Minor spoiler alert. I just saw The Last Jedi today, and I'm gonna tell you, it's all splash and no heart. Never a big J.J. Abrams fan, I was excited to see Rian Johnson take a turn at the helm. I enjoyed his twisty sci-fi Looper a few years back, and his quirky little indie film Brick is one of my favorite hat-tips to noir style and dialog.
Sadly, eight movies in and we're still slavishly following these same characters around -- Leia and Luke, Chewbacca, even Yoda shows up. But it's Luke in particular that drags the pic down. He's always such a buzzkill with his brooding self-seriousness, and without a cynical rogue like Han Solo around to balance the force, as it were, you're left with a big lemon-suck.
All the new characters we met in The Force Awakens are back, but they are cardboard cutouts, moving the plot along but providing no depth, no emotion. Even Kylo Ren's brooding (and, oh, does he brood) over a supposed betrayal by his onetime Jedi master feels perfunctory. What could have been a great conflict is handled with trickery and shortcuts that steal the power of the relationship. Rey is much blander than last time, and Finn and Poe seem to be there only to complicate the plot.
Interestingly, on their sideplot to nowhere, Finn's sidekick Rose steals the goddamn movie. A new character, she is genuine in a way that we haven't seen in this franchise since the early days, even if her love for the resistance is a little meta. (She's like a rebel alliance fangirl. You almost expect her to bust out original trilogy action figures.) But she's cool and gets one of the better scenes of herism.
Speaking of what was genuine in the early pics, why all the fawning over the raggedy old humans but no love for our favorite droids? I've always believed that the original arc of the Star Wars universe necessitated a series in which R2D2 and C3PO were the through line, the real main characters. The rebellion revolves around them almost as if they were narrators. They speak the first lines in the films. And they can continue on as the other characters lived and died, just as it is implied that they have a history with the rebellion before they ever meet up with Luke. (I think this was addressed in the second trilogy. Frankly, who cared.) And they are perfectly picaresque characters, uncannily showing up in the middle of every major moment in the rebellion like little Forrest Gumps.
Until now, that is. Sadly, they are no more than window dressing here -- appearing for a momentary cliche, and then being brusquely shunted aside like last year's iPhone for the bouncy and bubbly antics of BB-8, who is nowhere near having a personality. C3PO gets one chance to be an officious protocol droid and R2D2 gets a quick reunion with Luke. Done, and done. (Anthony Daniels's lines sound like they were literally phoned in -- on a flip phone, from his sofa, perhaps, on some or other Monday afternoon.)
Look, Star Wars was a big enough moment in my life that I had to see this one -- just as I will see the next. But it's all getting a little threadbare. My favorite thing about Rogue One was that they broke so fully away from the canonical characters into a self-contained story. More of that, please. Perhaps the ninth movie will be the charm. After all, everyone we knew from the earlier trilogies is now dead.
Maybe now we can move on, for god's sake.
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