Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
★½ — Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
I want my two and a half hours back. More than that, I want the version of Luke Skywalker back that I grew up with, the one who walked into Jabba's palace like he owned it, who stood before the Emperor without flinching, who looked at Darth Vader and saw a father worth saving. Rian Johnson has taken that man and left something I simply don't recognise in his place, and I'm not sure I'll ever fully get over it.
Let's get into it. The central problem with The Last Jedi isn't that it tries something different. I'm genuinely not opposed to a Star Wars film that challenges the mythology, that takes risks, that asks hard questions about legacy and failure. Push the boundaries, please. But there has to be a foundation underneath you when you do it, and this film kicks away the foundations before it even gets started.
Luke Skywalker. The same Luke who rejected Palpatine's every attempt to goad him into striking his father down. The same Luke who, in Return of the Jedi, chose to throw away his lightsaber rather than give in to hatred, because he believed, absolutely and without reservation, that redemption was possible even for the most fallen of souls. That Luke, we're now told, sensed darkness in his sleeping nephew and crept towards him with an ignited blade. We're supposed to square that circle and call it character development. I can't do it. I've tried. It doesn't square.
The defence I keep hearing is that people change, that failure breaks people, that showing a hero at his lowest is brave filmmaking. And yes, fine, heroes can fall. But there's a difference between a character evolving under the weight of their experience and a character being rewritten to serve a new film's thesis. This feels like the latter. The entire emotional engine of the original trilogy runs on Luke's unshakeable belief in the good within people, and here that belief is simply switched off to justify a plot point. That's not regression, that's mutilation, and no amount of gorgeous cinematography on a remote island makes it sit better with me.
Because yes, there are visually striking moments here. A particular sequence involving crimson and silence that I won't spoil is genuinely arresting, and I'll give the film that much. But stunning imagery in service of a story that's undermining itself at every turn doesn't amount to much. The broader plotting is just as troubling as the Luke stuff. There are entire subplots that go nowhere, narrative threads introduced with apparent urgency and then abandoned, and a persistent, nagging sense that "subverting expectations" has become the film's only real ambition. Subversion is a tool, not a philosophy. When every twist exists to wrong-foot the audience rather than to serve the characters, the story loses its grip.
What the original trilogy understood, what made it matter, was hope. Not naive, unearned hope, but hard-won hope built on sacrifice and belief in something bigger than yourself. The Last Jedi wants to be a meditation on legacy and the passing of torches, but it fumbles it by treating the legacy itself as something disposable. You can't ask an audience to invest in what comes next when you've spent two hours telling them that everything that came before was hollow.
I've sat with this film for a while now, rewatched bits of it, tried to meet it on its own terms. And I will say that Johnson is a genuinely talented filmmaker. I loved Knives Out, and his work in Looper showed a real ability to interrogate genre from the inside. But talent and a good idea applied to the wrong property, or the wrong instincts about what a property owes its audience, can still produce something deeply frustrating. And this is deeply frustrating.
One and a half stars. And honestly, knowing where things go in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, there's an argument that the damage done here sent the whole sequel trilogy into a spin it never recovered from. That's a conversation for another review. For now, I'll just say this: I grew up wanting to be Luke Skywalker. After watching this film, I'm not entirely sure who Luke Skywalker is anymore. And that's not a feeling I'm willing to forgive easily.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2017-12-04
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Hulu · Disney Plus
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Rian Johnson: Brick (2005) · Knives Out (2019) · Looper (2012)
More with Mark Hamill: The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978) · Batman: The Killing Joke (2016) · Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) · Return of the Jedi (1983)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
