Last Jedi?!? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Wow! It was fun! It was exciting! It was everything Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets wasn’t!

This was easily one of the prettiest Star Wars movies ever. Maybe a bit too pretty; when we first saw Snokes’ throne room, I thought it looked like a dance stage, something from a ‘50’s film where we’d see a large, choreographed number. “Ah ha!” I thought. “We’ll be seeing a big lightsaber duel in this room.”

I was mostly right. Completely right for certain definitions of “lightsaber duel.”

Yeah, there will be spoilers below.

This film does have issues. It’s embarrassed by lots of things. It’s embarrassed to be an action-adventure movie and self-flagellates over the excesses of the genre. It’s embarrassed to be the movie following The Force Awakens, though I have to admit, the digs it takes at that film are some of my favorite moments.

The point is, it’s not the free-wheeling swashbuckler the original three were. A bit too much of Rogue One’s earnest war movie has rubbed off on it. Still, it’s not nearly as heavy as that one was, and our heroes get to be heroic and our villains get to be vile. It just has to make a big plot point out of the issue of all the people dying for the cause, where a New Hope deftly encompasses the issue with tension in the Rebel control room and a look of fear and shock and loss on Luke’s face when Biggs dies. I understand; there’s been a lot of big blockbuster action films with massive body counts. People die left and right in Valerian and hardly anyone seems to notice most of the time. And it does give Poe a nice arc from hero to officer. But Lucas did it far more gracefully in ’77.

Like Episode VII, VIII still feels stupidly small. In the original trilogy, the Empire was a freakin’ empire, with a military force capable of subduing a galaxy. Entire star systems slipped through Gran Mof Tarkin’s squeezing fingers. The battle of Hoth involved hundreds, if not thousands, of soldiers, pilots, support personnel, etc.

The First Order feels like its got maybe two dozen starships; the entirety of the Resistance fits in the Falcon at the end of the movie. Neither side has the industrial infrastructure to produce their own armaments and end up buying their weapons from the same dealers. (Kinda makes you wonder why the Order hasn’t just said, “Hey, you know, these tie fighters are totally naff. Let’s just buy a bunch of those totally boss x-wings and paint ‘em black and white.”) When the Resistance sends out its message asking for help and nobody responds, the truth becomes obvious: nobody else cares. The Resistance vs. the Order feels like a slap-fight between the last vestiges of two once-glorious powers now deep into their respective sunsets.

But let’s be honest: the action in this film is top notch. Not only is it obvious what is happening, it’s obvious why it’s happening. We can see the move and counter-move of both sides and we know why they’re doing what they’re doing. I’ll admit, I wasn’t always sure how they were doing what they were doing; the whole hyperspace tracking thing felt odd and full of Geordi-speak, but even worse was the Order targeting the cloaked Resistance shuttles. Maybe they explained how the thief guy learned that while I was in the bathroom? (Hey, it’s a 2.5 hour movie, cut me some slack!) And there’s waaaaaay too much characters not telling each other things for no good reason.

Beyond those little quibbles, we know why the fights take place and the strategies employed make sense. When Kylo turns on Snoke, when the Order brings a big gun to the planet to blast through the massive doors and the Resistance flies out on outdated gear to destroy it first, when Luke strides out to buy time for the escape, we know what’s at stake. Even when Poe launches an attack at the Order’s dreadnaught and then gets castigated by Lea for it, we understand why he did what he did and why Lea took issue with it.

And then there are the lightsaber duels. The one in Snoke’s throne room was lovely and fit in perfectly with the duels we’ve seen after the original trilogy: dance-like choreography and spectacle galore. But it’s the Kylo/Luke duel at the end which is the real thing, worthy of standing beside the lightsaber duels of the original trilogy. It’s not about killing but things far more important than mere life and death. It takes place on a plane elevated from all the military hardware and mere lightsaber technique. For that reason alone, I’m miffed that Luke is relegated to the role of Force ghost in IX. Yeah, ok, moping for however many years on his island is lame, but everything else about this Luke, from his frustration with Jedi tradition to his old-guy been-there-done-that attitude, to his disgust with fame, is awesome! I want more adventures of old-fart Luke and I’m really, really annoyed I’m not gonna get ‘em.

Luke vs. Kylo was not quite the Luke/Darth fights, but wow! The magic is back.

I can’t way to see episode IX!

Next time: Everything wrong with Vice-admiral Purple Hair, where everyone I didn’t piss off with this post gets to hate me. 😉

UPDATE: more thoughts on the teeny tiny stage this movie takes place on.