A THEATRICAL FORCE
The Last Jedi should please fans
When The Force awoke, two long years ago, pretty much the worst thing critics had to say was that it was a beat-for-beat retread of Star Wars, the 1977 original. And they’ll be saying it again of this one. The Last Jedi harks back strongly to The Empire Strikes Back; even the opening crawl, which has the rebels in retreat and the First Order on the march, feels very Empire in its design. Later, writer-director Rian Johnson (Looper) will mix in notes from Return of the Jedi, although the final movement will be far less certain.
But again, an abundance of nostalgia is about the worst thing you can say about Episode VIII. And a large part of the Gen-X fan base that embraced the original will say you can never have enough of that anyway.
So here we go again. The forces of goodness and decency are being driven from one planetary redoubt and are looking for another. In pursuit, a trio of baddies. In ascending order of rank we have General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson), whose command of English suggests he owns a special thesaurus with only the evil words; Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) finally convinced to ditch the faux-Vader helmet because he doesn’t actually need it to breathe; and Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis), who like the Emperor of old is content to lounge around, surrounded by red-velvet bodyguards, and cackle.
The good guys are led by General Leia Organa. She and Carrie Fisher have basically become one and the same, and every moment we see her on the screen is bittersweet, knowing that whatever befalls her in this movie, mortality has dictated she won’t be around for the next. As Yoda would say: Strong is she with the Force ... but not that strong.
Then there’s Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron, a cocky cockpit jockey whose loose interpretation of the chain of command has Leia uncertain whether to give him a medal or throw him in the brig. (She will basically try each of these at least once, with varying success.) In the opening battle, a real whiz-bang affair, he pulls his X-wing into a stall in what might be the geekiest/greatest bit of fighter flying in the franchise. Later, he’ll participate in an aerial battle that feels like a Second World War dogfight in which one side is flying First World War aircraft.
Leaving aside the technology brings us to Daisy Ridley as Rey, last seen confronting a wizened Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) on a remote island. The film catches up with them at the very same moment. Luke’s first line is — well, let’s just say actions speak louder than words. You’ll have to see the scene to know what I mean. Also, I can report that Chewbacca gets one of the film’s best lines — again, sort of.
Johnson has packed a remarkable amount of laugh-out-loud humour into the film’s franchisetopping 152 minutes. (Attack of the Clones was a mere 142 — it just seemed longer.) Much of this comes from the Porgs, memeworthy pudgy pigeons that Han Solo would never have allowed on the Millennium Falcon. I miss Han ...
Anyway, back to Rey. The young warrior holds her own opposite Luke, forcing the old man to become a reluctant guru as she struggles to figure out what this Force thing is and why it flows so strongly in her that she can basically use it to place long-distance collect calls to other Force-sensitives. Equally important, Ridley proves the equal of Hamill in grounding this fantastical world. She believes in his “hokey religion,” and through her, so do we.
This leaves John Boyega as Finn, the stormtrooper-turnedrebel. His character’s storyline is the flabbiest, as he joins forces with a technician named Rose (Kelly Marie Tran, a fantastic addition to the cast) on a mission-within-a-mission that will lead them to a casino planet (every Star Wars movie needs its exotic watering hole), involve a humanitarian sideline and eventually include treachery and counter-treachery. If The Last Jedi were to get a trim it would be in this plot line. That said, it does give rise to one of the film’s most
beautiful and resonant lines, when Rose tells Finn the secret to victory: “Don’t fight what you hate; save what you love.”
Star Wars has always excelled at that: combining cheesy techno-babble — “Horizontal boosters ... alluvial dampers ... hydro-spanners” — with ungrammatical, vaguely Buddhistsounding wisdom: “The greatest teacher, failure is.” The Last Jedi continues to balance the mixture perfectly, while increasing the stakes for both sides — we lose some memorable heroes and villains alike before this chapter is closed. If this instalment doesn’t quite deliver the same adrenalin rush as The Force Awakens, that may be because the human body can only take so much of that neurotransmitter at a time. Much as I love the Star Wars galaxy, I fear the day is fast approaching when we reach peak Force.
Recall that when the very first movie blasted into our analog pop cultural consciousness 40 years ago, it would be a full three years before the next hit, not counting the benighted Christmas Special. But in less time we’ve already seen The Force Awakens, Rogue One and The Last Jedi, with the Han Solo movie a mere six months away, a new trilogy from Johnson announced, and rumours of an Obi-Wan trilogy in the works.
But again, “too much of a good thing” is such a mild critique you could almost put it on the movie’s poster. The Last Jedi provides a resoundingly positive answer to an old smuggler’s longago query: “Let’s see what this piece of junk can do.”
Star Wars: The Last Jedi opens Friday, with select screenings on Thursday night.
Call it life imitating art. Or maybe art imitating life.
Whatever the case, actor John Boyega acknowledges there are some similarities between his career arc and that of the character he plays in the Star Wars franchise.
Finn, a former First Order stormtrooper who switched teams in 2015’s The Force Awakens to join the Resistance and battle evil, emerged as one of the heroes in the new generation of Star Wars lore. He played a key role in destroying the First Order’s Starkiller Base, even if he was severely wounded in the process by villain Kylo Ren (Adam Driver).
As Star Wars: The Last Jedi opens, Finn has recovered and is regarded as a hero in Resistance circles. This is certainly the view held by Rose, a young star-struck mechanic played by Kelly Marie Tran, who teams up with Finn for most of the film.
“People know who he is now and give him some form of respect and he’s just like ‘Oh cool, I like that,’ ” Boyega said. “So that’s something that is quite fun about it and something that kind of relates to real life in a sense. You know, you weren’t as well known before (The Force Awakens), now you’re known for (The Force Awakens) coming on to The Last Jedi. Everyone knows who you are. It’s the exact thing that’s happened with Finn. Now on the Resistance base, he’s a big deal.”
Finn was not Boyega’s first role, of course. In his native England, he first secured up-and-coming status after playing a young gang leader in the 2011 horror-comedy Attack the Block. He also had a recurring role as a U.S. drone pilot in 24: Live Another Day. But ever since Disney’s massive publicity machine kicked into gear to promote The Last Jedi earlier this year, Boyega’s star has been steadily on the rise, with media following his every move. He had made headlines after tweeting that he may miss the Dec. 9 Hollywood première of Star Wars due to an Atlanta snowstorm, which was quickly followed up by confirmations by numerous outlets that his flight did indeed make it to L.A. on time for the red carpet (even if his luggage didn’t). He received a good deal of attention in mid-November when, during a roundtable interview with the Hollywood Reporter, he revealed for the first time that Prince Harry and Prince William had cameos in The Last Jedi. Footage of him paying homage to Michael Jackson with some fancy footwork on the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, meanwhile, went viral in late November.
“I don’t really process it as an important thing in my head,” says Boyega, when asked how he is dealing with his rise to fame. “It’s just something that comes with the territory for me.”
“I dance a lot,” he adds. “I just like to have a little bit of a dance. I just do what I’d normally do.”
Speaking of choreography, the early trailers for The Last Jedi revealed that Finn will again be picking up a lightsaber, this time to battle his former stormtrooper commander Captain Phasma (Gwendoline Christie). Boyega says getting these iconic scenes into proper fighting form is no small task. They may start like a “slow dance” but quickly increase in intensity as the day progresses.
“Once we got that fight, it just became ferocious,” he says. “It was just back and forth. We did a day or two doing that fight. The cameraman could follow us on a steady and then it turned the camera having to go on a track because we were fighting so fast and there were explosions going off. It was an adrenalin rush.”
Boyega will be seen engaging in another epic battle as one of the heroes in Pacific Rim Uprising, which pits pilot-controlled giant robots against massive sea creatures. But Boyega says he is interested in playing as many different roles as possible in the future. Since The Force Awakens, he seems to have chosen his roles carefully, from the mysterious tech guru in the thriller The Circle to a conflicted and heroic security guard in Kathryn Bigelow’s harrowing Detroit. Both earned the actor rave reviews.
“I want to be in things that I like to watch,” he says. “I don’t like watching actors do the same thing in each project, you can lose a sense of motivation and drive and purpose for it all. To keep me on my toes and to keep me interested in all of this, I have to read a script that is different and collaborate with a director who knows what they’re doing.”
Star Wars: The Last Jedi opens on Friday, with select screenings on Thursday.
People know who he is now and give him some form of respect and he’s just like ‘Oh cool, I like that.’