May The Force Sod Off And Die

Conditions: Crisply Warm

Film Review: Star Wars - The Last Jedi

So new Star Wars enters it's middle phase, usually the one where everything goes dark and the good guys are on the run.  And sure enough, we start with the Resistance on the run.  The Empire has discovered their hideout and are attacking.  The Resistance are in full flight. And that's basically that.

Oh, you think I'm joking but ask this: what actually happens in this film other than the long, slow, O.J Simpson freeway chase sequence?  Basically there are two spin-off plots in this death-march of a movie.  The first is where Rey pointlessly harangues Luke Skywalker into coming with her back to the fight, and the second is a bizarre sequence where characters sneak away from the Resistance fleet and visit a Las Vegas planet in order to recruit a hacker to help them sabotage the chasing Empire ships.  Despite being arrested for parking their spaceship on a beach, this plan amazingly works - right up to the point where they try to upload the virus, where suddenly they're arrested and are about to be executed.

Fortunately, this is where the main plot (you know, the slowest space chase in history) cuts back in.  Admiral Laura Dern, now having finally told everyone what her plan was all along and gotten the rest of the resistance to jet off to a convenient desert planet, now takes her empty ship and truck-bombs it into the pursuing fleet.  Surprisingly, this doesn't slow things down much, perhaps because it would be physically impossible to make the plot go any slower, and the Empire show up on the desert planet with a bunch of giant walking tanks to finish the Resistance off.  And who should show up at the last moment but Luke Skywalker himself.

Because the other spin-off plot, that takes up about 30 minutes or so of the film and is also utterly useless, is Rey scurrying around this awful island Luke is living on, trying to get him to come back.  He, naturally, doesn't want to.  And that goes on forever.  Finally, finally, Rey gives up and flies back to the fleet in time to fight against, and then with, and then flee from, Kylo Ren.  But they all end up in the same place, on the desert planet, behind the wall of a fortress, which is when Luke arrives.

So finally, after the longest wait in all of Star Wars, we finally get our big rousing battle.  Luke squares off against his ex-student Kylo, and for about ten minutes or so things are pretty cool.  But it can't last.  Eventually the film again reverts to subterfuge and missed expectations.  It's a film that seems set to do the opposite of what it should do, simply because that's what people are expecting it to do.  Well after 9 films it would be silly not to have some expectations.  If you wanted to do something different then maybe you shouldn't have signed up to make a Star Wars sequel.  As it stands a lot of things lie smashed and broken for the Star Wars 9 director J.J Abrams to try and make sense of.  I have to wonder what is the point?  Other than money of course.  One pew-pew out of five.

- Peace out