Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

Man, now I'm really conflicted. I just saw it again after reading all the ancillary information surrounding the film. I recall feeling very similarly on my first viewing of ESB when they rereleased them to theaters in the late 90's. It was my first Star Wars experience. My parents never introduced them to me, so I came in in the middle of things, without the context of ANH. After I saw it, I walked out wondering what the righteous fuck was all the hype about that movie, which was supposed to be the best of them. Of course, this was the late 90's, when I was still a teenager, and shit like the Matrix and other epic films started coming out. ESB was just noise to me. Then I saw The Phantom Menace, and was further what the fucking the hype. So much that I didn't bother going to see the rerelease of RotJ, or Clone Wars, or RotS.

A few years passed, and then I came into possession of the Special Edition DVD set, with the unmodified originals included. I was determined to figure out the hype. I watched ANH, and even with its cheesy wolfman, I continued into ESB. Then it hit me. The story made sense. The conflict was layered. That's when I became a fan. Pretty much every line of ANH and ESB is memorable.

So I decided to give The Last Jedi another viewing. A lot of the shit I hated initially, kind of passed by rather quickly on the second round. The space whale milking, the green milk angry face, the casino scene, the purple haired lady, how the Luke/Kylo story was portrayed.

The Last Jedi is insanely somber. The jokes weren't funny the second time. Instead, it was mostly the punch in the gut of what destiny means. It has fuck all to do with lineage. Who are you without your parents? How can you be someone if you're literally no one? Shit, how can you leave your mark, even if you're royalty? Leia left paradise in pursuit of the Rebellion. Han was a scoundrel. Luke was a moisture farmer. Finn was a stormtrooper, Rey was a nobody, and Kylo comes from "royalty". They've just tossed the dice on the back stories.

Aldo, purple haired lady made a lot more sense the second time. She's her own form of royalty. Why would she give credence or two fucks what some random hot shot pilot is demanding of her? Fuck him, basically. He's important to us as a viewer, but to her, he's literally as she put it, "dangerous". He got the last of their force wiped out, just to take down a single ship, and caused a fuck ton more problems with his Finn/Rose plan that resulted in losing even more. That he even has the courage to keep moving forward after such levels of failure...

DJ, "don't join", is a true scoundrel. He's morally ambiguous, which is generally frowned upon, yet his Iron Man posturing about guys selling arms to both sides is prudent. He's the scorpion on the turtle's back. "It's in my nature."

It's a film of colossal fuck ups. On both sides. The cockiness, and assuredness of Finn, Poe, and even Kylo - all their actions caused loss. The captain saying the main ship was just a distraction, yet it ended up wiping out their fleet. "Don't get cocky, kid!" Even Yoda preaches on learning from failure. I may be misquoting his line, but he said something like, "They'll grow beyond us." Did they intend for this movie to feel like a failure? What kind of meta mind fuck is that.

And really, we're sort of meant to walk out asking, "Well, where do we go from now?" and that we don't really care kind of speaks to the helplessness that the movie left off on.

Don't get me wrong, I still rank this one only slightly above A Phantom Menace, but I was actually able to get a little something out of it. Even if it literally just pushed the goal post as far as the overall story is concerned. And not a single line of it is distinctly quotable. It was just another "episode", as it were.

By the way, I literally have a cardboard cut out of Vader with his arm reaching out and says, "No. *I* am your father." behind my living room couch. I'll post a pic when I get home. That my wife agreed to its placement is just another reason I married her.

Oblio said:

Your parents took you to see ESB without showing you ANH first? That sounds like child abuse, I am sorry bro, I am here if you need me.

Click to expand...

Nah, I went to watch it of my own accord, with a girl I was interested in at the time. My folks were preachy biblical folk, who wanted to spare my fragile mind from the villainy of mass media productions. The irony is my mother saw all of the original Star Wars on release... what the actual shit, bro-mom.

Now I can appreciate the juxtaposition of the Battlestar poster in conjunction with The Last Jedi.