The funny thing is, even though this is the only one that has piqued my interest since the originals, it also annoys me way more than any of the previous sequel/prequels, even the Lucas prequels. It has the longest run time of any Star Wars film and for me, definitely feels the most frustrating to get through, since there was the one aspect that engaged me, but the rest of it felt like total filler. The separate stories seem rather artificially connected and my god, the amount of pointless scenes that don't really lead anywhere. I grant you, Return of the Jedi's beginning doesn't really connect with the rest of the film in any way either, but in this one it takes up like half the movie. The whole "subversion for subversion's sake" made it hard for me to really care what happened in the story or with the characters and in the end, it didn't even go all the way with its subversion goal, thus ruining the only thing that did interest me. Also, not a single woman getting a character arc, while all the dudes got one (even if it is partly recycled from the previous outing), is something I've noticed in a lot of these films that claim to be "feminist" or "empowering to women". I can take one movie where the main character doesn't really change or learn anything, but when you have more than one in a series of films, it is unacceptable that the main player does not get a character arc and it is even more painful to me when that character is a woman.
What does make me kinda laugh, is the fact that exactly the part that some feminist critics denounced as toxic or problematic is the one thing I felt was genuine in the whole movie. That's right, the relationship between the hero and the villain was, for the 2/3rds of the film actually kind of intriguing. Knowing my fondness for fucked up things and relationships though, it shouldn't really be a surprise that I liked it. Mind you, I ain't talking about romance here. I am adamantly of the opinion that since Luke didn't need a love interest, why the hell would Rey need one? Feeling sympathy for an enemy who is not related to you is something I really haven't seen in any of the previous films, so it was at the very least a captivating thing to witness. Unfortunately for Rey, it was also the only thing that made her for the first time for me, a character. She has been dangerously thin on character since the first movie and this one only improved her a little, and only for 2/3rds of the film and really just when she was interacting with the villain. It is alarming to me that in the Last Jedi, the villain was truly the one character that elicited any sympathetic feelings from me. And not just sympathetic but relatable. I understand why he is the way he is and why he does horrible things. The point of no return for me was when Kylo tells Rey how Luke tried to kill him and Luke later confirms it. The fact that Kylo hadn't yet committed any sins apparently didn't matter. Plus you never see fucking anyone making amends to this guy. The context that the movie has given to Kylo Ren is that of an abused child, not a villain. No wonder Rey's connection to him is believable, since Rey is also an abandoned child. Preferring the villain is another trend I have noticed in many modern mainstream films or tv-series.
Many critics, especially many who identified as feminists, hailed the Force Awakens as a good film and Rey a great character. I liked her the 1st third of the movie, when we actually saw a little of her yearning for her family, her loneliness and her fear of the power inside her. And then bam! Suddenly she's invincible. Now I ain't gonna pretend that Luke was the greatest character in the originals. He wasn't. But he at the very least had to train to learn to use the Force and he fails at points and quite spectacularly so in the movies. That adds a little more personality to him. Though, if I did care enough about these new movies (which I don't), I would have been furious about the changes they made to the original characters. Especially Leia. Leia was always supposed to be a jedi (according to the originals and even according to the expanded universe) and learn the ways of the Force like Luke did. Instead they gave her an empty title and took away her power. Her anger seems to have evaporated as well. After all, Carrie Fisher herself said that making Leia angry was the only way she knew to make her strong. There is an angry woman living inside me too, so I understand that reasoning very well. Leia barely does anything in both of these new films, whereas Han and Luke get stuff to do and character arcs to boot. Though, Han and Luke weren't well treated either in these new ones (Han bailing the minute shit got hard and Luke planning cold-blooded murder of his sleeping nephew). But since Leia was one of the most pivotal characters of my childhood, it did pain me to see her get the Éowyn treatment. So, if I cared, yeah, I would probably hate the Force Awakens as much as I do the Two Towers film version.
But what really pisses me off is what they kept from the originals was the one thing I always held against them - not giving women character arcs. Your main character is supposedly a woman, so where the hell's her character arc? I also find it bizarre that although you can't call the originals feminist by any means from story perspective, Leia is a pretty decent feminist character. It has been hilarious though, to read some reviews that condemn The Last Jedi for "feminist propaganda" and on the other hand as "great feminist film", since my opinion is that past the surface the film is actually kind of sexist. As most people who know us, know that I was raised in quite a strict religion. The sexism that often took form there was benevolent sexism, ie. women are so much better than men, hence we can guard men's purity, inspire them to be better, be their moral guidance and just in general be perfect. And whaddya know, I find exactly these elements in the Last Jedi's female characters and its story. Women are the ones who are always right, know everything, are always justified in their behaviour and actions and learn nothing. It is actually baffling to me how this film can have so many women yet be so completely devoid of women's stories. All the stories in the movie are men's. Finn, Poe, Luke and Kylo are the ones with character arcs. They make mistakes, fail, change and learn something. Rey, Leia, Rose and Holdo have to content with being the moral centre for the men surrounding them. And they aren't really given space to develop their own character. Say what you will about Leia not having a character arc in the originals but at the very least she wasn't made to be the moral leader for the men. She did things according to her own judgement and followed her heart, just like the men around her did. And she had personality - she was serious, dutiful, witty, little sardonic and incredibly reserved. I cannot for the life of me list any defining personality traits of the women in the Last Jedi - all I can say is that they are powerful and morally quite absolute. So the women have power but no character while the men have both power and character. Where exactly is the feminism in this film?
What annoys me in this movie is that it could have actually been good. The conflict and connection that was created between the main hero and villain was quite engaging. Rey was actually challenged in her beliefs and the villain turned out to be not so black-and-white. That is, until the last 3rd, but I'll get to that. Rey showed some actual human emotion when she interacted with Kylo - she got angry, had doubts and felt despair. She felt sympathy towards the villain and optimistically believed Kylo would turn, much like Luke in the originals. Her yearning for her family and belonging returned from the first movie. So did her fear of her power. But then by the end, the fact that she failed to turn Kylo and finding out her parents abandoned her doesn't seem to affect her all that much. She's the same hero she was by the end of the Force Awakens, nothing changed. Kylo, I'm sure, was meant to be some whiny entitled man-baby, but as it is, he is literally the only character that in any way interested me in the film. He has some anarchist ideas with the whole "let's tear all the old things down and forget the past". Pretty much all the adults in his life either abandoned him, lied to him, manipulated him or worse, thought to kill him and completely lost any hope of his redemption. So it is no wonder that he doesn't trust any of them or their ideas. He had to train to learn to use the Force, whereas his counterpart Rey could use it without any training at all. The explanation we are given for this is that Rey and Kylo are ying/yang - type of balance in the Force. But if they are equal in power, then why the fuck did one of them have to train and the other didn't? Some internal logic would be nice here. God, I really hate putting women on these pedestals; watching this movie felt like I was back in my church. Lazy writing justifying why a character is so powerful makes the character boring (same problem plagues the prequels with the whole "prophecy" thing).
The story takes a complete nosedive in the 3rd act. The stuff between the hero and the villain has led to this ambiguity of light and dark side of the Force and realization that maybe the two sides need each other and do not necessarily have to be in conflict. Now that would have been something that I haven't seen in any Star Wars film, but for all the Last Jedi's subversiveness, in the end that is the one thing they didn't have the guts to subvert (granted, that whole 'the villain might have a point' is totally stolen from anime). By the 3rd act, the villain who they were making into a more of an anti-hero turns back into a cardboard evil guy and all the complexity they built collapses. It is amazing that the originals, which are very simplistic in the whole good and evil aspect, manage to be more subversive. All the old fogeys in the original trilogy turn out to be wrong, both the good guys and the bad. It is Vader who kills the Emperor, not Luke (who abandons violence as a way to win in the end). In the Last Jedi, it turns out that the old people are right - Luke and Leia are right in giving up on Kylo, Luke and Yoda are right in believing that Rey is the saviour of Resistance and Holdo is right in not telling Poe their plan. Rey also fails to get Kylo on her side, which proves Luke right. So basically the film implies to respect authority figures, 'cause they are in the right. That's a pretty conservative message considering that so many people on the internet lambasted the Last Jedi for being "liberal propaganda". Even the whole Finn and Rose segment that attempted to criticise the immoral third parties that only look for profit is something we've already seen. Jabba and his crew were, after all, gangsters who sold their goods to anyone who offered money. The whining about this film criticising capitalism is pretty ridiculous, though. There are other blockbuster films that have managed to criticise capitalism better. Aliens is one example - an evil corporation wants to get these creatures even if it means sacrificing all the humans on the planet, all to gain a profit. Ripley even comments to Burke that " I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage". And Aliens was made during the heyday of the Reagan/Thatcher - era. In Aliens though, the corporation is directly tied into the plot - all of the characters are going to the planet because of what the corporation started. In the Last Jedi, the whole casino sequence doesn't tie into the story, except as some overarching teaching about failure, I guess. Films that come from billion dollar corporations and criticise capitalism could be considered as some form of irony, though. Plus it is weird to see a Star Wars film making overt commentary to modern social and economic systems.
All in all, the film's visuals do look amazing and the one aspect between the hero and villain was interesting. I do not hate and despise this film like I do the prequels. But both the originals and the prequels did have something the Force Awakens and the Last Jedi do not - coherence. The originals were about Luke's journey to adulthood, becoming a Jedi master and saving his father. One could also argue they depict guerrilla warfare against a dictatorship. The first Star Wars could be retconned to fit the second's and the third's story line. The prequels are about Anakin's fall from grace and how a democracy turns into a dictatorship (viable ideas, horrible execution). Whose story do the Force Awakens and The Last Jedi tell? Rey's? But Rey is not the one with a character arc in these movies, so they don't tell her story. Han has the character arc in the Force Awakens - he confronts his son after running away from his responsibilities. In the Last Jedi, it's Finn, who basically repeats his character arc from the first movie and Poe, who is suddenly a dick (he was a decent guy in the first movie) who have character arcs here. Other two who have some kind of arcs are Kylo, who lets go of all his past but also regresses back into a villain, while Luke gets the redemption arc in this one. All dudes, who change and learn something. It would've been fairly effortless to write some growth for the women as well - for example, Rose could've learned that moral absolutism isn't necessarily always good, Holdo that sharing information could actually lessen the burden of being a leader and Rey could have carved her own path, realizing that both Kylo and Luke might be wrong and the two sides of the Force could work together. Isn't there some kind of middle ground between women being so goddamn perfect that they are practically devoid of personality and men being assholes in order for them to grow? Lastly, I think the Last Jedi tried to be too ambitious - it really wanted to be a movie in the A - class, not realizing that the originals have always been B-movies. Great B-movies, but B-movies nonetheless. Thus the fun, adventurous and even campy spirit of the originals is very much dampened in this film that takes itself a tad too seriously, even when it tries to jarringly stuff humour in places where it shouldn't (much like a Marvel superhero movie would). Rant over.
