Come and feel the Force of a genuinely startling blockbuster
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
12A cert, 152 min ★★★★★
‘We are what they grow beyond,” one old-timer observes to another in Star Wars: The Last
Jedi, as they watch a symbol of their shared past go up in smoke. The twosome – one of whom is a grizzled Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) – are reflecting on the new generation of rebels fighting their age-old cause in ways they could have never expected. Watching the torch being carried forward is “the true burden of all masters”, Luke’s companion continues – and if George Lucas were ever to watch the latest entry in the cinema-changing series he created, the line might strike a plaintive chord.
Rian Johnson’s film certainly feels like Star Wars: it even has a supporting cast made up of British character actors and gorgeously Cg-augmented rubber creatures, including porgs, a kind of hyper-marketable cross between a puffin and a young Justin Bieber. But it’s not a Star Wars you’re entirely sure Lucas would or could have ever made himself.
Rather than playing the hits, as JJ Abrams’s franchise-reviving The Force
Awakens did two Christmases ago, it flexes its fingers before riffing over old chord progressions in ways that will leave fans beaming with surprise.
Johnson, the director of the winding neo-noirs Looper and Brick, doesn’t share Abrams’s heart-on-sleeve delight in homage and pastiche – and
Star Wars’ biggest open secret is that it has always been homage and pastiche, even the original ones.
The way this film uses Luke is entirely different from Abrams’s nostalgic deployment of Harrison Ford’s Han Solo in The Force Awakens, for instance; while it’s an unbridled joy to see Hamill return to his defining role, the character is now a surly hermit, scarred by secrets.
But Johnson does seem to share Abrams’s view of that famous galaxy far, far away as a vast and marvellous mechanism, whose movements are so ingenious that it’s enormous fun just watching its parts tick intricately from one configuration to the next. In doing so, The
Last Jedi mounts some genuinely startling narrative twists and feints, while charting an onward course for the franchise that has you itching to discover what comes next. That’s smart business practice, but it’s also exemplary blockbuster filmmaking.
But how much of the premise to share without risking death threats? It feels safe enough to say that things pick up almost exactly where The Force Awakens ended, and the film assumes you’re already revving your engine at the starting line, and will have no problem keeping up.
The brave orphan Rey (Daisy Ridley) has tracked Luke to his island hideaway, lightsabre in hand, with questions about his fallen apprentice Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and her own mysterious past.
The half-monstrous, half-elegant, all-scary Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis) is still bent on wiping out General Leia (a suitably stately final turn from Carrie Fisher) and her dogged Resistance, whose numbers have never been at a more precarious ebb. Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern), Leia’s steely deputy, has a cloak-anddagger plan to turn the tide of struggle.
But ace pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) covertly launches a flashier counter-initiative, dispatching ex-stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega) and Rose (Kelly Marie Tran), a plucky security guard, to the casino resort of Canto Bight where lurks a sneak-thief who can slip a raiding party on board the First Order’s flagship. Those two prongs might sound like callbacks to The Empire Strikes Back, but this is Johnson’s film, and he takes pains to warn you otherwise: even after Rey pitches her comeback plan to Luke, he gruffly cautions: “This is not going to go the way you think.”
Guess what? It really doesn’t. Alpha-swashbuckler antics that would have paid off in the Seventies and Eighties just don’t find purchase. As signalled by the arrival of Rose and Holdo centre-stage alongside Rey and Leia, they’ve been superseded by a more feminine style of heroism based on strategy, endurance, lateral thought and lightning judgment. Johnson’s screenplay staves off pomp by undercutting itself at every opportunity, joking about laser swords and levitating rocks. It’s less Star Wars as you’ve never seen it than Star Wars as you’ve never felt it.