Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

No one, it seems, hates Star Wars as much as Star Wars fans. To be fair, we’ve been wronged by the franchise we profess to love – the much-maligned Prequel Trilogies are cumbersome and inelegant, and the less said about the “Holiday Special” the better – but I think by and large the fanbase has been spoiled by a profusion of content and thus has developed a very narrow view of what Star Wars ought to be. The Last Jedi, the eighth episode in a franchise that now also includes “Anthology Films,” flies in the face of that narrow vision of Star Wars and does something truly unique with the franchise while remaining (to borrow a phrase from its composer, John Williams) quintessentially Star Wars-ian.

(As ever, you can trust me to give you the spoiler-free treatment. Believe me when I tell you that the plot summary below is only half of the first act, but if you haven’t seen it and want to go in totally unspoiled, skip down to the last paragraph, and don’t listen to the soundtrack, because Williams is not shy about quoting identifiable cues.)

The Force having awakened in the previous film, The Last Jedi picks up moments later, as Rey (Daisy Ridley) encounters Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) in his self-imposed, grimly pessimistic exile. While Rey implores Luke to rejoin the galaxy and teach her the ways of the Force, Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) leads the Resistance in evacuating their D’Qar base; Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) butts heads with Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern); and defector Finn (John Boyega) joins up with mechanic Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) to seek out a way to keep the First Order off their tail. And speaking of the film’s villains, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is dispatched by the Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis) to snuff out the Resistance, the Jedi Order, and his own demons.

The Last Jedi covers a lot of ground, and it’s been rightly compared to The Empire Strikes Back for its divergent plot structure. Where The Force Awakens was relentlessly linear and unilaterally focused on a tight narrative, The Last Jedi sprawls out on this galactic tapestry and gives us no shortage of plots to follow. Like in Empire, the plots splinter off and converge in unexpected ways, and the audience is never quite sure what’s going to happen. I’ve seen a lot of outlets that report the film doesn’t “play it safe” and “takes risks” with the franchise – there is a moment, about halfway through the film, at which point I realized I had no idea what was going to happen because something I’d taken for granted had changed completely. After that, I found myself trying to keep up with the film as it heroically outpaced my expectations. As we galloped into the third act, I found myself quite literally gasping for air; I’d forgotten to breathe, and it took an unexpected shock to jar me back to life.

There’s not a bad performance in the bunch, and to say more might encroach on the territory of spoilers. Daisy Ridley gives a fantastically driven performance as a woman who is finally running toward her destiny, while Adam Driver is magnetic as he wrestles with the legacies he’s being forced to inherit. Far and away, the film belongs to Mark Hamill, who’s given a meaty character arc once Rey holds out that lightsaber on the island of Ahch-To, but Carrie Fisher gives a hell of a swan song as General Leia, who looms over the film like the regal war hero we know her to be. Then there’s the trio of new faces, of whom Kelly Marie Tran is the most engaging and likely a new fan favorite as she presents a giddy new look at what it means to be a hero of the Resistance from the vantage point of the mechanic Rose Tico; Laura Dern and Benicio del Toro turn in compelling performances, too, and all three of them are examples of what Star Wars has done best – introduce us to slices of a character’s life and invite us to study further into that galaxy far, far away. For The Last Jedi is, like all of the Star Wars universe, a story about the personal stakes of good and evil, about a series of individual choices that add up to galactic mythology because every life is precious, every moment sacred, every interaction blessed by significance because each life exists in its own expanded universe of stories. (Rose has her own tie-in book; Holdo appears in an earlier novel about Leia; and del Toro’s DJ has his own comic book coming soon – crass consumerism it may be, but sign me up for the lot of it.)

By way of critique, I’ll say that there are a few moments in the movie that don’t quite feel like Star Wars to me – new abilities we see on display, new technologies, even incidental characters who feel as if they’ve been imported from another franchise. Where some have taken this with resentment, #NotMyStarWars, I’m in the camp where those plot devices feel like fresh angles on a franchise that had already recapped its greatest hits with The Force Awakens and, to an extent, Rogue One. The tone of the film does, however, occasionally flirt with the line between deflating comedy and moments of high drama; where Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 tripped headlong over its own shoes into a pratfall in its best effort to prevent us from engaging with an emotion beyond laughter, The Last Jedi uses these moments to show us that a person is never only one thing. Someone mired in the deepest depression can find an opportunity for levity; life-or-death stakes end up blinking when they stare us down and we shrug our shoulders as if to say, “Do your worst.”

Surprisingly, I didn’t cry at this one. I still get a little choked up at the reunion of Han and Leia in The Force Awakens – kudos to John Williams, who did nonpareil work there and who continues to live up to his own legend. (Thank goodness, by the way, the “Canto Bight” theme is on the soundtrack!) I did, however, feel a swell of admiration at a film that managed to defy my expectations and yet make a perfect amount of sense. There may have been a few things I would have done ever so slightly differently, but of what movie isn’t that true? At film’s end, I felt thrilled, breathless, captivated. Though it’s the longest entry in the franchise, I could have easily done another hour. We’ve got two years until the as-yet-untitled Episode IX, but director Rian Johnson has given us a lot to pore over, and I can’t wait to see it again. Moreover, my excitement for the future of the franchise is stratospheric, because this all could have gone horribly wrong. The galaxy is in good hands, and there’s room for hope.

The Last Jedi is rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi action and violence.” Written and directed by Rian Johnson. Starring Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Gwendoline Christie, Kelly Marie Tran, Laura Dern, and Benicio del Toro.