Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Premise: Rey, Poe, and Finn must come together to find the evil Emperor and stop his “Final Order” plan to take over the galaxy.
About: It’s finally here! After many many months, the much talked about “final Star Wars film” has hit theaters. Already, there are mumblings of “failure.” The movie made 175 million this weekend, which is 25 million less than predictions. Last Jedi made 220 million its first weekend. Force Awakens made 247 million. It will likely be the nail in the coffin for Kennedy, who never really understood the franchise, resulting in numerous missteps. But none of that has anything to do with whether the movie is actually good. Is it? Let’s find out!
Writer: Chris Terrio/JJ Abrams (George Lucas)
Details: 2 and a half hours long
Duh duhhhhhhh duh duh duh DA da. Duh duh duh DA DA duhh duhh duhh duhhhhhh!
SPOILERS DROID: “BEE-BEEEP BOOOOP SPOILERS BELOW, I HAVE SPOKEN”
I’m hopped up on Sudafed, Advil, and Vitamin C so WATCH OUT! You’re about to get a review for the ages.
I’m going to get right into it.
I LOVED THIS MOVIE. Absolutely positively loved every second of it. There is literally nothing I disliked.
And let me take a quick detour because there’s something going on on the internet that’s infuriating me. Tons of Youtubers realized that they got 10x as many views as they’d ever had on any video when they trashed The Last Jedi. It’s not hard to figure out how those same people are going to approach their reviews for this movie. “Money or truth? I’m going with money, buster!” This is why you see so many Star Wars reviews on Youtube that say, “WORST MOVIE EVER!” and “A CATASTROPHE!”
I have no issues with people who disliked this movie. But if you’re going to try and convince me it’s the worst movie ever or “a catastrophe,” I’m going to tell you you’re a straight up liar. This movie was one of the most entertaining movies ever made. And there’s no way you didn’t have at least a little bit of fun watching it.
My viewing experience started off confusing because I’d heard all these reviews saying that the first 45 minutes were awful and confusing. The first 45 minutes were great (LIGHT SPEED SKIPPING!) I kept waiting for them to get bad and waiting for them to get bad and they never did. A lot of people were confused by the multiple McGuffins, Sith planet finders and daggers – but all of that made perfect sense to me. It’s a hidden planet so they’re going to have to go on a galaxy-wide hunt to find it. Duh.
From there, it only got better. And it started with Rey and Kylo. I was lukewarm on Rey in Force Awakens. I straight up despised her in Last Jedi. But here, she’s awesome. There’s so much conflict within her in every frame. She really earned the title of strongest Jedi in the galaxy through this movie.
And Kylo, who’s always been a great character, was at his best here. I loved how JJ and Terrio advanced the “Force Skype” power so that objects could travel between them. I thought that was well set up and it was also well paid off. And I loved the chemistry between the two. I’ve been a little weirded out over the Reylo fan fiction stuff online but by the end of this movie, I was rooting for it. And I was one of the people clapping when they kissed.
Now when it comes to “the group” (Rey, Finn, and Poe) and how a lot of people turned on Rian Johnson for splitting them up, I was never in that camp. In the second movie, you have to split everybody up so that the audience wants to see them back together again. Could Johnson have done it like Empire and had them together at the start and also at the end? Sure. But then you risk looking like you copied Empire. So that didn’t bother me. What bothered me was that Finn’s mission was dumb and Poe’s was lame.
However, now that I see how much chemistry these three actors have with each other, I agree with everyone else. You needed to put these three together in as much of the trilogy as possible. They’re the reason this movie was so fun. Their dialogue was funny. Their action scenes were great. They’re people you want to be around ,you want to be friends with. I think writers forget that simple tip. Give us characters we’d want to be friends with in movies like this.
Yet another accomplishment is that I’ve never seen a movie this long that plays this fast. We are SCREAAAAMING through this plot. Someone said online that the movie takes place over 16 hours of time? That was another strong choice by JJ. He knew he was in a desperate situation coming off the plot mess that was Last Jedi. So he went back to one of oldest screenwriting tricks in the book – KEEP IT MOVING. Make sure characters always want something whenever we come into a scene with them. Make sure they want that something NOW. Not at some later date. If you’re cutting between 3-4 storylines with that kind of pace, your movie is going to move.
A lot of people are upset about the fan service. Not me. I loved every single fan service moment. I liked Harrison Ford showing up. No idea that would happen! I liked the callback of Kylo saying he needed to do something but didn’t know if he could do it then throwing his lightsaber away (he needed a new one anyway – that one was too cumbersome), I LOVED Luke catching Rey’s lightsaber and telling her to hold onto it. The highest profile “FU” from one director to another we’ll ever see. I loved that Luke was happy again! That we finished Luke’s character on a happy note. I loved that he levitated the X-Wing like Yoda did. Awesome.
And I loved the new stuff too!
BABU FRIK!!!
My biggest laugh in the theaters this year was C-3P0 saying, “Hello, my name is C-3PO, human cyborg,” and Babu Frik’s nearly throwaway line, “Hello, I am Babu Frik.”
I loved D-O. Wish there was more of him. Zori Bliss didn’t get enough time but her and Poe had great chemistry together. You know something is working when a character gets three minutes of screen time mid-movie and then comes back in the end, has an interaction with another character 40 feet away with no dialogue, and it gets a big laugh (Poe motioning if there’s any chance for that kiss – her shaking her head, nope!) .
I want the Adventures of Baby Yoda, Babu Frik, and D-O on Disney Plus. Robert Iger, are you listening???
The Emperor.
A lot of people have a problem with The Emperor in this movie. If you have a problem with The Emperor, blame Rian Johnson. He’s the one who killed off the big baddie and left JJ with nothing. So he did the only thing he could do. He brought back the biggest bad guy of them all. This is also the genius of JJ. Six months ago, we thought we were watching the first trailer for Rise of Skywalker at D23. Wrong. JJ had one objective and one objective only with that trailer: GET PEOPLE USED TO THE IDEA THAT THE EMPEROR IS BACK. If he would’ve sprung that on us in the movie itself, it wouldn’t have worked. We heard a million times over that the Emperor was coming back so it didn’t take long to get used it. I bought it right away. That’s part of Star Wars’s secret weapon – the opening crawl. You can throw something in there (“THE EMPEROR IS BACK!”) so that we can get into the story right away.
I LOVED THE JEDI HUNTER WHO WAS AFTER LUKE! I want to see a whole movie about him.
I LOVED THE KNIGHTS OF REN!!!
I loved the cheesy line when they pass the stormtroopers. “Knights of Ren. Cool.” That’s what Star Wars was missing in Last Jedi – Star Wars humor. Cheesy but fun dialogue. There were so many spot-on Star Wars humor jokes. Like Poe hopping in between Rey and Finn, “When do you want to talk about it? When Poe isn’t around?” Nobody called the First Order up and pretended to have a bad phone connection and then made ‘your mom’ jokes in this movie. This movie, more than ever, highlighted why Rian Johnson was so bad for Star Wars.
General Hux! I loved that JJ gave him a big moment cause he’s another character who got screwed in Last Jedi. He became so unimportant that JJ had to introduce a new ranking character above him to be scared of! So I love that Hux was the spy.
The Snoke reveal was a little weird. But it kind of made sense to me. The Emperor is extremely manipulative. He is the ultimate puppet master. He’s creating things to pull Kylo’s strings. Do I think JJ planned for Snoke to be the Emperor’s clone all along? No. But JJ and Terrio did the best they could with what they were given. And that’s another thing I loved about this movie. JJ addressed everything. He made sure that Star Wars fans felt heard. That’s something the previous director had no interest in which is why so many people dislike his Star Wars vision.
I actually think this movie could’ve been EVEN BETTER if they weren’t hampered by the late Carrie Fischer footage. They really had to stretch all believability to get any sort of cohesive storyline out of that. The fact that they made it work is another feather in JJ’s and Terrio’s caps. They were burdened with such a difficult task and they somehow, some way, pulled it off.
There was only one missed opportunity and that’s when Rey was down in the Emperor’s room and she heard all the whispers of Jedis from the past. They should’ve put all the force ghosts in there. Not just one or two. But 30. 50. I heard they were thinking of doing this but scrapped it and I suspect that they wanted this to be about Rey overcoming this moment and not Rey plus 50 other people. That’s an old screenwriting trick. If it’s possible to have your hero save the day, have your hero save the day. The only time you want multiple people helping your hero in the climax is if that’s part of the theme. For example, wasn’t the theme “friendship” or “togetherness” in Guardians of the Galaxy? So there, it made sense that they all came together to defeat the bad guy.
Someone on the internet said it best. This is the Star Warsiest Star Wars movie ever made. If you love Star Wars, you will love this movie. It’s so darn fun and it makes you feel so darn good. I left this movie on a high unlike any movie this year. I’m not going to go so far as to say it’s the best movie of the year. That’s Parasite for me. But it’s up there. This is the epitome of how to make a crowd-pleasing blockbuster.
Babu Frik!
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If characters work well together – if they have good chemistry on the page – that’s a rare thing and therefore something you want to take advantage of. Even if you have characters that you didn’t initially create a bunch of scenes for, once you identify that their scenes sparkle, write more scenes for them. That’s what I learned here in regards to Rey, Poe, and Finn.
