I have seen Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi twice now, and my feelings on the movie continue to remain conflicted. On the one hand, I really appreciate, conceptually, what the movie was trying to go for—the idea that Star Wars has to grow beyond the Jedi, Sith, and Skywalkers, and become about the larger galaxy and the people within it. A lot of what the movie ends up doing, from Rey's parentage to Luke's actions, can ultimately be explained in terms of those themes.
And yet, Episode VIII has some major, major failings. I'm not even going to get into the larger problems it has in context the Star Wars lore or anything. I'm going to try to look at this movie, for what it is, and assess it as an independent piece of storytelling, in trying to point out what its problems are.
PROBLEM 1: REY IS LITERALLY A PLOT DEVICE
As I said above, I appreciate the intent behind Rey's parentage amounting to nothing. It's a great idea- but it completely fails to take into account that Rey as a character no longer makes any sense. Rey's entire motives as a character have thus far been driven by a burning need to know who her parents are. Once that is taken away, she has nothing left to her. She's not an engaging character- she seems to be an insert, a cipher, or a plot device, used as needed to make the story move forward. Just or how or why is she as Force sensitive as she is? She is because she is, is now the explanation. Literally, that's it. Why did she throw in her lot with the Rebels? Why did she take the old Jedi books with her when she left? Why did she care about ensuring Luke didn't get depressed about his failures? Why is she so sad and heartbroken about Han's death? Why did she want to turn Kylo Ren? Why did she not join him? Why does she do anything?
Rey is not a character, she is a blank monolithic entity used to justify story events and set pieces. If I asked you to give me Rey's character in 2-3 sentences, you would be unable to do so, because Rey is not a character. Given that she is at the very least 1/3rd of the reason for the entire movie existing in the first place, and the protagonist of its central conflict, this is a major problem. It's really hard to invest yourself into a movie or a story where the main character doesn't seem to have a consistent drive to them other than "this is the good guy who's, like, really strong, and can do whatever they want".
PROBLEM: SNOKE AND KYLO REN
Once again, I get the intent of Snoke's treatment being what it was- Snoke is, ultimately, just an archetypical shadowy evil figure like the Emperor. He would bring nothing new to the table, even if we did find out more about him. In terms of active story movement, us knowing as little as we do about Snoke works just as well as us knowing everything about him.
Unfortunately, there is more to storytelling than active plot progression. Contextualization is hugely important, especially when it comes to a character like Kylo Ren. Kylo, we are told, the son of Han and Leia, and extremely strong with the Force, had begun to be seduced to the Dark Side by Snoke—in fact, "Snoke already had his heart" by the time Luke went to "confront" him, and seeing the sight of Luke standing over him with his light saber drawn, caused Ben to go over the edge and truly turn.
Great- except now, given that the basis for Ben becoming Kylo Ren is that Snoke was turning him (so much that Luke got terrified and contemplated killing his student and nephew to prevent tragedy, and helped cause the very thing he was afraid of in turn), not telling us more about Snoke robs Kylo of all contextualization, and, much like Rey, turns him into a cipher character for the Dark Side. This is especially maddening because the movies hint at more nuance and texture for him- he talks about how "he didn't hate his father", he refuses to pull the trigger on Leia, he seems to have some sentimental response to Han's dice, and to the Milennium Falcon; but there is no context framing any of it. Kylo became evil because Snoke made him evil, and Snoke was ultimately inessential, so Kylo became evil because he became evil. That is literally what the entire arc resolves itself into. While Kylo at least seems to have some internal conflict driving his actions, the overall motivations for his character remain frustratingly obtuse—which, again, is a major problem. If we are meant to invest ourselves into Kylo Ren as a villain, as a foil for Rey, as a conflicted character, if we are supposed to feel horrified, sympathy, disgust, whatever—we have no context to feel any of that. Because we are given none. Kylo Ren's evil is rooted in a larger evil, and that larger evil, robbed of contextualization, is just... evil. Meaning Kylo Ren is evil because an evil person made him evil. Therefore, much like Rey, Kylo Ren becomes a blank foil.
At this point, The Last Jedi is a story with a poor protagonist and a poor antagonist, but there's more...
PROBLEM: THE ACTUAL STORYTELLING
The Last Jedi is a victim of poor storytelling through the movie—that is its largest problem. In fact, both then things I brought up above are the symptoms of the movie's larger failings with storytelling, than actual issues in and of themselves. There's a lot that is wrong with The Last Jedi's storytelling:
- Things just happen because the movie needs them to happen: consider Finn's entire story- what was the point? His entire story is a diversion from the main plot and conflict, that ended up resolving itself completely without any involvement from him whatsoever. Finn could just as well have not been in the movie, and nothing would change, except we would be spared the awful casino section. There are other similar problems like this, too—for instance, there is no actual reason that you won't tell the crew of your doomed fleet that you have your plan, and this is what it is, and this is how we will do it. Unless you outright suspect a mole in your crew (which was never a consideration even brought up in the movie), you have no reason to tell everyone, for crew morale, as well as to ensure everyone is working towards the success of the plan. It feels like the entire reason that Poe et al weren't told the plot there is because the movie needed some dramatic tension in those scenes.
- Related, but Finn's actions are pointedly made immaterial through the story, too. From a plot perspective, Finn achieves nothing—but the entire ordeal would have been worth it, if, at the end, he had been allowed to sacrifice himself to save the Rebels against the battering ram cannon; it would point to character growth, which he attained because of the time he spent with Rose, which lends some purpose to that story. Instead, he's not even allowed to do that, which means that the movie ends with him in the exact same place where he started, and everything he did having been pointless anyway—even if he had succeeded.
- The movie's pacing is an absolute disaster. It starts well with a space battle, and ends well on the salt mines planet, but everything in the middle bookended by those— in other words, about 80 minutes, or the bulk of the movie's runtime—suffers from horrible pacing. To some degree, that has to do with just how pointless most of the movie's central conflicts are, but the end result is that the movie drags for the whole second act, and further disengages the viewer from the story on screen.
- Finally, I want to talk about the various plot points that are raised through the movie but end up going nowhere—these range from the code breaker, to the abuse dealt to the animals and kids on the Casino planet, to the 'Dark Side portal' that Rey goes into (for an absolutely pointless sequence that, again, goes nowhere), to Rey having taken the Jedi text with her, and so on—the movie feels scattershot, bringing up what seem to be major plot points, and then proceeding to promptly forget about them right away.
Look, I'm not even going to go into the whole 'this is a bad Star Wars movie' argument that many want to make. I'm willing to accept that this is meant to start a new era of Star Wars by throwing out the old and starting with the new; one of my biggest complaints with The Force Awakens was its slavish devotion to the original trilogy, so i actually appreciate what The Last Jedi tries to do. But it doesn't do it well, and it ends up giving us a movie that is confused, scizophrenic, and with multiple flaws in its story and storytelling which all seem to undermine every major character, arc, conflict, and context in the movie to lead to the most hollow-feeling and pointless movie we have received in this franchise, at least, in a very long time.
