Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

 IMDB Rating 7.8/10 ( as on 19.12.2017)

Rey develops her newly discovered abilities with the guidance of Luke Skywalker, who is unsettled by the strength of her powers. Meanwhile, the Resistance prepares to do battle with the First Order.

Director: Rian Johnson

Writers: Rian Johnson, George Lucas (based on characters created by)

Stars: Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Mark Hamill

PG-13 | 2h 32min | Action, Adventure, Fantasy

 IMDB link Here

Movie Rating ★★★★☆  

May the eighth be with you

Mark Kermode

The core theme of the ongoing Star Wars narrative has always been one of balance – an equilibrium between light and dark, life and death. Balance is also the key to making a great Star Wars movie, with the directors of each new episode standing or falling on their ability to walk a tightrope between spectacle and substance, seriousness and absurdity – keeping both the fans and the first-timers happy.

In this eighth episode in the official Star Wars saga, writer-director Rian Johnson (who made his name with such adventurous features as Brick and Looper) proves himself the master of the balancing act, keeping the warring forces of this intergalactic franchise in near-perfect harmony. Just as the film’s sound designers understand the tactical use of silence, so Johnson instinctively knows when to internalise or externalise the film’s multiple explosions – conjuring vast attack ships on fire and tiny individuals in torment with equal ease.

Picking up where JJ Abrams’s The Force Awakens left off, The Last Jedi puts distance between Daisy Ridley’s Rey and John Boyega’s Finn, sending the latter chasing across the galaxy while the former searches for her true self on the remote island where Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) lurks.

Armed with all the samurai-style sabre battles and eye-popping dogfights (both in dark space and on bright land) that a Star Wars fan could hope for, Johnson’s increasingly crowd-pleasing adventure packs its heftiest punch by respecting the narrative arcs of its disparate characters. Whereas certain previous instalments suffered from George Lucas’s drama-free formula of having two-dimensional ciphers explain the plot to each other, Johnson adheres to the maxim that “action is character”, nowhere more so than in the introduction of Kelly Marie Tran’s winning Rose Tico – already a firm fan favourite who turns out to be much more than a mere maintenance engineer for the Resistance.

A recurrent motif of hands reaching across great divides becomes a defining image, with allies and enemies bound by strange ties, and cowardice and heroism easily confused. No wonder Rey finds herself gazing at her own image in a Wellesian hall of mirrors in one of the film’s most strikingly surreal sequences.

There are some quibbles – a visit to a space casino seems distractingly diversionary, and a few minor elements are a little on-the-nose. But as the third act approaches, the crescendo of air-punching interludes accelerates, eliciting gasps, cheers and OMG whoops from an audience whom Johnson treats with respect, affection, and evident admiration.

 Read full review at The Guardian

Movie Rating ★★★✬☆  

One of the most intelligent blockbusters of the year

Jake Wilson

Like most recent exercises in pop nostalgia, the new Star Wars films have an underlying melancholy. It's not just because Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and friends have aged with the rest of us, but because today's Hollywood so rarely manages to devise brand-new stories with the same breadth of

While The Last Jedi may not receive top marks for originality, the eighth official entry in the Star Wars saga is still one of the most entertaining blockbusters of the year, justifying the faith the Disney corporation have shown in writer-director Rian Johnson (Looper).

Johnson has a subversive streak, but also the knack of gratifying an audience through a stream of small surprises. He delivers nearly everything a Star Wars fan might want, though not always in the expected ways: there are the requisite aerial battles and light sabre duels, and a winning range of new aliens, from sleek snow foxes to the already-legendary porgs, who look like upright guinea pigs with large pleading eyes.

As a technician, he owes less to series creator George Lucas than to Lucas' old comrade Steven Spielberg. Like Spielberg, he makes the camera part of the action, tracking in rapidly for emphasis and zipping from one significant detail to another.

As in The Empire Strikes Back - the Star Wars film Johnson most obviously takes as a model - the complex plot branches off in multiple directions.

Unavoidably, the innocence of earlier Star Wars instalments is long gone. Johnson can't help mocking the cliches Lucas played straight, even as he strains to deepen characters originally conceived as cardboard types.

Where Lucas was content to delight the first Star Wars audiences with a simple tale of derring-do, Johnson has to wrestle with the complex legacy of one of the most popular and influential film series ever made; the encounter between Luke and Rey offers an explicit commentary on which aspects of this legacy should be preserved and which left behind.

That Johnson has signed on for three more Star Wars movies is not wholly good news for fans of his original work as writer-director, and Johnson seems to have some ambivalence, repeatedly acknowledging the possibility that it may be time to move on from the Jedi and the Force.

Perhaps he has accepted the burden out of civic duty, feeling that no one can now afford to turn down the chance to deliver a positive message to an audience of millions. At any rate, it's no bad thing that the cleverness which goes into his battle sequences is also used to imply there might be more to heroism than blowing things up.

Read full review at Sydney Morning Herald

Embraces the Magic and Mystery

 MANOHLA DARGIS

“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” picks up where the story left off two years ago in “The Force Awakens,” the leadoff of the series’ newest trilogy. Keeping track of where each “Star Wars” title fits into the overall scheme of things can be brain-numbing (the movies weren’t made in story-chronological order), but the strongest ones work as stand-alones and let you just go with the onscreen flow. The writer-director of “The Last Jedi,” Rian Johnson, frontloads the critical back story intel — who’s fighting who and the like — in the opening crawl. And then he gets down to the difficult business of putting his fingerprints on a franchise that deliberately resists individual authorship.

Mr. Johnson largely succeeds despite having inherited an elaborate ecosystem with a Manichaean worldview divided between heroes (a.k.a. the Resistance) and villains (the First Order). That’s about all you need to know to follow this movie, which charts the franchise’s future while continuing to pass the baton from its first holy trinity — Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill — to a new trio, introduced in “The Force Awakens.” Mr. Ford’s character, Han Solo, exited the series in that movie. As Leia, Ms. Fisher plays a critical role in this new one, but her death last December (after production ended) imparts real melancholy to a series that from its start has been defined — if not always comfortably — by loss.

And so, once upon a time yet again, peace remains elusive and weapons are locked, loaded and often firing. Here, the fight continues with Leia searching for her absent brother, Luke Skywalker (Mr. Hamill), while leading the Resistance against the First Order, the dark-side successor to the dictatorial Empire (Darth Vader’s cohort). The old Imperial evildoers have been replaced by the suitably cartoonish-sounding Snoke (created by the hard-working Andy Serkis and digital effects), a wormy, towering ghoul with vivid scars and an insinuating sneer. He commands the usual stormtroopers along with the impetuous Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), a charismatic villain who has closely fashioned himself after Vader.

The story is a tangle, but its complications are mitigated by Mr. Johnson’s quick pace and the appealing performers. Like most contemporary action flicks, this one more or less plays out as a succession of fights, chases and time outs (for chatting, scheming or lonely musing) across two or more plot lines. Having joined together in “The Force Awakens,” the story’s latest dream team — Rey (Daisy Ridley), a scavenger turned warrior; Finn (John Boyega), a First Order deserter turned resister; and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), a Resistance fighter pilot — now often spends time apart. Poe spins in Leia’s orbit while Rey pesters Luke, and Finn finds a winning ally (Kelly Marie Tran).

One of the truisms of the “Star Wars” series is that its battle between good and bad has always uneasily and sometimes openly mirrored the attendant struggle between good and bad filmmaking. Mr. Lucas’s 1977 foundational movie mostly transcends its flaws with slick looks, hooky effects, old-school heroics and loads of marketable material that helped turn fan love into an ecumenical cult. The second trilogy, entirely directed by Mr. Lucas, began in 1999 with “The Phantom Menace” (infamous for the minor scandal called Jar Jar Binks) and is pretty much a drag outside of some fleet light-saber duels and the arresting black-and-red patterning that distinguishes one villain.

Part of what has already made the new trilogy more successful is that its directors, J.J. Abrams (“The Force Awakens”) and Mr. Johnson, are technically adept, commercially savvy “Star Wars” true believers who came of age in the post-Lucas blockbuster era. Each has had to navigate the intricacies of Mr. Lucas’s sprawling fiction while handling the deep imprint created by Darth Vader’s heavy-breathing menace, R2-D2’s amusing beeps, Mr. Ford’s insouciance, Mr. Hamill’s earnestness, and Ms. Fisher’s smarts and latter-day screwball charm. Unlike Mr. Lucas, though, Mr. Abrams and Mr. Johnson don’t feel burdened by that legacy; they’re into it, charged up, despite the pressures of such an industrial enterprise. They’re resolving their cinematic father issues with a sense of fun.

Mr. Johnson can make you forget about those issues as well as the franchise’s insistent obligations; it also seems like he had a good time at work. He brings lightness to his banter, visual flair (not simply bleeding-edge special effects) to the design, and narrative savvy to Rey and Kylo Ren’s relationship. Mr. Johnson’s use of deep red is characteristic of how he turns ideas into images, most vividly with a set that looks like something Vincente Minnelli might have dreamed up for a Flash Gordon musical with Gene Kelly. When that set becomes the backdrop to a viscerally exciting fight, all the red abruptly evokes the spilled blood that this otherwise squeaky clean series insistently elides.

Like “The Force Awakens,” “The Last Jedi” engages with the first “Star Wars” movie less as a fetish than as a necessary point of departure. And, like Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan Kenobi once did, Luke comes off as a brooding monastic loner. With a hooded robe, beard and inexplicable moodiness, he has retreated to an eerily lovely, isolated island where imaginatively designed critters roam and trill. The cutest (right in time for Christmas tie-ins) are Porgs, saucer-eyed mewling creatures with plump, puffin-like bodies that are mainly on hand for easy laughs. The creature design throughout is so inventive — there are less-fuzzy whatsits on the island, too — that you wish more had been added.

You feel Mr. Johnson periodically reining himself in, yet the movie cuts loose when he does, as when he embraces the galaxy’s strangeness, its non-humanoid beings as well as its magic and mystery. There’s a trippy scene in which a character floats into a resurrection, an ethereal drift that borders on the surreal. It’s a fleeting bliss-out in a series that knows how to bring the weird but has too often neglected to do so amid its blaster zapping, machinations and Oedipal stressing and storming. This is, after all, a franchise in which the most indelible character remains Yoda, the wee, far-out philosophizer with the tufted pate and syntactically distinct truth telling: “Wars not make one great.”

Wars do, however, make warehouses of money as this franchise has been affirming for decades. It’s instructive how normalized its permanent war has become, with its high body count, bloodlessness and fascist chic (the black uniforms evoking the Nazi SS). Given this, it’s notable, too, that while Mr. Johnson manages the big-canvas battles well enough, he’s better with smaller-scaled fights, in which the sweat, vulnerabilities and personal costs of violence are foregrounded. With Mr. Driver — who delivers a startlingly raw performance — Mr. Johnson delivers a potent portrait of villainy that suggests evil isn’t hard-wired, an inheritance or even enigmatic. Here, it is a choice — an act of self-creation in the service of annihilation.

Mr. Johnson has picked up the baton — notably the myth of a female Jedi — that was handed to Mr. Abrams when he signed on to revive the series with “The Force Awakens.” Mr. Johnson doesn’t have to make the important introductions; for the most part, the principals were in place, as was an overarching mythology that during some arid periods has seemed more sustained by fan faith than anything else. Even so, he has to convince you that these searching, burgeoning heroes and villains fit together emotionally, not simply on a Lucasfilm whiteboard, and that they have the requisite lightness and heaviness, the ineffable spirit and grandeur to reinvigorate a pop-cultural juggernaut. That he’s made a good movie in doing so isn’t icing; it’s the whole cake.

Read full review at New York Times

Movie Rating ★★★★☆  

The Last Jedi breaks all the sci-fi boundaries

A welcome disturbance in the Force, Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi is, by wide measure, the trippiest, scrappiest and most rule-breaking Star Wars adventure yet.

Not the exercise in nostalgia that was J.J. Abrams' The Force Awakens, Johnson's Episode VIII takes George Lucas' space opera in new, often thrilling, and sometimes erratic directions while finding the truest expression yet of the saga's underlying ethos of camaraderie in resistance to oppression.

Though there are countless familiar broad strokes - rebel escapes, Jedi soul-searching, daddy issues - The Last Jedi has discovered some new moves yet, in the galaxy far, far away.

As the second installment in this third Star Wars trilogy, The Last Jedi is like the inverted corollary of The Empire Strike Back (long the super fan's favorite).

While it is, like its part-two predecessor, often murky and weird, Johnson's frequently comic film distinguishes itself by upending the traditional power dynamics of heroes and bit players in the Star Wars galaxy.

 Johnson, who also wrote the film, has gone further to shake up the familiar roles and rhythms of Star Wars. Scattershot and loose-limbed, The Force Awakens doesn't worship at its own altar, often undercutting its own grandiosity.

Those breaks of form - formerly mostly reserved for a smirking Harrison Ford - will throw some diehards.

Especially in the surreal isolated scenes of Rey and Luke - where Luke, with a thick gray mane and a hermit's foul-manner is seen drinking a creature's breast milk and pole-vaulting from rock to rock - The Last Jedi teeters on the edge of camp.

It's not surprising that Johnson, the director of the twisty time-traveling noir 'Looper,' has made a movie full of clever inversions.

What's jarring is that he's made a Star Wars' film that tries to not take itself too seriously, while simultaneously making it more emotional.

Yet before its considerable payoff, The Last Jedi feels lost and grasping for its purpose.

Unlike the earlier films, the less tactile The Last Jedi isn't much for world building, and its sense of place isn't as firm. As an intergalactic travelogue, it's a disappointment.

There are exceptions, though, especially the chambers of the Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis, adding to his gallery of grotesques). Soaked in an otherworldly crimson red, Snoke's liar looks like something out of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.

Johnson also lacks what Lucas and Abrams alike recognized as the franchise's most potent weapon: Ford. As the prairie boy turned knight, Hamill has never been the saga's heart-and-soul.

While Luke gets his big moment, The Last Jedi doesn't do him any favors, plopping him on a pitiless jagged rock away from the action and a backstory filled with regret.

As Fisher's final Star Wars film, it's a shame she isn't more front-and-center. (The next film was to be hers, the way Ford and now Hamill have had theirs.) But she makes her scenes count.

Though Isaac has been fashioned as the heir-apparent to the bemused Ford, Boyega is the actor I've left both episode VII and VIII wanting more of.

The downside in a story that spins its characters around the galaxy is that the new generation of Star Wars protagonists hasn't had time for the small gestures that would shape their characters - close-ups that their forerunners were afforded. Even after two films, Rey is more of an unstoppable sprite than a fleshed-out person.

But The Last Jedi, as if with a wind against its back, gathers momentum. By breaking down some of the old mythology, Johnson has staked out new territory. For the first time in a long time, a 'Star Wars' film feels forward-moving.

In a pop culture juggernaut as imposing as Star Wars, these moments carry more meaning than they would elsewhere. After long skating around anything political, 'The Last Jedi' - whether it's meant to be or not - has the tenor of a rallying cry.

Johnson has fully internalized a single line of dialogue from The Return of the Jedi - 'You rebel scum,' said with disdain by a Nazi-like lieutenant - and turned it into a badge of pride.

 Read full review at Daily Mail

Star Wars has now occupied a galaxy of its own in the zeitgeist for 40 years and shows no signs of disappearing anytime soon; to the contrary, each new year brings a new Star Wars film of one kind or another, so using the word “last” in connection with anything to do with the series seems a bit disingenuous. Rather, this latest, and longest, franchise entry has the decided feel of a passing-of-the-torch from one set of characters, and actors, to the next. Loaded with action and satisfying in the ways its loyal audience wants it to be, writer-director Rian Johnson's plunge into George Lucas' universe is generally pleasing even as it sometimes strains to find useful and/or interesting things for some of its characters to do. Commercially, Disney is counting on another haul soaring past a billion dollars in worldwide theatrical box office alone.

As indicated by the dramatic finale of Star Wars: The Force Awakens two Christmases ago, the follow-up is anchored by the attempt by Daisy Ridley's Rey to persuade Mark Hamill's Luke Skywalker to indoctrinate her in the ways of the Jedi. As a warm-up, however, the first quarter-hour is mostly devoted to the evil First Order's outer space attack on the Resistance, led by General Hux, who's goofily played by Domhnall Gleeson as if he were acting in a Monty Pythonesque parody. Still, the resurgent fascists decimate the fleet and put the good guys on their heels.

Back on terra firma or, to be specific, the thrusting oceanic mountain hideaway so splendidly represented by Skellig Michael, Rey finds Luke in a singularly depressive state, ready to call it a day where Jedi and the force are concerned. For him, it's all over, and Rey has her work cut out for her getting Luke to change his mind.

There are generational differences of opinion on the dark side as well. When Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), the turncoat son of Leia and the late Han Solo, shows up in a Darth Vader outfit, Supreme Leader Snoke (a deliciously heinous Andy Serkis) barks, “Take that ridiculous thing off!” This is the sort of mild all-in-the-family irreverence that the fan culture eats up and Johnson — who here becomes the first person to single-handedly write and direct a Star Wars feature since George Lucas did the honors on the original and two of the “prequels" — injects a good deal of this sort of elbow-jabbing humor into the proceedings.

Hardcore series devotees will decide to what extent the new film functions in an equivalent way to how The Empire Strikes Back did in the initial trilogy in 1980. But what it definitely does is stir the pot with ambivalence on both sides of the good-and-evil equation: Just as Luke is ready to pack it in as far as perpetuating the Jedi tradition is concerned, so does Kylo Ren begin to question his abandonment of his true legacy; the tables keep turning here, which is desirable from the dramatic point of view of sustaining fan excitement about what's in store two years from now and beyond.

Johnson, whose three indie-slanted prior features — Brick, The Brothers Bloom and Looper — are all crime tales tinged with offbeat humor, is faced with at least two major narrative challenges: to advance the renewed face-off between the resurgent First Order and the beleaguered Resistance and to further develop the characters introduced two years ago.

As to the first issue, neither here nor in The Force Awakens is it convincingly shown how the demolished Evil Empire was able to bounce back so powerfully just 30 years after its destruction. Even less clear is where Snoke came from, not to mention how he ended up with a face that looks like a twisted and rotted old tree. It feels like not nearly as much time is spent with the bad guys than has been the case in previous Star Wars incarnations (no Peter Cushing-back-from-the-dead appearances here).

As for the one who counts, Kylo Ren, it remains difficult to accept Driver physically as the son of Ford and Fisher (unless there's a surprise parentage revelation yet to come, which could make for a good joke), although the character's complexities begin emerging in interesting ways that promise even more surprises in two years' time, when J.J. Abrams' third chapter to this yarn, the still-untitled Star Wars: Episode IX, will land.

More crucial is building up audience interest in and sympathy for the new banner carriers for the Resistance, and the results remain mixed. As bold soldier Finn, John Boyega made a big splash two years ago, but his character more or less treads water here; he's reduced to more generic athletics. An adventure he shares with a new character, maintenance worker Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran), isn't one of the most compelling interludes of the film's 162 minutes. Lupita Nyong'o is in again briefly as the leather-skinned-looking old pirate Maz Kamata. Towering Gwendoline Christie, so wonderful in Game of Thrones, is, ironically, hard to spot.

The one character who begins to come into his own here is Oscar Isaac's fighter pilot Poe Dameron. His status seemed rather generic and uncertain in The Force Awakens, but there's more confidence here both in the writing and performance of the character as he steps up to fill the void left by Harrison Ford's Han Solo, without yet having achieved that sort of stature. Perhaps in the next episode.

At this stage, Poe has his hands full not only with the First Order's warriors but with a disconcerting new character who has parachuted into the story. Laura Dern's Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo is a lavender-haired, oddly accoutered contemporary of Leia who turns up ostensibly to help the Resistance. But she has an odd way of speaking, doesn't like “trigger-happy fly-boy” Poe at all and is so negative about every proposal made to thwart the enemy that one might imagine she's working for the other team. Time will no doubt tell what her game is, but one shares Poe's apprehensions. Mixed in with these emotions is the poignance attached to Fisher's death a year ago toward the end of production.

Enlivening things in a more positive way is a blaggard named DJ played with great mischief by Benecio del Toro, who sneaks and slithers around and plays all sides like an unusually active lizard.

But while the physical action unfolds in the air and on land (the climactic battle explicitly recalls the celebrated combat involving the giant AT-AT, or Imperial Walkers, in The Empire Strikes Back), the real drama lies elsewhere, that being in the weird space that prolonged solitude has made of Luke Skywalker's head and heart. Stating that he considers himself “a legend and a failure,” Yoda's former devoted student prefers to let his lineage and teachings die out, and an ideological battle ensues, involving both Rey and Kylo Ren, that's philosophically engaging and narratively elemental. It's where the film has been headed all along and will assuredly serve as the springboard for what's to come in two years.

Narratively, Johnson has a tendency to create digressions within digressions, not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that as long as you're skilled enough to keep multiple balls in the air, which he mostly is. The humor does at times strike notes unusual for the franchise, more often to the good than bad, and John Williams' vigorous eighth Star Wars franchise score never sounds rote or tiresomely familiar.

Maybe the film is a tad too long. Most of the new characters could use more heft, purpose and edge to their personalities, and they have a tendency to turn up hither and yon without much of a clue how they got there; drawing a geographical map of their movements would create an impenetrable network of lines. But there's a pervasive freshness and enthusiasm to Johnson's approach that keeps the pic, and with it the franchise, alive, and that is no doubt what matters most.

 Read full review at Hollywood Reporter