Yeah, I really wanted to see more of that. Interestingly, I think I read that showing the attempt at the new academy and rebuilding the Jedi was Lucas' original idea for a sequel trilogy. As questionable as his writing, plotting, directing, editing, and other skills may be, the guy does have some good big-picture ideas because that's what I would have preferred to see. 

Yeah, I agree with this. Yoda is really wise and knows who need what. He was screwing with Luke because he needed screwing with, and he was taking himself OH SO SERIOUSLY. I think it was a good way to draw Luke back to the best, remind him of when he was the young student, and I am sure seeing Yoda not take all so seriously would have an impact on him. It did work after all. 

I'm late to this party, I know, but I only saw Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi about three weeks ago. Ill health and a looming tax return prevented me from having time to type up my thoughts on the film until now (warning: this post is long, full of spoilers and isn't complimentary of the movie).





The first thing to say is, wow! What a f**king mess. This really is one of the most badly made mainstream films from a major Hollywood studio that I've seen in recent years – and that's without even beginning to discuss its merits as a Star Wars film! It has a poor structure, bad pacing, huge plot holes, and is all over the place in terms of mood: one minute it's a gritty sci-fi war film, the next it's a lightweight kiddies' movie. Call me old fashioned, but I believe that a good film should have a cohesive tone to it, irrespective of where the narrative might take us.

The "kiddies' movie" part that I'm referring to was the largely unnecessary Canto Bight casino sequence, which seemed like a really jarring change of tone compared to the first part of the movie – and did we really need a sub-plot about animal cruelty shoehorned into the film at this point? Then there's the tacked on bit at the very end, just before the credits roll, where we return to Canto Bight and see a child slave looking determinedly up at the stars, dreaming of the day he'll get off-world and see the galaxy. Not only was this scene nauseatingly schmaltzy, but it also felt like a totally tacked on afterthought.

Leaving behind the film's structural and thematic shortcomings, I must talk about the huge, gaping plot holes right at the centre of the film. Firstly, Admiral Holdo's plan for escaping to the disused Rebel base on the planet Crait in Resistance loadlifters has one major flaw: the Resistance ships are in visual range of the First Order! The earlier part of the film is full of shots of the First Order commanders looking out of the window of their Star Destroyer at the escaping Resistance fleet. When the Resistance shuttles leave the larger transport, we're told that the First Order will only be tracking the lead ship and won't notice the escaping shuttles. Errr...except that all the First Order have to do is look out of the bloody window to see the good guys escaping!




There are also two other plot holes associated with this long, drawn out chase between the Resistance and the First Order. The first is that the Star Destroyers keep pounding the Resistance craft with their laser cannons, but we're told that the good guy's ships are light and fast enough to stay at a range where the First Order's laser fire is ineffective against their shields. But if the Resistance craft are lighter and faster, then the distance between them and the First Order's Star Destroyers wouldn't remain the same, it would increase, as the Resistance transports pulled further and further away, until eventually, they would be out of range altogether.

The second plot hole relating to this chase sequence is about the First Order's laser bolts being ineffective against the Resistance craft's shields. Shields don't work like that in Star Wars. Laser bolts either hit their target, miss altogether, or their target is out of range. There's never been any indication in any of the previous films that turbo lasers are ineffective at certain ranges, even if they hit their target. Every time a ship's shields are hit by laser fire, they are weakened and, sooner or later, they will fail, leaving the craft vulnerable. Shields cannot take punishment indefinitely, as they do in The Last Jedi. That has long been established in the Star Wars universe, ever since the original film in 1977, actually, and it has also been shown multiple times in the subsequent films too.

I know that this last criticism about the shields might seem like nitpicking to some, but its a blatant violation of the established way in which technology in the Star Wars universe works, for no other reason than the plot of The Last Jedi demands it. That wilful jettisoning of the "rules" of this fictional setting is, for me, indicative of the sloppiness of the whole production.




Another major criticism I have is that the "heroic" trio of Poe Dameron, Finn and new character Rose Tico achieve absolutely nothing throughout the course of the film. Worse, they actually cause the unnecessary deaths of a lot of Resistance soldiers and pilots. If this trio of "heroes" had done nothing, and simply followed the orders of Admiral Holdo, like they were supposed to, then the Resistance's escape would've gone much smoother, and with a lot less loss of life.

Oh, and let's not forget that Poe also got all those Resistance bomber pilots killed at the start of the film by disobeying orders too. How heroic! I know that the film was supposed to be making a point about Dameron's inability to follow orders and play as part of a team, but still, the fact remains that the so-called heroes of this film did nothing but f**k things up royally.

There's a continuity problem with Rey and Poe's first meeting in The Last Jedi too. The pair are shown being introduced to each other for the first time in the film, but in The Force Awakens they were both in the same room together after the destruction of Starkiller Base, when the map inside BB-8 was reunited with R2-D2. The novelization of The Force Awakens, which Disney have been at pains to tell us is 100% canon, goes even further and actually describes the pair meeting. Here's the relevant section of the novel...

Rey and Poe were not excluded, though their sudden, tight clinch of shared excitement led to a moment of mutual awkwardness. “Uh, hi,” the pilot mumbled. “I'm Poe.” She nodded slowly, searching his face and finding that she liked it. “I recognize the name. So you're Poe. Poe Dameron, the X-wing pilot. I'm Rey.”
“I know.” He smiled back, a little more at ease. “Nice to meet you.”

I'm not sure how the writers of The Last Jedi managed to overlook this glaring fact, but again, its indicative of what an incompetently made film this is.




Like many other fans (from what I've seen online), I also have a problem with what the film did to the character of Luke Skywalker. For one thing, the fact that Luke confesses to having contemplated killing Ben Solo (Kylo Ren) while he slept, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I appreciate his concerns about Snoke's corruption of the boy, but for Luke to even momentarily consider butchering the youngster in his bed doesn't sit well with me at all. There's also the attendant suspicion that Luke may have murdered the rest of his Jedi Academy too – that's certainly the inference that I got from the film, although maybe I'm wrong about that. Nevertheless, watching Luke contemplate cold-blooded murder like this felt really out of character.

On a related matter, it was also hard to see Luke living as a terrified, cowardly old hermit, waiting to die in a mire of regret. I found that characterisation hard to reconcile with the plucky hero whose adventures I'd followed in the original trilogy. As for Mark Hamill, he very much seemed to be dialling his performance in and playing himself, rather than Luke Skywalker.




Another criticism I have is that Snoke's death just came across as pointless and unfulfilling from a storytelling point of view. He'd been set up as a mysterious, shadowy presence in The Force Awakens, and I was looking forward to learning more about him and getting some character pay-off, but no, he was just killed, with nothing resolved and with the audience still knowing nothing about him. What's his background? How did he became so powerful with the Force? How did he manage to become the supreme leader of the First Order? From a storytelling perspective, this lack of answers is deeply unsatisfying. Maybe the answers are all in the comics and novels, but if so, that's just not good enough: the books and comics should compliment the film, not be a substitute for it.

Some of my friends also had a real problem with Princess Leia getting sucked out into space and surviving. For me, personally, that wasn't so far fetched – I mean, the human body can survive for up to 30 seconds in the vacuum of space, and clearly Leia has some power with the Force to aid her survival. But the way in which the princess flew back into the damaged starship, like Mary Poppins or something, was laughable. Who the hell approved such a ridiculous shot?!

Other minor annoyances were that finally seeing Captain Phasma in combat was a total let down, there were too many visual call backs to The Empire Strikes Back, and Poe's childish "yo mama" taunts to General Hux were cringe-inducing. I was also disappointed by the lack of old fashioned practical effects in this film, after we'd seen them put to such good use in The Force Awakens.

There were some recurring problems with The Last Jedi that were common to The Force Awakens as well, such as John Williams' score being utterly unmemorable, which is in sharp contrast to his incredible work on the original and prequel trilogies. There was a lack of any thought-provoking or quotable dialogue in the film too. The original trilogy and even the much maligned prequels have lots of eminently quotable pieces of dialogue, many of which were seized upon by cinema audiences at the time of those films' initial release and have since become absorbed into the common vernacular. There's nothing at all like that in The Last Jedi, or The Force Awakens, for that matter.




Rey is still as bland as all hell and a real "Mary Sue" of a character (that is, a character who is unrealistically idealised and perfect), while Daisy Ridley is straight out of the Keira Knightly school of acting – and that's not a complement! The problem is that Rey is all-powerful, has no character flaws and is proficient in literally everything she does in the film...and that makes her a very boring and unsympathetic character indeed. In The Last Jedi, she goes from having very limited knowledge of the Force to holding her own against Luke Skywalker, a seasoned Jedi, as well as besting Snoke's elite Praetorian Guards and levitating several tonnes of boulders with the Force – all within the space of about a week! There is no "hero's journey" there, just an overpowered, blandly virtuous character who never fails.

While we're on the subject of rubbish characters, Kylo Ren still isn't a good enough villain for my money. He's not scary, he's not threatening, and when you compare him to the genuinely menacing Director Krennic in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story or even Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace, you can see just what a lame duck of a villain he is. Never mind comparing him to Darth Vader!

*sigh* I hate to be so negative, but trying to find something positive to say about this film is tough. I will admit that the space battles were visually very impressive. Some parts of the film were quite enjoyable too, as they played, and the scenes between Luke, Rey and Chewbaccaa on Ahch-To might've been my favourite parts of the film. The scene where R2 brought out Leia's old, "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope" hologram for Luke on board the Millennium Falcon really choked me up. As Luke said, it was a cheap shot, but it was certainly an effective one.

I also liked the cute little furry aliens that Chewbacca befriends on the planet of Ahch-To (I'm not sure what they're called), and I found BB-8 as entertaining as ever – although he seems to have turned into a walking (rolling?) example of Deus Ex Machina, able to do absolutely any feat the script requires him to, in order to get the heroes out of a jam.




Overall, I felt that The Last Jedi was an unnecessarily bloated mess, in need of a decent script writer and a damn good editor (like George Lucas, for instance!). Very few films need to be more than two hours in length and The Last Jedi certainly didn't have enough story to warrant its 2½ hour running time. I also felt that The Force Awakens set up a lot of questions, character arcs and plot momentum, but The Last Jedi failed to deliver on all of them.

I've heard random people in the street talking about the film and saying things like, "Well, it's a kid's film, just like the originals were, so what can you expect?", as if being a children's film is an excuse for it being a bad movie. Putting aside the fact that Star Wars was never intended to be just for kids, a children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is just a bad story! A good kid's film is still a good film. A bad film is just bad, whoever it's aimed at.

With the death of Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi, Han Solo's demise in The Force Awakens, and Princess Leia's death being a forgone conclusion for the next instalment, it's clear to me now that this current trilogy is designed to be a "handing over the baton" exercise. The trouble is, the new characters that are supposed to replace Han, Luke and Leia simply aren't good enough. I have to say that I honestly don't care what happens to Rey, Finn or Poe.

This isn't just a case of an ageing fan viewing the earlier films through rose-tinted spectacles either, because I loved 2016's Rogue One. That, for me, was a Star Wars film done right. The Last Jedi is just a badly made film. Not even just a badly made Star Wars film, but a poorly executed movie in general.

Sad to say, but for this life-long fan of George Lucas's galaxy far, far away, I think I might be done with Star Wars.

Very much agreed.




Again, I totally agree. But, as I noted, it goes further than that -- Poe (along with Finn and Rose) achieve absolutely nothing throughout their character arcs in the film, and worse, they cause the deaths of many of their comrades. All three "heroes" act in a way that is the antithesis of heroic during the film.




I don't recall the cloaking device dialogue, but you may well be right -- I've only seen the film once (and I won't be settling down to re-watch it any time soon). But regardless of whether a cloaking device is mentioned or not, the fact remains that the First Order's Star Destroyers can clearly see the shuttle craft, because they target them with their lasers with devastating precision. If they were cloaked, far fewer would've been destroyed, I would think.

I also wholeheartedly agree that introducing cloaking devices into Star Wars would be opening up a real can of worms.




I don't know, I don't think it does make sense because we have seen that kind of long range ship-to-ship combat before, both in the post-Hoth evacuation chase between the Millennium Falcon and the Imperial fleet and again in the Battle of Coruscant in Revenge of the Sith. The Resistance fleet didn't look to be any further away from the big Star Destroyers in The Last Jedi than the Millennium Falcon did from the Executor and Imperial fleet in The Empire Strikes Back, at least at certain points in the chase. The Falcon's shields take some punishment from the Imperials for a while, but eventually they fail, resulting in Han Solo turning the ship around and "attacking" the lead Star Destroyer, but actually hiding on their hull.

That's the way that shields have always shown to have worked in Star Wars. Hell, even the Star Wars role-playing game has shields work in this way.




Yeah, they are introduced and, I believe, shake hands. They are clearly meant to be meeting for the first time. Good point about Rey and Poe meeting when the teams get back from the Starkiller Base mission too. As the novelization I quoted shows, they've definitely met before.




The difference with Obi-Wan and Yoda is that a) they were both fleeting the galaxy wide Imperial purge of the Jedi, and b) in Obi-Wan's case, he was living as a hermit on Tatooine to keep an eye of the great white hope that was Luke Skywalker. Neither of them became embittered hermits by choice, as Luke is shown to have done in TLJ -- in fact, neither Kenobi or Yoda are embittered at all in the original trilogy.




It's been a long while since I last read Splinter of the Mind's Eye, but I read it a lot as a kid, and my memory of it is that Vader isn't killed when he falls down the pit at the end. I think that the book even tells us that Luke senses through the Force that the Dark Lord is still alive. I'd also never heard about George Lucas telling Alan Dean Foster to kill off Vader, but you may be right about that.

Regardless though, the situation with Vader after one film wasn't the same as with Snoke. Vader already worked as a big, up-front screen villain and you learned everything you needed to know about him in A New Hope. You weren't teased by this shadowy presence and then never given any answers in the sequel, as you were with Snoke. Vader's character was expanded upon considerably in ESB, sure, but we already knew enough about him in ANH that he worked as a brilliant bad guy (even if a lot of what we learned ultimately turned out to be untrue).

Really, Emperor Palpatine's appearance in the ESB and subsequent fleshing out in ROTJ is a much better parallel for Snoke, and also an example of how to do it right.





I get what they're going for with Kylo's character, it just doesn't work IMO. There's nothing wrong with complex, nuanced villains -- they don't all have to be pantomime bad guys -- but the problem with Ren is that he never, ever feels like a credible threat. Especially when going up against the perfectly perfect Rey. He's just not scary enough as a villain. You know you've got trouble when regular Imperial officers like Director Krennic or Grand Moff Tarkin are a more threatening on-screen presence than your Force wielding Dark Jedi.




Heh! I've had that video come up in my YouTube recommendations recently. Having just watched the first five minutes, it looks like a well made mini-documentary, although I knew most of what it has to tell us anyway. But it's nicely assembled. I'll definitely watch all of this.

As for Lucas being a good editor, I think he is, and he's more responsible for the editing of ANH, ESB and ROTJ than you might think. Although Paul Hirsch, Richard Chew and his wife Marcia Lucas are formally credited as A New Hope's editors, George worked very closely with all three of them on the editing process and served as very much a guiding hand to these three official editors. This is in much the same fashion as Lucas was later a phantom director and editor on Empire, Jedi, Raiders and Temple of Doom. His fingerprints are all over the final edits of those films.

In addition, Lucas was the editor on both THX 1138 and American Graffiti, the latter of which is a very well edited film indeed (it's also an interestingly directed film too, with something of a documentary or cinéma vérité feel to it). Lucas might be something of an average director, although that wasn't always the case, but writing and editing are his real strengths.

Incidentally, I remember reading an article in the Star Wars Insider back in the mid-90s about John Jympson's very first cut of Star Wars. It used somewhere in the region of 30% different footage to the finished film and haad a very different tone; it was apparently almost a farce or comedy movie in some places. I love to see that cut. It would be fascinating.




I hope you're right. One thing's for sure, with the forthcoming Han Solo film looking like it's gonna be an unmitigated car crash and a total lack of interest in spending £14 of my hard earned cash on seeing the adventures of Rey, Finn, Poe and Kylo in Episode IX, it'll be a while before I'll be seeing any new SW product at the cinema.

Good catch, sunofdarkchild. Can't believe I forgot that line.

I really hadn't thought of that; it's a pretty good point.

The difference I would see is that when Ben and Yoda quit and went into hiding, the Jedi order had just been annihilated, all their friends were gone and the Empire was triumphant. When Luke quit, from what we can tell, the only loss was a personal one: his star pupil had turned on him and joined the First Order, but the Republic was still standing, his friends and family were still around and in need of him. To give up at a time like that sounds a little too self-centered for the idealistic young man he had been. (*edit* Oops, Confessor already made that same observation. Sorry for the redundancy).

Then again, there's a lot we don't know about the post-empire Republic. Perhaps the New Republic was headed by idiotic leaders who wasted all the gains made by the Rebellion and caused a lot of worlds to willfully turn to the First Order, and with the final straw of Ben turning on him Luke went "A plague o' both your houses" before calling it quits.    

At least in the case of Ben, you can say that he was hiding from the Empire but was watching over Luke's upbringing from a discreet distance. He's not entirely unfamiliar to Owen ("That wizard is just a crazy old man") Lars. And Leia was growing up in the home of one of the nascent Rebellion's ringleaders, Bail Organa. Yoda's exile is harder to explain in light of Episodes I-III showing him at the heart of an organized Jedi culture on Corruscant. It would make a whole lot more sense if Yoda simply always lived on Dagobah, and Episodes I-III had shown Jedi traveling there to meet him. Just one of the many ways that Lucas screwed up in the prequels.

As for the New Republic questions you raise: There's plenty of story opportunity there, and it's a shame that these films care little for overarching mythology issues like that. As you know, I've been reading through Astro City lately, and the biggest thing that pops out overall is that Busiek clearly did his worldbuilding on the front end. All these characters have names and biographies that intersect. There's a whole timeline operating behind the scenes, just waiting to be revealed in bits and pieces. It's the Tolkien approach. Whereas Star Wars, like many modern mythoi, seems very ad hoc. Every story adds pieces to the mythos, and astute fans are better than the creators at asking, "How does X fit together with Y?"

The ability to write a filmable screenplay is insignificant next to the power of the worldbuilder.