I still don't understand why so many people hate The Last Jedi. I left the theater after that movie feeling like I'd seen a modern classic. Every single decision felt exactly right and the ending shot to me was a love letter to Star Wars and how much it meant to those of us who grew up with those movies. Even George Lucas himself had 3 full movies to prove that he still understands why Star Wars is special and he couldn't even come up with a single scene that did that. I wish I could call up Rian Johnson and personally thank him. Then I went online and read all the scathing comments and I went to work and listened to people tell me how bad it was - - the corny dialog and bad jokes, Snoke not getting a back story, Luke being a murderer - - and I'm still confused by it. Did we even watch the same movie? And I'm struggling to figure this out because critics almost unanimously praised The Last Jedi as one of the best movies in the series. It should have been a rousing success, a daring movie that reinvigorates the series and yet here we have JJ Abrams going out of his way to retcon almost every decision Rian Johnson made and fans are praising him for it. I've seen the original trilogy films at least 20 times each. I've played almost every Star Wars video game. I played the pen and paper roleplaying game with my friends in Jr High. I am as big of a Star Wars nerd as anybody and yet so many people just regard it as a fact that The Last Jedi is some vindictive abomination and Rian Johnson set out to ruin the series and anyone who disagrees with them is either a plant or not a real fan. What is actually going on here? Since we both agree that The Last Jedi is not terrible, do you have a theory about this? What is it that people hate so much about it?
The Force Awakens was a fun movie to watch in the theater because it had Star Wars-y stuff in it but people were complaining (fairly I think) that it just aped the plotline of the original film and Rey was somehow already an incredible pilot and Jedi despite growing up on a junk world and never receiving any training. That was all JJ Abrams invention. So then when we got a new storyline that didn't copy the previous films beat for beat and Rey isn't all-powerful and Finn and Poe get something to do besides run around cracking jokes and Kylo Ren isn't just another generic badie in a mask but actually has a complicated emotional journey that's the movie that people think ruined Star Wars? People hate that movie to the extant that half the reviews of Rise of Skywalker are still taking shots at Episode 8. I mean, even the movie itself does that with Rose getting sidelined, Kylo getting his mask back, Rey getting new parents and Luke mocking his lightsaber toss.
What The Rise of Skywalker proves to me is that JJ Abrams doesn't seem to understand is that if I want to watch the original trilogy then I'll just watch the original trilogy. I don't need him to hip it up with modern effects and a faster pace. I don't need every character from the original trilogy coming back to wink at me, say a couple lines, and then disappear. All he had to do was tell an original story that got us to care about a new group of characters as much as we cared about Luke, Han, Leia, Chewbacca, C3PO and R2D2. It's hard to do that when everything feels more like a video game than reality and when you have callbacks to those other movies in every other scene. How can it be that people prefer this movie to the one that came before it? It's just one MacGuffin after another until we get to an "epic" showdown that feels lifted out of a Harry Potter story?
I do have sortof a theory. There is an element in Episode 7 and 9 that really bothers me and it's the cartoonish treatment of violence. The Mandalorian does this too. Every Marvel movie does this. Our heroes kill dozens and dozens of people without a second thought and we're invited to cheer as they do it because it looks cool and cause they're the heroes so whatever they do must be justified. They unfailingly make these hollow speeches filled with buzzwords like justice and unity and peace and then go shoot or punch dozens and dozens of bad guys until they get to the ultimate bad guy and kill them and that's it, the universe is saved one body at a time. Regardless of whatever they claim to stand for before they start killing everyone in sight, their actions state loudly that violence is always the answer. It's become so normalized in our culture that most people don't even see it as a stylistic choice.
One of many things Episode 8 got right is that it managed to convey the significance of violence. Luke considers murdering Ben Solo for just a moment and then spends the rest of his life trying to atone for it. Poe leads a heroic attack that damages the First Order fleet and gets demoted for allowing so many pilots to die. Hux starts blowing up defenseless transports filled with Resistance survivors and we feel helpless as none of our heroes is in a position to save them-- in fact their actions are what cause this to happen at all. I wonder if ultimately what makes so many people so angry about the movie is that they've come to expect easily digestible entertainment without ambiguity, where violence is cool and death is temporary, where the heroes are always right and where no one has to think all that much or engage with their emotions. The Last Jedi is a movie that goes out of its way to make the audience uncomfortable. This isn't the Luke I rermenber, we think. Why am I feeling bad for the villain? Why is this character telling me that the Resistance is no better than the First Order? But I think if you're patient enough to listen to what the movie is saying you'll find that all that discomfort is meant to be therapeutic. It's not escapism, it's a story about us - - how we sometimes hurt the people we love most of all, how violence always has consequences, even when we think it's justified. I think that what people hated about The Last Jedi is that it challenges this idea that violence is cool and might makes right which have dominated our culture for decades. Think about it: how many people do our heroes kill in that movie? They blow up a First Order dreadnought but it's a pyrrhic victory. Rey kills some of Snoke's guards in self-defense so she can escape but she doesn't succeed in turning Kylo Ren to her side and it's only Kylo Ren's desire to seize power which allows her to survive at all. Admiral Holdo sacrifices herself and the last ship in the Resistance fleet to destroy Snoke's flagship and prevent the First Order from killing what's left of the Resistance. All of these victories feel like losses. At the end they're still badly outnumbered and on the run. And in the end Luke is the biggest badass of all for rescuing his friends without even needing to touch a lightsaber. He outsmarts Kylo Ren with non-violent resistance, turning Ben's insane quest for revenge which has pulled him to the dark side against him. Maybe this is just a lesson that most in America are not ready to hear?
You’ve offered some very compelling analysis here. I wouldn’t say I have a unified theory of my own regarding why ‘The Last Jedi’ sparked such controversy. I do think there are a number of things at work in the seething backlash that it incurred, however.
Americans love to claim that our chief values are independence and self-reliance and a commitment to democracy and freedom of expression and thought, but our culture is endlessly fascinated with the concept of “the elite.” We desire to see ourselves reflected in those who we consider to be “above us,” rather than chart our own courses and leave our own marks on the world. We may not have a “royal family” in America, but we’re always looking for one, sometimes desperately so. From the Kennedy’s to the Kardashian’s, we are historically obsessed with the powerful and the wealthy. We revel in celebrity. We recently elected a reality television star to be President of the United States of America. We are idol worshippers. I don’t buy for a second that our present cultural moment represents “the people” raging against “the elite.” We’ve just tribally organized around
our elites, in opposition to “them” and
their elites.
“The Skywalker Saga,” as these nine mainline Star Wars movies have become retroactively called, are about “the elite.” In many ways, they’re about a few key bloodlines and the inheritance of power and influence that follows from being born with the right name at the right place in the right time. For whatever reason, this appeals to many American viewers. ‘The Last Jedi’ dared to offer that maybe one’s name doesn’t matter; maybe heroism can come from anywhere. It’s hardly a unique message. It’s not even a terribly complicated one. But I love how Rian Johnson took JJ Abrams’ unnecessary mystery box regarding Rey’s parentage and used it as character motivation for Rey to discover that where and whom she comes from bears no influence over who she can choose to be. But this isn’t satisfying to many American viewers. Perhaps we’re afraid of such a message, that we must think for ourselves, that we must discover on our own who we are, that nobody can explain what our purpose is or what it should be.
I’d also offer that a big culprit of the backlash to ‘The Last Jedi’ might be the “Expanded Universe.” As someone who does not lay claim to Star Wars fandom, I’ve spent very little time engaging with these outside materials. But from what I’ve gathered, much of the EU essentially functions as a way to freeze the image of beloved Star Wars characters in carbonite, to preserve what fans love about them in service of moving Star Wars branded products off the shelves.
‘Return of the Jedi’ was released in 1983. ‘The Phantom Menace’ was released in 1999. That’s a 16-year gap between the first two Star Wars trilogies, but those latter movies were prequels. They obviously didn’t advance the story, and they didn’t even really clarify much about our understanding of the characters or the themes from the original trilogy. ‘The Force Awakens’ wasn’t released until 2015. That’s a
32-year gap between the end of the first trilogy and its official sequels. And that three-decade vacuum in Star Wars movies with Luke Skywalker at their center was filled with a ton of terrible Lucas-approved fanfiction in the form of “Expanded Universe” stories that starving Star Wars “die hards” ate up, calcifying their understanding of Luke Skywalker rather than, ya know, expanding it.
32 years is a long time. Hell, I’m 32 years old, and much has happened already in my lifetime. The world around me has changed. I’ve changed. I’m not the same person I was ten years ago. And I don’t imagine I’ll be the same person ten years from now. Or thirty years from now. But I’m not a character in a movie adored by millions. I can’t be frozen in time the way Luke Skywalker was in the minds of many, who cling to Luke’s heroic arc in ‘Return of the Jedi,’ or read of Luke’s heroic adventures after ‘Return of the Jedi,” as if he were an ageless and static symbol, cast in carbonite, an action figure, a toy, and not a person who would no doubt evolve as he was beset by the rigors of responsibility and the weight of his legacy.
Personally, I’ve never understood the fan worship that Luke Skywalker has received. He’s not a particularly interesting character. And apologies to Mark Hammill, but Luke wasn’t a particularly well-acted character, either. At least, not in the original trilogy. It’s one of the reasons I was deeply surprised and delighted by ‘The Last Jedi.’ Hammill did
extraordinary work on that film, the best of his career. And the character was also more interesting than he’d ever been. I really admired Rian Johnson’s flat-out refusal to indulge the infantile fantasies of a certain subset of Star Wars fan. How terribly boring it would have been if, thirty years later, Luke Skywalker was exactly as we’d left him.
Even JJ Abrams, fan servicer extraordinaire, understood this to some degree. He didn’t put Luke Skywalker on screen until the final scene of ‘The Force Awakens,’ but his script had the sense to explain Luke’s absence as a result of the character grappling with the kinds of difficulties and failures that come with age and responsibility. Rian Johnson picked up that open-ended question and elegantly crafted a response to it.
Johnson’s “original sin” within the Star Wars universe might actually be in how clever a writer he is. He delivered a compelling and plausible narrative around Luke’s exile, and then he built a fascinating meta-narrative on top of it about the dangers of hero worship and the need to chart one’s own course. So not only were a lot of Star Wars fans treated to an evisceration of their childish fantasies, they were also told that it might not be healthy to treat Luke Skywalker like an idol. And when one’s identity is so thoroughly wrapped up in the idolization of some figure of import, a perceived attack on the idol becomes a perceived attack on oneself.