as a group of fighters swoops in right behind him and blasts the the ship enough so that the bridge is destroyed and Leia gets shot out into the vacuum of space.

When watching this for the first time I thought that was it.  I thought they’d killed off Leia and I watched in sadness as they showed her motionless body floating through space.  Then we see Leia’s fingers start to move.  It becomes clear that this is not the end of Leia.  Then the unthinkable happens, she begins floating through space back toward the ship.

I don’t have any issue with Leia using the force to get back to the ship.  However, the way it happens is just silly.  Upon a second viewing I will admit that it looked a little better but when I saw it for the first time my immediate reaction was an uncontrollable chuckle.  Maybe if she had glided more horizontally but the fact that she was upright, her dress unmoving in the zero gravity, just looked comical.  To me it was the “first kiss” moment of the new trilogy.  In the prequel trilogy we see Anakin and Padme have a first kiss and as she pulls away the swelling music cuts out.  The result is hilarious and I know that’s not likely what hey were going for.

We then return to planet Ahch-To to see Chewbacca slowly roasting a Porg over an open flame.  As he goes to eat it he is stopped by a sad-looking Porg staring him down.  Chewbacca scares away the growing number of guild-inducing Porgs but then is left with no appetite to eat he roasted one.  The scene appears to be a comedic lift after what we’ve just watch but to me it played like two simultaneous comedic scenes.  It also left me a little disturbed about the wasted roast Porg.

As this scene unfolds Luke enters the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon and we see him have a solitary reunion with the old ship.  He even takes the gold dice hanging in the cockpit seemingly as a souvenir.

After sitting a moment he noticed R2-D2 and it’s the only moment of joy we see Luke experience in this movie.  He looks genuinely happy and smiles like the Luke we all grew up with.  He tells R2 that he’s not going back and that nothing can make him go back.  R2 then plays the famous Princess Leia hologram from the original movie which Luke tells him is a cheap shot.

Luke emerges from the Millennium Falcon and tells Rey that tomorrow, at dawn, he will begin her training with three lessons.  “I will teach you the ways of the Jedi and why they need to end.”

We then return to the Resistance ships being fired upon and learn that all the Resistance top leadership was killed in the blast that ejected Leia into space.  This includes Admiral Ackbar.

One of the problems I have with these new movies is that they’re sad.  I know it’s fine for there to be sad elements in a movie.  It’s just very depressing to see all of your old heroes growing old, suffering loss and heartache, and dying.  I was pretty happy with where Return of the Jedi left things.  I just imagined Leia worked together with Mon Mothma to re-establish the Republic as we see in a lot of the expanded universe books, and that they rose above all the conflict and devastation they’d seen.

Unfortunately, the truth of it is that Han and Leia didn’t live happily ever after.  They broke up.  They had a son who betrayed them.  We see Han die in heart-breaking scene at the hands of his own son.  Presumably we will see or hear about Leia’s ultimate fate as it looks unlikely she’ll be in the final movie for any more than a few stitched-together scenes.

I don’t like it.

Seeing Han Solo die affected me more than I’d like to admit.  Knowing that Admiral Ackbar dies is also a bummer.  Who knows what happened to General Madine or Mon Mothma?  Likely they were killed in other pointless battles the Resistance had with the First Order.

The information about Admiral Ackbar and the others’ deaths is delivered by Vice Admiral Holdo, a purple-haired military officer in a dress who gives a not-so-reassuring speech to everyone about Leia’s status.  We learn that there are about 400 resistance fighters left on three ships.  We also learn that Poe had no idea what Holdo looked like or who she was despite the fact that she was a senior member of the leadership.  I’ve worked for companies and locations which hundreds more people than that and I can tell you I knew who the top people were.

The dwindling of the Resistance just shines a light on the continued problem I have with the new movies.  The First Order is not the Empire.  The Resistance are not the Republic.  But they sort of are.  It was dumb to create these two new fictional entities rather than just have it be the remnants of the Empire vs. the New Republic.

In the first expanded universe books Timothy Zahn creates a compelling struggle between the diminished remnants of the old Empire being helmed by the military genius of Grand Admiral Thrawn.  Despite the Republic’s advantage in size, Thrawn manages to make them underdogs in this new fight.

We don’t need the Resistance to be down to twenty people to make it seem like all could be lost.  That could be achieved without having concocted this weird new military/political struggle between these two new groups.

At a certain point the struggle becomes too much.  How will this tiny remaining group of fighters win against the Empire at this point?  Earlier in the movie Luke asks Rey,  “ You think what? I’m gonna walk out with a laser sword and face down the whole First Order?”  I liked this line.  I like the realism of the lightsaber duels.   The prequels are just highly-choreographed dance sequences.  In this new trilogy it looks like an actual struggle when two people are fighting.  In the prequels it would be taken for granted that Anakin or Obi-Wan or whoever would simply just take on an entire army alone.  In the new trilogy the Jedi are strong warriors, but not super heroes, and not invincible.

That’s the refreshing point of these new movies.  It’s something I really enjoy.  The downside is that the corner they seem to have painted themselves into is that they need an unrealistic hero to seemingly win this fight.  They need a Neo or an Anakin Skywalker, or a Goku.  Rey is strong but, much like Luke, she won’t be able to do it either.

Next up . . . Finn meets Rose and sets out on another adventure!