The Last Jedi

I've seen a lot of reviews of this now.  Most of them will echo what I have to say (or more likely, vice versa, since I'm a little late to the party on Monday morning after the movie's been out for a few days.)  One curious one, here, tries to excuse the movie, at least a bit, by saying that it's not science fiction, but it is successful (in a way) at being 1) a heroic magical fantasy movie, and as a subset under that, 2) a Disney princess movie, and as a subset (or maybe superset thereof), 3) an advertisement to move tie-in merchandise.

That gets into the loaded question of "what does and doesn't qualify as science fiction?" which is too big of a question for me to really tackle here.  Suffice it for now to say that it meets that standards offered at Infogalactic: "Science fiction (often shortened to SF, sci-fi or scifi) is a genre of speculative fiction, typically dealing with imaginative concepts such as futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, faster than light travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life. Science fiction often explores the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations, and has been called a "literature of ideas." It usually avoids the supernatural, and unlike the related genre of fantasy, historically science-fiction stories were intended to have a grounding in science-based fact or theory at the time the story was created, but this connection is now limited to hard science fiction."  There's a case that can be made that if those are reduced to merely trappings and that they don't actually impact the development of the plot or aspects of the setting that can't be substituted with something that doesn't have a "sciencey" element, then it isn't science fiction.  I get where that's coming from, I suppose—although I dislike that kind of snobbishness, which plays directly into Campbell's nebbish attempt to feel superior by writing out mainstream science fiction.

Of course, now that I've argued that Star Wars is science fiction, by definition contrary to the claim above, I'll add that I'm not really interested in arguing that with anyone about the question.  Mostly because I see your point, and the notion that science fiction should be defined as fiction in which an element of science plays a crucial role in the development of the plot or the setting such that it couldn't be told by "converting" that into something else is one that I can at least understand.  Or at least fiction in which some kind of science features prominently,  And certainly, that is not true for Star Wars.  So, if you prefer a more restricted definition of science fiction and Star Wars doesn't fit in your definition, OK.  I'll attempt to discuss the latest Star Wars movie without making any reference to whether it is or isn't science fiction—in fact, I'll even try to discuss whether or not Star Wars works as a heroic fantasy space opera and within the context of the Star Wars milieu; because honestly, I think simply saying that The Last Jedi isn't science fiction (and therefore; what? We don't have any standards for it?) is a cop-out at best.  I also think that he's wrong to suggest that this movie succeeds on any of the three levels that he mentions except maybe the third.  And we'll see; I personally believe that its failure to capture the imagination of the audience means that it will fail to move merchandise all that well too.  Check out this analysis for more info.  It's long, but very salient.  But the question is interesting; does The Last Jedi work as some other kind of movie than maybe the fans were expecting?  Can it be "salvaged" as a good movie on at least some level if you consider it as something other than what it probably should have been?   

It's my contention that the only way in which The Last Jedi works as a good movie is if you align your expectations to consider it agitprop designed to poison and corrupt what Star Wars was and remake it as intersectional social justice propaganda.  It's quite good at that, although I think the market for that kind of movie is much less mainstream than what you'd expect for a Star Wars film.  It's also successful, or at least interesting, seen as a case study for some r-selected behavior, and how r-strategists would imagine in their heads swashbuckling heroic fantasy to work; given that heroism is inherently alien to their mindset.

Other than that, though... it fails almost everywhere.  It even fails as a sequel to The Force Awakens, much less as a chapter in the greater Star Wars saga.

This review will have spoilers.  A lot, actually.  So, if you don't want them, don't read below.  I'll insert an image juxtapositioning the critics vs the audience impression of the film to protect you from them if you want to bail now.

Final settlement of audience vs critics score

OK, so where does this movie fail?  

• Like The Force Awakens before it, it deliberately ruins well-loved characters from the past.  We already got to see Han Solo as a gimpy old man who failed at life somehow; divorced, living like a bachelor, deadbeat dad, Leia's reaction to him is more pity than love, etc.  What happened?  That is not Han Solo.  Well; in this movie, we get to do the same thing to Luke, except even worse.  Not only is Luke now a whiny, sad, completely anheroic loser who is so scarred by a setback, where he was also unable to even rise to a fraction of the heroism that he did in Empire or Return of the Jedi but it also creates a major plot hole.  If Abrams suggested that Luke left this map so he could be found in case he was needed, why do we find out now that Luke really just wanted to run away and die on a planet that is even less of the bright center of the galaxy than Tatooine was?  The old heroes cannot be heroes.  They have to be re-imagined as losers whose heroism in the original trilogy is invalidated, because it doesn't fit the tone or the themes that the new creators want to explore.
• Along those lines, none of the new characters get to be heroic either.  Poe and Finn continually try to be heroic, because they're kind of the closest thing to characters that remind you of the fan favorites of the past—and every time they do they have to fail, and they have to, in fact, be hammered down by totalitarian feminist bureaucrats with the concept of "running away to survive is heroic."  They literally say that.  And near the end of the movie, Poe accepts this finally as a kind of epiphany.  Now look; running away can be the right move if you're in an untenable situation, and you need a strategic retreat to regroup and try again.  But we're not talking about that; we're talking about the notion that even making a heroic sacrifice so that your friends and allies can get away is stupid and wrong.  Poe really wants to be Maverick from Top Gun but the movie really wants to tell the audience that that sucks, and that men can't be trusted, and they should shut up, sit down, and listen to their "wise Latina" betters.  Not that Laura Dern or Carrie Fisher are Latinas, but the "wise Latina" archetype, if such a thing can really be called an archetype rather than a joke, clearly applies to them (thanks to Richard Spencer and Hannibal Bateman for pointing out these specific comparisons.)
• Well, that's not necessarily true.  The incredibly unlikable 7-foot tall lavender-haired Laura Dern who is "admiral in an evening gown", after berating Poe and Finn for trying to be sacrificing heroes, ends up doing the same thing by making a kamikaze attack on the First Order fleet.  Jar Jar Chinks, the most annoying new character, stops Finn from blowing up the "battering ram cannon" and utters literally the stupidest line ever heard in a Star Wars movie (yes, it's worse than the sand flirting dialogue) and tells him, "I saved you.  That's how we're going to win.  Not fighting what we hate.  Saving what we love."  Wha...?!  So, you don't win wars by fighting the enemy?  Finn was willing to sacrifice himself to save the #Resist guys, but tubby Asian girl was willing to sacrifice the entire resistance movement to save Finn?  This is what Rian Johnson thinks is heroism?  By the way, this is Rian Johnson up there above; using the Heartiste axiom that "physiognomy is real," this tells you an awful lot about him.  
• Leia, who's supposedly the supreme leader of the #Resist movement does this too.  She's the worst leader I've ever seen, who has no plan, no clue, no nothing—but by deus ex machina she somehow ends up being right just because.  She also flies through space like Superman.  I'm not kidding here.  She does this.  Somehow, she's the only old character who survives, even though the actress hasn't, so I have no idea what we're supposed to do.
• Although not quite as clear as it was in Rogue One, isn't it curious that the creators are now openly and overtly making the case that non-state terrorists are the "good guys?"  In the original trilogy, the rebels were more like the American Revolution patriots (even if Lucas himself saw them as the Viet Cong, audiences clearly saw in them Revolutionary patriots) but now, they're very overtly the PLO and Che Guevara.  Including being openly anti-white, of course.
• Rey continues to be the worst Mary Sue ever; she can just do whatever just because.  Yoda even shows up as a plastic looking apparition to tell Luke that she don't need no Jedi training, or Jedi Holy Books, or anything at all that has to do with the Jedi to be a heroic force user who's better in every way than the Jedi ever were.  She's actually a little better as a character with a little bit of an arc this time around, but it's still absurd that with literally... what; two or three days worth of training, she's the equal of any force user we've ever seen?
• Speaking of which, Luke, after deciding that after his entire life's goal was to be a Jedi to just do away with the Jedi because this one kid went bad, turns out to be too much of a pussy to go through with it.  So plastic Yoda shows up and burns down the original temple and Holy texts for him, and then tells him that those scriptures were boring and sucked anyway.  What?!  Yoda destroys the Jedi order, and their history and heritage. Yeah, really. Leftists like Johnson are like ISIS except too cowardly to actually go around burning down real things, so they ingratiate themselves to some amenable authority and burn down things like the Star Wars franchise instead.  The projection here from the writer is hard to miss.
• The First Order can track the #Resist guys through hyperspace because they have what looks exactly like a flux capacitor on one of the ships.  I'm not even kidding. I think they may literally have recycled the same prop. This doesn't actually need to be shut down, as it happens, because "Admiral Gender Studies" as Hannibal Bateman calls her, blows it up in her kamikaze run, but in spite of that there's a a huge subplot where Finn and Jar Jar Chinks, who's played up like a love interest for him, although they have no chemistry and never even seem to like each other as friends much less in any other way.  No, rather the whole thing is merely an excuse for some gratuitous CGI and Phantom Menace style "jokes" and then it devolves into a lecture on white privilege in space. I've seen one reviewer call this whole sub-plot like a grafted The Fifth Element in the middle of a Star Wars movie. On top of this, there's some supposedly sympathetic little kids, but... they're not sympathetic.  So freakin' cheesy and gratuitous.
• Stuff dropped or wrapped up cheaply: 1) the Knights of Ren.  No explanation.  2) Who Snoke is.  He dies even more chumpy than Boba Fett, without any explanation of where he came from.  3) What the deal with Rey's parents is.  Apparently they're just space meth users (I actually didn't mind this too much, because the whole "everything is always about the Skywalkers" was stupid—but it's also stupid that Abrams set this up as a mystery, and there isn't actually an answer to it.) 4) Captain Phasma was supposed to be built up to be the new trilogy's Boba Fett, but she never did anything that wasn't major loser in the first movie, and here she has a single fight scene for a few minutes and then dies.  5) Benicio del Toro; what was that all about?  I mean, I guess he wasn't necessarily "set up" to be anything and then wasn't, but it's kinda weird, unless he just really wanted a cameo or something.

All that said; there are even more problems than just these.  It really is a pretty terrible movie, and what does it all mean?  As Brian Niemeier says in the comments of his post which I linked on Friday, the creators of Star Wars hate you if you are 1) white, 2) male, 3) a fan of the original Star Wars.  And they not only hate you, they want you and your family dead.

So, to tie this back to the beginning of the post: no, The Last Jedi really fails as a heroic fantasy.  It fails as a Disney princess movie (which, I'll point out, with the exception of Brave all have their romance as a key elements, although it was poorly done and tacked on in Frozen—The Last Jedi doesn't have that, because Rey has to be "I don't need no man" as a feminist icon.)  Will it succeed in moving plush toys of those weird furry bird thingies or salt crystal foxes?  I highly doubt that that'll end up being true either.

It fails as a Star Wars movie.  It fails as a heroic fantasy movie.  It fails as a Disney princess movie.  It fails as a sequel to The Force Awakens.  Why?  Because its creators are nihilists.  The closest thing to the true theme of the movie is actually said by Ben Solo at two points to Rey in an attempt to get her to join him: just let everything die.  Destroy the past and everything about it.  Build your own identity ex nihilo without any reference to where you came from.