It's been about two years since the release of Star Wars Episode 8: The Last Jedi. And I hate that movie so much that I hate Rian Johnson as human being, and if I ever meet him, there's a good chance I'll suffer severe apoplexy while I shout at him about how much I hate him for what he did to Star Wars. And there's a small chance my ability to reason will disappear and I'll put that man in a hospital with the beating I'd bestow on him.
Subvert Expectations? That's a worthy goal by itself? Fuck you Rian Johnson. I hope you die miserable, despondent, and alone... slowly and painfully.
Alright... I want to write some more about the movie itself. But it's hard to figure out what else to write. I've written a few other reviews of the movie including one where I tried really hard to keep my emotion out of it, to point out flaws that I think should sway everyone's opinion of the movie to the negative by a wide margin. I feel like Episode 8 is Donald Trump, and people who like Episode 8 are Trump supporters who are just missing the huge list of horrifying things that Trump has done that should make everyone hate him. I'm super confused that anyone likes Episode 8, and that anyone isn't mad at Rian Johnson for the steaming pile of offensive rotting shit that he handed us. Yes... I'm equating all three things: Trump, Episode 8, and a steaming pile of offensive rotting shit.
And it hurts me a little that my friends who are also geeks and who I would have guessed would react like me defend the movie. It's... It's really just incredibly confusing and disappointing.
Back to Episode 7...
I guess my next approach is going to be to try to explain my expectations... born of great love for the original trilogy. And I'll have to back up to Episode 7 to explain where the expectations started falling apart.
When it was shared that we'd be getting the sequel episodes to the original trilogy, I was excited by the potential, but a little nervous because George Lucas had done so much damage of his own with the Special Editions and with the truly terrible prequels. But Disney was behind the reigns for this right? It was someone different that understood that you had to give the fans something they'd like if you want them to spend money on it.
And my hope for the new movie was that we'd get to see how the galaxy had been changing and what the people we care about had been up to. I wanted to find out that the New Republic was forming and that Luke had been running the New Jedi Academy. I was thinking about which things from the extended universe they might include in the new movie. Would Mara Jade be introduced? Would Thrawn have been a source of inspiration for a character that had spent the last 30 years building a fleet and army... finally ready to act against the New Republic?
I knew that the actors were a bit too old to be the center of attention of an action adventure movie, but it makes complete sense to me that you would use the familiar characters to introduce what's happening at the time of the movie. And you could even include the same basic new characters... but... I wanted to know what's been happening in the last few decades and I wanted to have a good believable story for what my favorite characters had been up to.
And while I like the new characters, and even some of the writing for Episode 7, it didn't deliver anything I was hoping for. What it gave us was a near carbon copy of Episode 4. I wrote a
long review about that too. But you can probably figure out my assertion about it being a copy of Episode 4. Starts on a desert planet where a Force sensitive young adult has been left behind. They meet someone that doesn't want to be involved, but is anyway. There's a droid carrying really important information that everyone wants. There's an inherited lightsaber. There's a really long list of details that are copies. In a 9 episode series, one of the episodes shouldn't be a copy of another one.
But the copied aspects that are part of my disappointment with Episode 7 are that
NOTHING HAS CHANGED (Episode 8 even makes a joke about how nothing has changed). The evil military organization is still the most powerful organization in the galaxy. The rebelling organization is still the small group that doesn't have enough resources to fight back directly. They're still on the run for some reason. Thirty freaking years. What was the point of
WINNING the war from the original trilogy?
So, what I hoped for was the re-introduction to the setting with the familiar characters that told the story of the Rise of the Thrawn or something like that. We start to see that outer rim new republic systems are being raided. Leia (still in government) sends a message to Luke to ask him to accompany the scout ships to get a better idea of what's happening. And yes, I realize it's also a copy of Episode 4 to have Leia ask the aging Jedi Master to help, but I'm going to add one more piece that's a copy...
He asks Ben Solo to accompany him because he's getting too old for this. And maybe Rey is Luke's daughter in this version, and he asks her to come along too... while asking Mara if she's okay keeping the academy going. We see on the trip that Ben and Rey are pretty competitive cousins, but while Rey is still friendly, Ben has that genuine need to be better... he wants to be more powerful.
Leia, Han, and Chewbacca are roped into the scout mission too. Leia is meant as a diplomatic representative to talk to the system governments about what the New Republic will do for them. Han and Chewy protect Leia but also might have contacts that could be useful sources of information. Luke and the young Jedi are there to provide any insights the Force can help with (Leia too... she should be a trained Jedi at this point).
Poe can be one of the scout pilots with his snazzy new model X-Wing that's black and might have some stealth capabilities. And in some battle happening near the end where the good guys find out the bad guys exist... they can still run into Finn and he can have his same basic back story.
In the Thrawn trilogy of books, Thrawn finds a sort of crazy Jedi Master that lives on some backwater world and who fell to the dark side... ruling a city around him using fear and his power with the Force. He convinces the crazy dark Jedi to work with him to take down the New Republic and in exchange, he offers the children of Leia as students to raise, mold, and train as he sees fit. Maybe we could see a similar relationship in Episode 7 for the remnants of the Empire to be lead by. Thrawn with his genius, and Snoke having gathered a few pupils to call the Knights of Ren. Thrawn keeps manipulating Snoke, by letting him believe he is in charge, and subtly guiding Snoke to good strategic decisions... using him until he doesn't need him. Snoke turns out to be a malformed clone of the Emperor that never got the complete memory transfer... so he's kind of unhinged, but still powerful.
In the climactic battle of Episode 7 we get some Knights of Ren fighting our Jedi (maybe Luke came up with a new name to go along with taking a path different from the Jedi... whatever). Ben Solo gets to see what emotion and rage can give for power as he fights the Knights of Ren. He may even give in a little and feel the ease of using anger in a fight. He gets a taste of the Dark Side of the Force and he likes it. This can be the set up for Ben betraying the good guys in Episode 8 or something.
I like this idea for Episode 7. And while some of the writing was good in what we got, and the actors did good jobs with the characters, and the new characters are interesting... the difference between what we got and what we could have had if a person who truly loved the setting had written the story is heart-breaking. We only get 9 episodes. Numbers 1 through 3 are already awful. And Episode 7 while not truly awful was just disappointing. We could have had something wonderful.
And then we got Episode 8...
Episode 8... the atomic bomb going off.
This episode is so offensive to me that as far as the movies go, I only accept the original trilogy... before the special editions. It completely destroyed any hope I had for Disney giving me something I would like. And it reveled in it. Rian Johnson is even quoted as saying he wanted to subvert expectations. And... maybe... maybe I could have accepted not getting a fun action adventure story in line with the original trilogy if the content was good on its own. But it's not. It's a strange patchwork of crap, on a framework of a slow space chase that limited everyone to the ships they were on for almost the whole movie.
I'm going to start with why this movie is crap given that Episode 7 happened the way it did (as opposed to my idea for the movie).
Episode 7 wasn't good, but it did set up some characters and possible story hooks that
COULD have turned into something interesting. I get that a
LOT of people are happy that Rey turned out to be unrelated to anyone and could be amazing without being a Skywalker. But... the numbered episodes started out as the story of Anakin Skywalker, and focused in part on his children: Luke and Leia Skywalker. The numbered episodes ARE THE STORY OF SKYWALKER. And the story hook of Rey's origin might have been predictable as a Skywalker... but... predictable isn't inherently bad. We know that the good guys are going to blow up the planet-destroying super-weapon at the end. But the battles provide big tension and are good for emotional engagement in the story. Being predictable doesn't make a story bad.
So, Episode 7 set up Rey's mysterious back story, and Episode 8 made a point of ignoring it. Either Episode 7 just got worse because it made a big deal out of it, or Episode 8 is shitty for letting us get interested in something and then letting it just sort of pitter out into nothing. Want to make a point that you don't have to be a Skywalker to be special? Fine. There's plenty of room for other characters that can even be Force sensitive and special... but the numbered movies are the story of Skywalker. That's the story I signed up for. Not some waste of time where the writers say, "look over here... this is interesting... oh... so interesting... wait... never mind."
Snoke and Knights of Ren are another example. Snoke is killed in Episode 8, but he was a window into the past that I wanted to know about. What happened in the last 30 years? Who is Snoke? Who are the Knights of Ren? Are they a new order of dark side Force users? How did they come about? What's their philosophy? Is Snoke just super pissed at Luke for ending the Emperor and Vader? Maybe Snoke was another apprentice because the Emperor was sensing that Vader was faltering? Who knows? From the movies we get nothing. And the movies should be able to stand together without extended universe stuff to explain it. The original trilogy managed it just fine. But Episodes 7 and 8 do not in my opinion.
And I haven't even gotten to most of the movie yet. I've just mentioned how Rian Johnson took the story and character hooks from episode 7 and threw them in the trash.
Episode 8 essentially starts with a crank phone call. Poe calls Hux and makes a crank phone call to stall for time. Do I need to say more about that one?
This leads to to Poe disobeying Leia when she wanted the group to flee... presumably at the point where they still could have escaped in time, and Poe decides to ignore her and kill off a good chunk of his friends to destroy one ship. This is super dumb. Leia should have recalled all the other ships and let Poe decide if he wanted to continue his attack alone or follow orders and survive.
Or... the writers made Leia super stupid. If the rebel ships couldn't get back to the ship in time for the fleet to flee, but they might have a shot at destroying it before they jump to hyperspace... then Poe was correct, and Leia's little lesson in leadership and the burden of risking people's lives is incorrect in that situation.
That opening battle was so dumb. If you can jump a big ship into hyperspace just ahead of a fleet of huge enemy ships and destroy all of them and yourself in the process. Why didn't they do that with a shuttle or something? One person dies (or one droid) instead of what? Forty people? And why isn't that technology developed into a missile? They've had hyperspace technology for THOUSANDS OF YEARS and the bizarre purple haired lady figures out it'll work and is the ONLY PERSON EVER TO DO THIS. I HATE that Rian Johnson fucked this part up so badly.
Anyway... even if you exclude the introduction of physics that break the setting for everything that has happened before, the battle at the beginning could have been a race to destroy the big guns on that big ship. A desperate battle just to hobble the attackers enough so you can escape. You can even have Poe make a bad decision that gets people killed, and have Leia chide him for it later.
Whatever.
Oh... and the bad guys are incredibly stupid. They get one BIG shot off at the base on the ground... that's been evacuated. They have life sign sensors. And they can see the ships that are about ready to flee. If it takes that long to cycle through shots from that big gun... why is the first shot at an empty base that might have useful information left behind? Why didn't they destroy the rebel threat they've been chasing for how long? Plot Armor? I understand that sometimes it has to be there... but this is just horrifyingly stupid.
Anyway...
The next step is the beginning of the worst backbone to a movie in any franchise I like. They add TWO more concepts to the setting that don't exist anywhere else to shoe-horn in a slow chase through space. The first concept they introduce is a new technology that can immediately where you went with a hyperspace jump. It was unnecessary, especially considering the story could have been much better without the stupid slow chase. But to make it even more tense they added the concept that the capital ships were low on fuel and could only make a couple more hyperspace jumps... which would be pointless because they can be tracked there.
Why is the rebellion the tiny band still and the empire is still easily in power? Why didn't the "Resistance" just jump to the New Republic military headquarters that has massive space stations and a fleet of combat ready capital ships? The bad guys know where they jumped to and if they follow, they're going to lose.
And in a setting where a flash light is large enough to hold a power source that can indefinitely power a lightsaber, and where a moon sized ship can fire a blast that destroys a world... how does a ship run out of fuel? What a stupid thing to introduce in order to achieve the goal of creating a stupid backbone to the movie that ends up limiting you so severely that the most climactic moment Carrie Fisher gets before she dies is that her character is blown into space and survives.
God I hate this movie so much.
So, now we' stuck on the ships and Princess Leia who should be a fully trained Jedi with her own lightsaber has a few scenes in a room on a ship, gets hurt, misses half the movie, and is painfully under used. Oh for no reason Ackbar dies in the stupid blown into space scene. At least I think that's Admiral Ackbar. Anyway... it's not just Leia. Everyone is just sitting on the ships while they plod through space trying to keep out of reach of the bad guys plodding through space.
And why did Kylo and his wingmen have to go back to that bad guy fleet? Because they couldn't be supported from that distance? Kylo was winning. He had destroyed the hangar bay with the only fighters. They were transport ships without much in the way of weapons. Kylo could have ended the movie and destroyed the resistance completely. Oh well.
Whatever.
Rian Johnson realizes that his slow chase scene is limiting him, so he gives Finn and Rose a shuttle to go off on a little adventure of their own while their friends are going to die. Wait... hyperdrive capable shuttle that the bad guys don't seem to care about, and we already know that the bad guys aren't bothering with life sensor usage... An idea is forming... how many people could they fit in that shuttle? How many shuttles do they have? Why don't those small shuttles at the end have hyperdrive? Even without hyperdrive, they were stealth shuttles or something? Or the empire is dumb enough to ignore sensors? Whatever... even if the ferrying with the small shuttle that's ignored would take days, couldn't the little shuttles flee and just hang out in space for a couple days while the shuttle goes back and forth to move people? Couldn't the shuttle fly some pilots to where there might be more shuttles and use those small shuttles to get people out of there? If their big hope at the end is a radio call to everyone hoping for help, couldn't they have sent the shuttle somewhere with a big radio and send the message from there much earlier in the chase before running out of fuel or landing on a planet? This movie is so incredibly stupid. No part of it makes any sense at all. Zero percent.
So, we get a stupid side story at a casino town where Rian Johnson makes a heavy handed point about industry not following morals. I'm sighing and pausing in my typing because I'm trying to figure out what to say about that side story. Here's a list...
- The side story is pointless for the movie
- The flimsy plan falls apart immediately and the improvising results in stupid failure that has us seeing BB-8 pilot an AT-ST
- There's a happy scene riding racing animals to freedom while trashing the town. I can't care less about that in my Star Wars Action Adventure Escapist story.
- There's the heavy handed philosophical point about the morality in business
- The side story wastes our precious movie time... we only get 9 movies and the prequels were already garbage... complete utter garbage and we get Rose Tyler smiling and happy while her friends might be dead because she's riding race horses to freedom. I hate this side story.
To top it off the good guys that went on that abysmal failure of a mission somehow make it to the resistance base before the first order gets there with their attack group, and luckily doesn't kill any of their friends as they crash through the closing door and we see people running for their lives. God I hate Rian Johnson.
Let's back up a little to another side story about Rey, Luke, and Kylo... and some unimportant guy named Snoke who is thrown away. The end of Episode 7 has Rey finding Luke and offering his lightsaber. This is one of the other story hooks that Episode 7 set up and that Rian Johnson decides to explode with dynamite and put in his own stupid idea. This could have turned into the explanation that Luke had come to this place because it was an old hideout Mara had used, and he hoped to find clues about where she might have taken their daughter to hide her from the Knights of Ren who attacked the Jedi Order and nearly wiped it out causing Mara to hide their daughter until the fighting was done but she never made it back. So, Luke had been gone for so long desperately searching for his daughter and chance (or the Force or whatever) brought them together.
Rian didn't like the idea of sticking with the theme and feel of Star Wars. He seemed to think it was up to him to change Star Wars fundamentally. He wanted to subvert expectations, so he decided the optimistic hero that redeemed one of the most evil men in the galaxy, would be so fearful and pessimistic that he'd consider killing his nephew while the nephew slept. Yeah... that works great in Star Wars! For those not picking up on the sarcasm in the writing, that last comment was sarcasm.
I hate the character assassination of Luke Skywalker. Hate it. There are lots of ways Kylo Ren could have turned to the Dark Side without destroying one of the characters I actually cared about. Rian Johnson figured it would be fun to have Luke be a bitter old man with a broken spirit. That's flat out wrong. I don't care if in the real world we all get disillusioned and jaded as we age. Star Wars isn't reality. It's an escape to lighthearted adventure that's specifically not the real world.
Luke Skywalker doesn't give up hope.
So, we have this stupid foundation for Rey not getting help from Luke and developing a friendship with Kylo Ren. The story device of telling part of a story; then another; and then the final real version was kind of neat. I liked that. But the story was the terrible stupidity around Luke not acting like Luke.
And then Luke dies at the end because he's tired from using the Force. Super dumb and pointless. I know that the old characters can't be the focus by the end, but there was zero benefit to Luke dying at the end.
Alternate 8
With the real version of episode 7, episode 8 (in my opinion) should have used the two big story hooks of Rey's mystery and the mystery of the dark Force users (Snoke and the Knights of Ren). Even if Rey wasn't Luke's daughter, Luke should have known who she was, and trained her. The Knights of Ren should have been a thing, and we should have learned a little more about what happened in the last thirty years that resulted in the lack of change in the galaxy (why is the empire effectively still in power? why is the rebellion still a thing?). Leia and Luke should have reunited and gotten at least one scene where they got to fight together against bad guys and Rey and Finn watch open mouthed at the lightsaber use and Force use... before they snap to it and start helping. And yes... the movie should end with the rebellion escaping... the bad guys need to be in the lead by the end of the middle of the trilogy... but it could have skipped making the escape the whole movie.
If my version of Episode 7 was what happened, we get to see the fall of Ben Solo and him becoming Kylo Ren. We get to see how the legacy of Vader influences Kylo.
And "what could have been" is a big part of why I hate Episode 8 so much. We got crap when we could have gotten wonder. And if Disney was insistent on giving Rian Johnson a Star Wars movie, it shouldn't have been a numbered episode because he broke what the numbered episodes were about.
Episode 9?
Episode 9 is coming out this weekend, and Disney and Ryan Johnson have killed my hope that they'll produce good Star Wars content. I have no hope that episode 9 will be good. I was going to skip it in theaters but my family is intent on going and guilted me into going. So, I guess Disney is getting more of my money.
