Star Wars: The Last Jedi review - An intriguing return to a galaxy far, far away

Rian Johnson's intergalactic blockbuster is a flawed but enjoyable addition to the franchise
Matthew Norman16 January 2018

For a master of the Force (and apparently lone surviving repository of timeless Jedi wisdom), Luke Skywalker can’t half talk some cobblers.

“Let the past die. Kill it if you have to,” he advises unwilling protégé Rey in The Last Jedi. “That’s the only way to become what you’re meant to be.”

Isolation does weird things to the mind, even a mighty Jedi mind. Luke (Mark Hamill; intensely soulful) has lived in hermetic seclusion for yonks on a remote island with only some penguiny creatures, alien nuns and his own gloomy thoughts for company. So you’ll excuse the lurch into banal wishful thinking.

If Star Wars teaches anything, it is that the past cannot die, while becoming what you are meant to be is a matter not of will but of destiny. You can run to the furthest outreach of the universe, but you cannot hide from fate.

Luke couldn’t even hide from Rey (Daisy Ridley; more assured and commanding than in the previous film). She ended The Force Awakens by achieving what those on both dark and light sides – the First Order, successor to the Empire; and the Resistance led by General Leia Organa (the late Carrie Fisher) – were desperate to do.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi European premiere

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She found Luke, and to this reluctant warrior, and more reluctant legend, she handed his light sabre. Whether he will choose to return to the battle or sulk in his cave like an intergalactic Achilles is one of three internalised conflicts at the film’s heart. Rey, the abandoned child of scavengers with the mystical gifts, struggles to face her destiny. Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), son of Leia and Han Solo, and Luke’s nephew, is tormented by his journey to the Dark Side.

This trio and their interactions are the only elements that develop the story. All else is padding, though after a languid start, and despite the saggy middle, it is generally entertaining padding.

Director Rian Johnson pitches us into the midst of aerial battle scenes to lend vibrant intimacy to the wearily familiar. A scene in a casino in which rolling droid BB-8 is mistaken for a slot machine is one of several excellent gags, visual and verbal, that leaven the introspection. But Johnson wastes Finn (the former Storm Trooper played by John Boyega who was a revelation in The Force Awakens) by relegating him to an inflated cameo, and denies Fisher a glorious swansong by leaving Leia out of action for too long. The versatile Domhnall Gleeson finds nuggets of comedy in General Hux, Ren’s rival, and Andy Serkis nails the performance capture once again as Snoke, the First Order’s supreme leader who means to turn Ren into the new Vader.

Why a creature of such immense power hasn’t done something about his teeth, which make Albert Steptoe look like a Colgate model, is a minor mystery. The major ones concern the trinity of the tormented, beautifully played by Ridley, Hamill and particularly Driver, who finds the light and dark within what might have been a dull caricature of wickedness.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - In pictures

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Who were Rey’s parents, and how can she and Kylo Ren maintain crackling sexual tension by telepathy alone? If Luke honestly hates the idea of being the new Obi Wan, why doesn’t he ditch the trademark Kenobi cloak? Is he truly the last Jedi? And what exactly, once again, is the Force?

Good luck with finding any answers in two and a half hours of unevenly paced, sporadically exhilarating, rather Wagnerian space opera with a pair of thrilling twists and a powerful finish. If the injection of nuanced confliction was designed to reinvent the franchise, too many old bones are thrown to slavering fans (name one on spoiler grounds I may not) for that.

Besides, you cannot kill the past. What you can do is build on it to enable an intriguing future. At the very least, The Last Jedi does that.

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