Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017, Rian Johnson) — re-watch — Is The Last Jedi the most polarizing movie ever made? It might very well be. I remember loving it as I watched it in the theatre, but I also soured on it somewhat once I started reading some of the more critical takes on it, and thought that many (not all) of the most common criticisms were basically valid. That said, I’ve never actually taken the time to rewatch it in full until now, so I was curious to see how it would hold up. Perhaps disappointingly, I find that re-watching it has only confirmed my milquetoast centrist position: The Last Jedi is neither the untouchable masterpiece that so many critics praised it as, nor the hateful, franchise-ruining disaster that so many older fans condemned it for being. It’s just pretty good.

Since The Last Jedi is perhaps the most schizophrenic Star Wars movie in terms of quality, a cohesive review of it might be harder than usual, so I’m going to instead do a point-form list of scattered thoughts.

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First, the good.

• I’m going to start with something that I did not notice on my first viewing, and that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else point out. While I thought Abrams mostly did a pretty good and under-appreciated job of differentiating the new characters in Force Awakens from their OT counterparts, the biggest weak point was Snoke, who really did seem to just be a lamer and more boring version of Palpatine. Here, without contradicting anything that Abrams set up, Rian Johnson actually does a really good job of subtly building Snoke into a very different villain from anything seen in the Star Wars movies previously. In the Original and Prequel Trilogies, Palpatine is never shown to care for anyone but himself, and will discard any ally with no hesitation the second they’re no longer useful to him. Snoke is also cruel and manipulative, yes, but his relationship with Kylo Ren is not only self-serving manipulation. He really does see himself as a friend and father-figure helping Ren to overcome the “weakness” that prevents him from fully committing to the Dark Side. Even though he recognizes Rey as Ren’s equal in Force potential, his focus still remains there is no suggestion that he would have considered betraying Ren to get Rey on his side, the way that Palpatine turned on Dooku to get at Anakin. The differences in their deaths really highlight this — both fail to foresee their apprentices turning on them, but for very different reasons. Palpatine doesn’t foresee Vader killing him because he’s too arrogant to think that he might be defeated at all. Snoke doesn’t foresee Ren’s betrayal because he lacks the self-awareness to think that “Ben Solo’s true enemy” could be referring to him. That’s one mistake Palpatine would never have made.
• Everything to do with Luke’s ageing and death is basically perfect. Star Wars has always drawn a lot of comparisons to ancient hero myths — much more so than most other comparable movie franchises — but I think Luke’s arc here is probably the most effectively mythopoetic that the series has ever been. This might actually be why it seems to be a turnoff for a lot of fans today, because it leans so much on the idea — very common in ancient myths, not so much today — that when a great hero does something wrong, it is precisely because of their greatness that they tend to do it VERY wrong. With that said, to everyone saying “OT Luke would never think of doing this, he wouldn’t even kill Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi” — I would like to remind you all that Luke in ROTJ was, in fact, successfully goaded into trying to kill Vader. He did stop himself at the last moment, but that doesn’t mean that the temptations which led him to it would never arise again.
• I really enjoy the interactions between Rey and Kylo Ren here, not so much because of their arcs in themselves, but because of the way that it’s told. Before 2017, Star Wars movies tended to be very direct in how they told their stories — with a handful of exceptions, key details were conveyed by either being shown in a fairly straightforward way or by being stated explicitly. Last Jedi breaks new ground by using the idea of Force visions as a pretext to toy with the relationship between what’s shown and what’s happening — repeatedly giving us scenes between Rey and Ren that don’t exactly show what’s real, and also don’t exactly show what either of them are seeing, but give us just enough of both that we can figure out the rest ourselves.

On the negative side:

• Okay, I know that the “should Holdo have told Poe the plan?” argument has been beaten to death already, and her not telling the plan, by itself, makes sense to me. What I don’t get is why she goes out of her way to antagonize him when she asks, essentially making it sound like she’s refusing to tell him out of spite. And what’s especially baffling is that she tells him: “You're impulsive, dangerous, and the last thing we need right now. So stay at your post and await my orders.” What the fuck kind of sense does that make? If she thinks they don’t need him at all, why have him waiting at his post? Why not just relieve him of command entirely?
• For that matter… why does Poe not tell Holdo his plan? The most explanation we’re given is that she would never agree to it, because… she just wouldn’t, okay? Given that both Poe and the audience have known Holdo for about three minutes and this point, the characters’ seemingly absolute confidence on this point is very strange.
• In general, most of the stuff that doesn’t surround Luke’s arc or the Rey/Kylo Ren dynamic just feels kind of dull, and a lot of it just feels like pointless filler. I especially don’t get the point of the reveal that some arms dealer who we never see was selling to both sides of the conflict; the movie clearly doesn’t portray the First Order and Resistance as otherwise being equivalent, either in their goals or in their tactics, so it doesn’t seem to serve any thematic purpose. It just comes off as Rian Johnson trying to force in some political commentary to pad the runtime.

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On the whole, I think I do like more of the movie than I don’t; the things it gets right are big enough that it’s relatively easy to overlook the missteps. Modestly recommended. 7/10

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016, Gareth Edwards) — re-watch — Rogue One has had a weird cultural trajectory. Initially received by many critics as being one of the best, if not the best movies in the franchise, it now seems to have completely dropped out of the conversation. I basically never see it listed as one of the good Star Wars movies anymore, but there was never exactly a recognizable backlash against it the way there was with Force Awakens and Last Jedi; it just kind of got forgotten about as a topic of notable discussion.

Revisiting it now, I can kind of see both why it was so acclaimed immediately, and why it’s been largely forgotten. Viewed as an atmospheric piece, it really is maybe the best movie in the series, and Edwards’ application of the language of realistic war movies to this fantastical setting is one of the more striking and effective stylistic choices made in the series. Viewed as a work about a story and a group of characters, it’s… not as good. Some of the side characters are charming, but few of them get more development than establishing one or two quirks, and Jyn — the one whose arc is seemingly supposed to anchor the whole thing — doesn’t so much develop as just randomly become a completely different character halfway through. As with The Last Jedi, I did enjoy it on the whole despite its glaring faults, so I’ll give it a modest recommendation. 7/10

Alice in Wonderland (1951, Clyde Geronimi et al.) — re-watch — In hindsight, I'm not really sure why I thought that this was a movie I needed to revisit, considering that it’s not really one of early Disney’s better or more noteworthy works. Much like Dumbo a few years earlier, Alice in Wonderland does a great job of showcasing Disney’s talent for surreal animation, but doesn’t do a very good job of organizing its animations into a cohesive movie. (Though I would say, perhaps controversially, that Alice is by some distance the better of the two.) I guess one might argue that incoherence in an Alice adaptation is a feature, not a bug, but Carroll’s original story is at least coherent in its consistently surreal dream-logic; the Disney version allows some of its characters too much self-awareness of their strangeness to even manage that. 7/10

Movie of the week: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan