Lifted from the archives, January 5, 2018. Re-posted Monday night, December 23, 2019.

Rey (Daisy Ridley) on her quest as the Romantic but not epic hero of the less than great but still fun second installment of the Star Wars sequels, The Last Jedi.
[My Star Wars Sequels reblogging marathon continues with my second post on “The Last Jedi”.]
That The Last Jedi was not a great movie or even all that good a Star Wars movie was not the first thought I had when the final credits started to roll. My first thought was, Wow! That was fun! My second thought was, But not as much fun as I expected…
I had a great time at The Last Jedi but, like I said, it’s not a great movie. There are plot holes you can fly the Millennium Falcon through and as many of them as Yavin has moons. It’s long. Over-long. Reportedly writer-director Rian Johnson wanted to make it longer and has lot of leftover footage for when his director’s cut comes to Blu-ray, but based on what he left in, it’s hard to imagine what of interest he might have left out. There are long stretches of nothing happening, filmed and acted as if this nothing that’s happening is as critical as Luke turning off his computer or as chilling and tension-filled as Han’s being frozen in carbonite and the gang escaping from Cloud City or as packed with swashbuckling action and adventure as the fight aboard Jabba’s sail barge. There are other scenes in which nothing happens that are filmed and acted as if nothing’s happening. When things are happening, to get them happening or keep them happening, smart characters have multiple attacks of the stupids. And, most disappointing, The Last Jedi does nothing to move the story of the sequels along, because, adding to the disappointment, it reveals that the sequels don’t actually have a story.
Not one worth it taking three movies to tell.
Check that.
It’s worth a trilogy but after two movies the sequels haven’t gotten down to the business of even beginning to tell it. The Last Jedi alludes to it, as if it’s being told in another set of movies that’s being released in alteration with the sequels, and we’ve already seen Episode VIIB and Episode VIIIC, with the two series intersecting and wrapping up together in Episode VIX. Would that it were so. That other series is telling the same story as The Lord of the Rings.
The age of magic and miracles is passing.
The prequels told the story of Anakin Skywalker’s fall from grace and with it the corruption of the entire galaxy. They didn’t tell it well. But that didn’t change the fact that the story itself is profound, epic, and tragic.
The original trilogy told the story of the return to grace in the person of Luke. It’s profound, epic, and comedic in the classical sense---order is restored, harmony reigns, and the good people live happily ever after.
In both trilogies, the fate of the world is tied up in the fate of the hero.
The sequels are not looking tragic or comedic. So far they’ve been routinely Romantic. And not epic. And not profound.
The fate of the world is not tied up in the fate of a hero.
Rey, whom I adore the way I adore d’Artagnan, Robin Hood, Jim Hawkins, Bilbo Baggins, and all the Knights of the Round Table, is, as I’ve written before, Percival, the natural innocent who becomes Arthur’s second greatest knight, but she’s to the Star Wars saga what Percival is to the Arthurian legends---not Lancelot. That is, she may be the one of the greatest knights but she’s not the greatest hero. A true epic hero needs an opponent or a challenge worthy of her.
Snoke is no Palpatine, Kylo Ren is definitely, emphatically no Anakin, and without a Palpatine or a Vader, Rey can be no Luke nor is she really in danger of becoming another Anakin. The Force Awakens is Rey’s origin story. She’s tested but not challenged in the way we would expect her to be challenged as the next step in her hero’s journey. This parallels what Luke goes through in A New Hope. He’s tested but his challenge isn’t given to him until The Empire Strikes Back and the moment when during his training he confronts “Darth Vader” and in lifting the mask confronts himself. In A New Hope, Vader is formidable but as far as we know he’s just the Black Knight. Now it’s revealed he’s somebody far more dangerous. He’s not simply a powerful villain who could kill Luke in a lightsaber duel or a dogfight. He’s a threat to Luke’s very soul. Luke doesn’t know it yet---neither are we supposed to---but he’s being told that Vader is his father and his challenge is to redeem the world by redeeming Anakin while resisting temptation and not falling from grace himself. The temptation, though, will come from Palpatine, working through Vader, and so Palpatine---Darth Sidious---is Luke’s real opponent, far more powerful, sinister, evil, and persuasive than Vader.
At the end of The Force Awakens, Rey, having passed her test, is given not a challenge but a quest.
It’s relatively straight-forward. She’s to find Luke, heal his psychic wound, and convince him to come home with her to save the galaxy. Along the way, she’s to receive the training from him she needs to master her skills so she can defeat Kylo Ren the next time they meet. If the parallels to Luke’s quest to find Yoda were to continue, she would be given the challenge that would make or break her as an epic hero. Things don’t quite work out as she hopes or we might expect.
Luke, unlike Yoda, hasn’t been waiting for the New Hope to come find him. He left the map, in case the day came when he was needed, but he’s been growing increasingly afraid that that day would come. And he’s convinced himself that if that day comes he’s the last person anyone should come to for help. He’s adamant that he won’t go home with Rey---which is to say, he refuses to let her heal him---and the little training he begrudges her is actually training in why she shouldn’t want to be a Jedi.
The challenge she’s given she gives to herself. Sensing that the Resistance isn’t up to the job of resisting let alone defeating the First Order and that she’s going to need help if she’s going to do the job herself, she decides to redeem Kylo Ren and convince him to help save the galaxy. Kylo Ren isn’t in the same league as Vader as a villain, but it may be that’s because he’s meant to be a hero. After all, look at his mother, father, and uncle. Look at what his grandfather was before his fall from grace. This doesn’t quite work out as she hoped either.
Ironically, in trying to make him a hero, she seems to be turning him into a stronger villain. Also a more compelling character.
This is interesting and potentially exciting---it depends on how it plays out in Episode IX---but it takes up about 40 minutes of The Last Jedi. The other two hours of The Last Jedi is mainly an extended chase scene---with a side trip to a truly fascinating and fun corner of the galaxy where it appears James Bondian adventures in space take place but which we don’t see taking place in The Last Jedi. It turns out that this is another stretch of nothing happening to move the story along except for introducing a fascinating and fun character who, it turns out, is instrumental in creating another stretch of nothing happening---the chase ending at the Battle of Helm’s Deep, with AT-AT Walkers instead of orcs and no Rohirrim on the horizon.
The lightsaber duel between Gandalf and the Necromancer’s Apprentice is pretty intense, though.
But here’s the thing.
Rey plays almost no role in the last half hour of the movie. She’s just the cavalry.
Now, consider this.
Although she provides much needed help, at the end of The Force Awakens she isn’t responsible for blowing up that movie’s version of the Death Star. She’s busy with her own personal problems. And in The Last Jedi, it’s her personal problems that have kept her away from the main action for almost the entire movie. Frankly, I’m more interested in her personal problems because I’m more interested in her and her story. I don’t care about a reiteration of the war story that provides the background to Luke’s story in the original trilogy. And if Episode IX doesn’t do what no third episode of a movie trilogy has ever done, be the best movie in the trilogy while at the same time tying up all the loose ends and closing the major plot holes and bringing the main characters’ stories to satisfying conclusions, that’s all the sequels will turn out to have been, which, as I’ve said, isn’t much of a story.
It should be all Rey’s story. That’s what The Force Awakens seemed to promise they’d be. But Rey’s story is like Percival’s, a Romance not an epic. And it’s a side story. Percival’s story is a Grail quest that takes him away from Camelot so he’s not there for the breaking of the Round Table. (Although the best King Arthur movie, John Boorman’s Excalibur, changes that, Percival is still only the sixth lead if not a supporting character.) And it would have been fine with me if the makers of the sequels---J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson at the fore---had contented themselves with telling that story. But then it wouldn’t have been what most fans expected.
What I really would have liked to see, was Rey’s story being part of that other, imaginary trilogy, in which she and Kylo Ren would both have been irrelevant to the saving of the galaxy at the end. The two of them would have been the last Jedi because the galaxy would have no need or place epic heroes and villains with magic powers anymore. The age of miracles would have passed, and the fate of the galaxy was in the hands of mere mortals who did good or evil on their own, without the influence of devils and the intercession of angels.
Like I said, that’s what The Lord of the Rings is about.
This is a theme that’s raised in The Last Jedi but it’s not the story or, to put it another way, The Last Jedi isn’t integral to that story.
Ok, that’s what didn’t like. The forthcoming posts are going to be about what I did like, which adds up to a lot.
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