Op-Ed: Fixing One Small Part of Star Wars: The Last Jedi · 2:03am Jun 28th, 2018
And with that title, I already feel the eyes of the internet upon me. Which is kind of the point. I wouldn’t be posting this otherwise.
Plus, it’s my website. I can post what I want. So there (despite a few internet commentators who have actually posted, in pure seriousness, the XKCD strip about “being shown the door” regarding content on my own website, without any trace of irony or acknowledgement of the ridiculousness of their demands).
Enough navel-gazing. This editorial is about The Last Jedi, specifically about what went wrong with one small part of it.
Because let’s be honest: There was a lotwrong with Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It definitely wasn’t Star Wars Holiday Special levels of bad, but at the same time … Well, let’s just say there were a lot of Star Wars fans out there who had thought that they’d never seen anything in the series that could possibly perform worse than the prequels.
Yeah, talking about something that didn’t work in The Last Jedi is easier than shooting fish in a barrel. Suffice it to say, its creators pretty much set the bar about as low as it could possible beset without reaching Holiday Special levels. I remember seeing Facebook and Twitter posts from people I knew, dedicated fans, talking about how they’d gone back and seen it a second time, hoping they’d missed something critical the first time around.
Yeah, you’ve probably seen some measure of this controversy. Personally? It’s not at all without merit. The Last Jedi kind of came across as a film that didn’t understand what Star Wars was about past the visual element. And sure, we got some great scenes—the battle with Snoke’s Praetorian Guard is a six-minute slug-fest that is absolutely one of the more fantastic Star Wars fights—but we also got some stuff that really dropped hard.
One of these, which I want to talk about today, is Finn’s butchered character arc. Actually, butchered isn’t the proper term. More … grossly mishandled character arc.
Huh, I missed that one. Oh well, add that to the pile of good ideas they failed to deliver on alongside Ren and Rey teaming up to find a genuinely new path forward.
Also, at this point I think I'm done with the franchise in general because it seems like they really can't get their shit together on even the most basic things and I'm not really a fan of the hard black and white morality the setting usually runs on, so there really doesn't seem to be a good enough reason for me to keep watching the movies even with their cultural importance at this point.
They even had a character that could have been perfect as that experienced in-it-for-themselves persona that could have made a great foil to Finn with DJ, the hacker dude, but he barely got any time for character development in the end.
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Which shows how badly 8 bungled it, because part of 8's whole schtick was taking that out and trying to make everyone and everything almost unambiguously nihilist, in the most ham-handed way possible.
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Yeah, he has maybe ... ten minutes of screen time?
I just checked. Less than 4.
Which brings to mind another thing. How a foil resolves. In A New Hope, Han and Luke's foil balances out when Han comes back to save the day, admitting that Luke is right (through action, not words). In The Last Jedi, DJ (del Toro) comes back to prove Finn wrong, driving the message home to the viewers that Dj is right and Finn is wrong, and the film never bothers to offer a disagreement. That's right, you have a "moral" of "It's all a machine, partner. Live free, don't join." in a Star Wars movie. That the good and bad guys are just the same.
Pretty much tears apart the whole "good versus evil" thing when one of your biggest thematic moments in the film is "good and evil are the same." Which pretty much 100% goes against the grain of what Star Wars is about.
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Yeah, it really is. The sad thing is that they were so close to nailing it with the interplay between Kylo Ren and Rey which would have fixed all those hanging problems, but they backed out at the last second. When he asked her to join him, it looked radically different from when Vader did that to Luke because he seemed to be viewing her as an equal to work with as a partner rather than a subordinate to do his bidding, and from the buildup it seemed like Rey should have fully understood that.
That would have allowed them to translate the "all the same" shtick into a genuine direction for the movie with the First Order and Rebellion putting their differences aside joining together into something that is hopefully more viable than any of the previous factions were. It also would have put them in a great place moving forwards since the logical followup to that is "my god, what have we done" since it seemed like both sides had ground themselves to the edge of annihilation by that point which in turn implies a substantial power vacuum. That would have been a great setup for the third movie to deal with them working together against the hutts that would naturally move in to fill that void and finding allies where they can (e.g. the Mandalorians) to help make up for their own weakness. That path would have been all kinds of interesting and would have resolved most of the really big hanging problems (although not the one you started this with), but instead they decided to force it back to black and white morality at the last minute.