With that being the case, though, neither Luke nor Snoke making it out of the film alive is really the best possible scenario going forward-as is Rey’s family having no great significance. I was hoping to be not just saddened but stunned. He’s just a sensitive guy who went through a terrible ordeal with the dark side as a young man and would sacrifice anything, even the Jedi’s future, not to repeat it. When all is said and done, Luke really did just plain give up-no terrible original sin for the Jedi Order, no shocking history with Snoke (that we know of yet), no real history of any kind. It feels like, well, a very George Lucas way to operate, while the film itself feels distinctly Johnson’s-experimental and idiosyncratic and goofy and melodramatic all at once.įor all the risks Johnson takes stylistically, though, I do wish he’d been a little more daring with the lore. In fact, I can see why Johnson made so positive an impression on Lucasfilm that they gave him a whole new trilogy to develop-for both better and (occasionally, mildly) worse, he’s apparently kind of a nutty dude who made kind of a nutty movie, one that isn’t particularly concerned with how many people love it. Actual, non-Force-based flashbacks, time lapse shots, X-Men-style telepathic conversations, and that crazy lightspeed ramming sequence are just some of the new ideas Johnson injects into the saga here, and while one or two of them may not be well-regarded in the final analysis, you have to give the guy credit for daring to try. But The Last Jedi expands the cinematic (and tonal) language of Star Wars enough for both of them. Both supporters and detractors can generally agree that The Force Awakens was the safe version of a new Star Wars movie-it needed to be loved by as many people as possible or the whole operation would have been limping right out of the gate. Nevertheless, it felt like a bold decision in a film full of bold decisions. Though maybe that’s on me- The Empire Strikes Back is mostly about the heroes running away as well. We knew the Resistance’s escape from D’Qar would be an early set piece in the film, but never in a million years would I have expected that escape to be the entire film. So it’s fitting that one of the easiest comparisons people are making to The Last Jedi is ’33’, an early episode of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica that sees the heroes’ fleet hounded indefinitely by the Cylons with no escape in sight. While I had seen Looper and liked it well enough, Johnson’s work on Breaking Bad was the most interesting to me in light of this job-what would a TV director do with Star Wars? When Rian Johnson was announced as the director for Episode VIII, I recall one of my first thoughts being “oh shit, the ‘Ozymandias’ guy”. this piece contains major spoilers from The Last Jedi.
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