Film
Director Rian Johnson reigns in the nostalgia for the original Star Wars films by easing out the old timers and allowing younger cast members to take centre stage
Alistair Harkness reviews Star Wars: The Last Jedi, plus an interview with Aaron Sorkin
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (12A)
Ferdinand (U)
It’s been 40 years since the original
Star Wars came out and caught a generation of fans in its allpowerful tractor beam. If you were a kid at the time, chances are you’ve stayed there willingly, enduring the dark days of the prequels and breathing a sigh of relief when 2015’s The Force Awakens made Star Wars fun again. That film, directed by JJ Abrams, was more of a remix than a reboot, a canny regurgitation of first film’s story with a new and welcome prominence for women and actors of colour in principal plot-driving roles. It may have fanned the flames of nostalgia, but in the midst of all the fan service it started reckoning with its past by subtly reducing R2-D2 and C-3PO to cameos, keeping Luke Skywalker off-screen until the final seconds and audaciously killing off Han Solo. It felt like an acknowledgment that those formative childhood memories of seeing Star Wars for the first time were no longer the exclusive preserve of Generation X or, if you will, Generation X-wing.
Two years on and that mantle has passed to writer/director Rian Johnson, whose last film Looper featured a dizzying time-travel plot in which its protagonist’s past and future selves battled each other for dominance in the present. Not to get too meta about it, but something similar is going on in Johnson’s approach to Star Wars: The Last
Jedi. Picking up where The Force
Awakens left off, the second film in the new trilogy functions in part like a wrecking ball. Hokey mythology is debunked, iconic artefacts are tossed glibly aside and extraneous characters reintroduced in The Force
Awakens are summarily dispatched with barely a cursory mention of their demise. There are some giddy red herrings too, with shots that feel like obvious set-ups for call-backs to
The Empire Strikes Back consigned to background texture and facetious humour undercutting the pomp of the evil First Order and the reverence for Luke Skywalker’s own exalted status.
The latter is certainly useful for addressing how to bring him back into the saga properly. Played once more by Mark Hamill, his greying, bearded, melancholic appearance at the end of The Force
Awakens suggested he’d become a mystical old hermit — like Obi-wan Kenobi without the gravitas of Alec Guinness. In truth he’s more like Yoda at his crankiest, a legend-scorning weirdo living in self-enforced exile on a barely habitable rock. Spending his days scowling, catching comicallysized fish and ruing his failed attempt to train his nephew Ben Solo in the ways of the Force, it’s small wonder he’s less-than-thrilled to see Daisy Ridley’s Rey, who has sought him out to help her understand the force that awakened within her in the previous instalment. Those fearing a remix of The Empire
Strikes Back won’t be dissuaded by this development, nor by way the film splits up the principal players and features an AT-AT attack on a salt-encrusted (but also snowcovered) rebel base. But Johnson keeps things fresh as well, drawing oddball connections and introducing a few more new characters to ensure you barely notice the casual way he’s surreptitiously sidelining old favourites like Chewbacca.
Chief among those new characters is Rose, a shy maintenance operative for the Resistance who gets a little star-struck when she meets rogue storm troop er-turned-resistance hero Finn (John Boyega). Rose’s introduction once again emphasises the way these films are subtly changing the make-up of the Star
Wars universe. Played by Vietnamese american actress Kelly Marie Tran, she’s the heart of the new film the way Boyega was in The Force Awakens and the pair of them are more interesting
to hang out with than some of the more established characters. Which isn’t to say Johnson hasn’t found a way to pay fitting tribute to the late Carrie Fisher. Her big moment in
The Last Jedi at first seems a little goofy, but it ends up being incredibly moving through the sheer force of Fisher’s star presence and the depth of feeling any self-respecting Star
Wars fan should have for Princess
Leia.
The spine of the film remains the connection between the light and dark side of the Force, respectively embodied here by Rey and the patricidal, newly battle-scarred Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). He’s repeatedly demeaned by his master, Supreme Leader Snoke, who scalds him for being beaten by a girl in his previous encounter with Rey and goes on to dismiss him as little more than a “child with a helmet”. It’s Kylo Ren who becomes obsessed with destroying the past because, as he says ominously at one point, “that’s the only way to become what you’re meant to be.” The film follows through on this extremist attitude with some unexpected plot twists, but sadly doesn’t go far enough. As talented as Johnson is, The Last Jedi suffers a little by reflecting the vision of another first generation fanboy filmmaker wrestling with what Star
Wars meant to him as a child. And yet Johnson does leave it at an intriguing place. A final series of images not only hints at the way a new generation will eventually make Star Wars its own, it finds a graceful way to give older fans permission to stop caring so much about it. After 40 years, I’m OK with the latter. For younger kids this Christmas,
Ferdinand is a so-so adaptation of
You barely notice the casual way he’s surreptitiously sidelining old favourites like Chewbacca
Munro Leaf and illustrator Robert Lawson’s classic picture book about a bull who’s scorned by his peers for preferring flowers to fighting. Previously the inspiration for an Oscar-winning animated Disney short back in 1939, the new version conforms more to the busy plotting of backers Blue Sky Studio’s Ice Age movies, with many more characters, myriad chase sequences and the inclusion of a comedy dance sequence to pad out the book’s slim plot. But the film’s be-true-to-yourself message remains as relevant as ever as sensitive Ferdinand (voiced by man-mountain wrestling star/actor John Cena) tries to avoid facing off against the world’s greatest matador while his fellow bulls compete desperately for the glory they wrongly believe will be conferred upon them by fighting.
As a calf, Ferdinand initially escapes his destiny by running away after his own father fails to return from the bullring one day. He ends up being adopted by a young girl and her loving father, who rather fortuitously runs a flower farm, enabling Ferdinand indulge his horticultural habits to his heart’s content. But when a growth spurt transforms him into 2,000 pounds of prime beef, he inadvertently starts wreaking havoc on the local village and soon winds up back at the old Casa Del Toro Ranch, where he’s once again eyed up for future competition. It’s not the soundest of stories but Kate Mckinnon is good fun as the wacky goat who takes Ferdinand under her wing and David Tennant adds some colour as a frustrated highland cow. The inevitable bull-in-a-china-shop gag isn’t completely groan-worthy either. Uninspired but inoffensive. ■