OVP: Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

Film: Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
Stars: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Laura Dern
Director: Rian Johnson
Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Score, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Visual Effects)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

In recent years, we have seen an influx in long-delayed sequels to movies.  Franchises such as Rocky, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones, and Blade Runner have emerged from a long dormancy, all the while coming back with an updated storyline and a continuation of a tale we know so well.  Perhaps no film series has done this in as big and splashy of a way as Star Wars, which this month brought its eighth (or ninth, depending on how we count Rogue One) entry into the series.  These sequels, though, have something very much in common: the intense need for nostalgia to sell their stories.  It is impossible to look at The Last Jedi separate from the nostalgia that it feeds from, but that's a problem for a franchise that is so central to American cinema in the new millennium.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film itself is largely known to most of us, not least of which because it's already made a fortune ($600 million at the global box office and counting), but also because it's very familiar to previous tales of the Star Wars saga.  The movie is the second chapter of a new trilogy, so it's going to be dark, and indeed, we see conflicts with our leading characters such as Rey (Ridley), Kylo Ren (Driver), and to a lesser extent Poe (Isaac).  All-the-while we see the expansion of the world that George Lucas created decades ago, alien planets and epic battle scenes, and the smaller moments like those between Luke and Leia, as Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher have returned for another entry in the series.

It is in this latter attribute that The Last Jedi gleans most of its power.  What made The Force Awakens so fun was not its plot or the updated effects, but the sheer movie magic of watching some of the most iconic characters of all-time be revisited decades after they were retired.  Harrison Ford as Han Solo boarding the Millennium Falcon literally made me clutch my fist in the air the first time I saw it.  I'm not even a Star Wars nerd, exactly (though I've gotten closer through the years, at least in terms of appreciating it for its place in movie lore), but there's a joy in watching Luke Skywalker clutch a blue lightsaber again or catching Carrie Fisher's trademark sardonic spunk infiltrate Princess Leia.  It's the same thing with catching a weathered Sylvester Stallone as Rocky one last time in Creed or Andy Serkis fighting with himself again in The Hobbit.  It's not the intensity of the original, but these are such storied part of our cinematic universe that watching someone try to recapture this magic gives me goosebumps.  The best moments of The Last Jedi rest with Hamill and Fisher, particularly a shared kiss on the forehead late in the film, as we understand that Luke Skywalker is soon for the ether, and tragically Fisher's work here is her final portrayal of the princess-turned-general.  It's in these moments that, in the same way a series finale gets the easy tears, you forget you're watching a movie and suddenly are a younger version of yourself, seeing your heroes battle once again onscreen.

The problem here isn't that these moments aren't effective, it's that they're perhaps the only truly effective things happening in The Last Jedi.  While some of the visuals are interesting (I adored the red sand battle, a spectacular visual), and I thought finally introducing sex into a galaxy far, far away (Kylo Ren wasn't shirtless for nothing here) was a nice touch, nothing in the movie comes close to being as special as Leia meeting Luke again, or really much of anything that the first two films in the original trilogy achieved.  It's hard to invest in characters who are so obviously carbon copies of the original characters.  Luke's a girl now, Leia's black and male, and Han's Latino, but well-intentioned diversity isn't going to change the fact that we've already watched this trilogy before, and the formula is so intensely similar between A New Hope/Empire and Force Awakens/Last Jedi that it's hard not to think of this more as a remake than a sequel.

And that's bad for the crown jewel of our franchise-heavy cinematic universe, particularly one so celebrated by Disney, because the characters are dying off a wee bit too quickly.  Though obviously fate played a cruel trick on Episode IX (it's obvious Fisher was going to be a centerpiece of the final film in this trilogy), with Hamill and Ford's characters both dead, the nostalgia will be in short supply in our next iteration.  Sure, we will see the robots and Chewbacca, but it's just not the same without Luke, Leia, or Han (if Disney knows what's good for them, they've already sent a blank check to Billy Dee Williams to reprise Lando in Episode IX).  And without that, we're going to have a problem as Rey, Poe, and Finn just aren't distinctive enough to root for without the help of the originals.  It's not a fault of the actors (there is no universe where Oscar Isaac isn't a better thespian than Mark Hamill), but the writing doesn't allow for us to know them, instead smartly focusing on the characters we already have a proven track record with.  This shouldn't affect my score of Episode VIII too much (it's getting three stars as its own entity), but when a movie basically ends on a cliffhanger (which this one does), what comes after should directly affect its score, and it's very hard to see the next movie getting past the gargantuan mountain of not having Han/Leia/Luke to fall back upon, and getting us to root for characters who are just too unknown for anyone to care about without tricking ourselves into accepting a facsimile.