The Force Is Not With Rian Johnson: The Last Jedi Review

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, which brought me out of my movie critic retirement home in Tatooine to say: don't try to repair the formula of the most culturally impactful and epic franchise in movie history! Star Wars: The Last Jedi follows Rey on a mission to receive Jedi training from Luke Skywalker to aid the Resistance in the fight against the First Order. Where we are now is Episode 8 and the second film of the sequel trilogy. Prior to this installment, J.J. Abrams' The Force Awakens had the audience in the palm of his hands with that final pivotal scene of Rey presenting Luke with his father Anakin Skywalker's old lightsaber which Obi-Wan Kenobi bestowed upon Luke in the original trilogy. Sounds like a great starting point for a fulfilling narrative. So many possibilities. How could it go wrong?

New to the Star Wars universe is writer/director Rian Johnson (Looper, Brothers Bloom), who was given the "go ahead" from Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy to scrap Lawrence Kasdan's story outline of The Last Jedi and write his own original Star Wars script - and Johnson goes full rogue (one). Kasdan, who previously co-penned the screenplays of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Instead of taking notes from J.J. Abrams' wise move to nab Kasdan as a co-writer on the fan-friendly The Force Awakens, Johnson decided that one thing this space saga needs is flat one-liners that border on ineffective parody. He also decided that revered characters do childish things, like slapping a lightsaber out of Rey's displaced Padawan hand. Who wrote this new Luke? The Luke Skywalker that we know and look up to would never do that. He would never stoop to that level; the level that Johnson is on for degrading the Force like this. In fact, all of the comedy had very un-comic timing and felt uninvited. This is not Spaceballs. Why the director forgot that movie was a spoof of Star Wars, I don't know. The only thing the "comedy" achieves is removing the audience from the seriousness and complexity of the Star Wars saga. Johnson's attempt to bring light into the dark fails miserably. 

Now, this movie will look so visually stunning that it tricks you into thinking it is a good film. If it wasn't for John Williams holding this thing together with his always-epic space opera soundtrack, this movie would have fallen apart. This film has an editing and length problem. Somehow even though the movie dragged on, it also felt like every scene was rushed through and quickly moved onto the next so that Johnson could pack in as many scenes as possible without letting them play out as they should. This doesn't allow us any time at all to feel emotions for characters that some viewers have been invested in for 40 years. I found the abrupt deaths of several characters to be untimely, undignified, and unwarranted. There was a complete disregard of the foundation and character arcs built in The Force Awakens in favor of out-of-character side stories that yield no progress. 

Luke Skywalker (played by Mark Hamill) and General Leia Organa (played by Carrie Fisher) are the heart and soul of Star Wars. This year has been especially difficult for fans still dealing with the loss of Carrie Fisher. Star Wars: The Last Jedi marks her final performance. I was expecting to be moved by a tear-jerking sendoff. What I got was an absurd scene of Leia flying through space back to her ship that I can now never remove from my memory. Even Mark Hamill told Vanity Fair that he fundamentally disagrees with every choice Rian Johnson made for Luke Skywalker. The way he was written for this film was unforgivable. These events cannot be undone. Skywalker is a hero and a legend. I suggest you treat him as such. The Last Jedi, he calls it. Focus on the Jedi it does not. 2 1/2 hours later, with no conclusions we have lost the dignity of Star Wars. 

Now we wait until Dec. 2019 for this mess to be cleaned up. May the force be with J.J.!