The Last Jedi (2017) [Score-Only]

Anyone who has known me long enough has heard me say some version of the following: so much of what works in Star Wars is due to the music of John Williams. I said over and over when I reviewed the prequels four years ago that if anything in those films works, it’s because John Williams crafted scores that, quite frankly, the films neither deserved nor lived up to. I even claimed, “Put the dialogue on mute, and the score alone could carry the plot better than the acting.”

With the home video release of The Last Jedi, I finally have the opportunity to put my money where my mouth is, because the digital copy of the film includes a score-only version – that’s the visuals, the John Williams score, and nothing else; no sound effects, no dialogue, not even subtitles to walk you through the film. It’s just you and the maestro. I won’t say that it’s the definitive version of the film, and I won’t say that the score-only version will necessarily work for everyone; my sense is that it might work better with a few listens to the score under your belt, because it’ll be easier to notice how the score is playing off the visuals when you have a sense of where the score is going. But I will say that it’s a special treat to watch The Last Jedi with Williams alone in your ears, particularly for those who haven’t been impressed with the Sequel Trilogy’s score work thus far. John Williams is still doing grand work, if only we had ears to hear it.

(I’m going to loosen the spoiler reins a bit, and by dint of talking about the score I can’t help but spoil a few things, particularly character interactions. I’ll keep it to a minimum, but please do watch The Last Jedi; it rises in my estimations each time I see it.)

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.

Monday at the Movies - November 12, 2012

Welcome to Week Forty-One of “Monday at the Movies.”  
 
The Brothers Bloom (2008) – From Rian Johnson, the mind that brought you Looper?  There are connections, to be sure, but for the most part this feels like a completely different film.  To be honest, that difference isn’t always a positive thing for Brothers Bloom.  Unfortunately, this is one of those con-man movies that is too cute by half, trying to out-indie Wes Anderson by couching unsubtle foreshadowing within overbroad characterization.  Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo star as the eponymous brothers; the depressive Brody wants out of the life, even though Ruffalo’s cons are as intricate and successful as a Dostoevsky novel.  One last con, blah blah blah, Rachel Weisz as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl mark.  You can call this one from the concession stand; where Looper reinterpreted its own dialogue to add meaning to the twist ending, Brothers Bloom quotes itself at the ending as if to say, “What, you didn’t see this coming?”  In praise of the film, Ruffalo’s performance is quite good; from the man who’s done the best Bruce Banner in a decade, I wouldn’t expect less, but it’s a disappointment that the film focuses more on sad sack Brody than on his more compelling brother. As Penelope, Weisz straddles the line between ascetic shut-in and sexually precocious, but the two halves never coalesce into a realistic character worthy of the affection Brody displays for her; her American accent, though, is nonpareil (something we saw in The Bourne Legacy, as well), and there’s a fun turn by Rinko Kikuchi as the mostly-silent Bang Bang.  But The Brothers Bloom ultimately fails to enchant despite its enthusiastic attempts to do so.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Looper (2012)

I don’t want to say that the current interest in sci-fi cinema is due entirely to 2010’s Inception, but I do think that audiences are more open to high concepts thanks to Christopher Nolan’s dreamy mind-bender.  The latest such offering, Rian Johnson’s Looper, is an engaging examination of free will in a soup of time travel.

Set in the year 2044, Looper stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Joe, an assassin for the mob.  Known as a looper, Joe kills targets sent back in time from 2074, but when it’s his future self (Bruce Willis) staring down the barrel of his own gun Joe has to make a difficult choice.  Joe’s pursuit of Old Joe leads him to a farmer (Emily Blunt) and her son, who may or may not be the future’s most dangerous man – and Old Joe’s next target.

Looper is certainly one of the better post-Inception science-fiction films; it’s far and away better than the disappointing Justin Timberlake vehicle In Time, and it’s less gimmicky than the still-fantastic Chronicle.  It’s also more accessible than Inception, requiring fewer of the mental calisthenics that made the earlier film such a hit.  It’s a smart choice, though, allowing Johnson to focus on the story rather than the mechanics of time travel; films like 12 Monkeys (also starring Willis) got bogged down in what wasn’t possible and why, but Looper wisely allows the story to run unfettered.

Though liberated from wibbly-wobbly time travel technicalities, Looper has plenty of fun with its main “rule,” that anything that happens to the past self happens to the future self.  The special effects here are neat and fresh, playing with paradox without burdening the viewer with working it all out.  That’s not, however, to accuse the film of not being “smart enough.”  There are very clever moments that examine how choice affects the future, but it’s less challenging than Inception.

Aside from the high sci-fi, the film’s biggest attraction is the smart casting of JGL and Willis.  It’s an unlikely pairing, perhaps, one usually skirted in such films by double-casting the same actor, but it works here.  The make-up effects are uncanny, bulking up JGL’s jaw, but while Willis essentially plays himself one more time JGL does a lot of good work to imitate Willis and make the transition less jarring.  And it’s always a delight to see Emily Blunt in a major film; has she arrived yet, or do we have to wait for those Avengers 2 rumors to pan out?

And let’s not overlook what might be the best performance in the film – the young Pierce Gagnon as Cid, Old Joe’s target.  Without spoiling too much of the fun surrounding the character, Gagnon turns in one of the best child performances in recent memory, doing more to toe the line between menacing and adorable than most contemporary actors do at the top of their game.  If it’s a welcome surprise when Emily Blunt appears in the middle of the film, it gets even better when you see the chops on this kid.

Perhaps it’s a result of paying too close attention to a film that isn’t as confusing as you think, but Looper may feel a little long.  But at just under two hours, it may just be a matter of perspective.  Looper is smart and engaging, anchored by compelling performances.

Looper is rated R “for strong violence, language, some sexuality/nudity and drug content.”  The violence is quite bloody, as large guns are fired and people quite literally explode in bloody rain; characters use the F-word a fistful of times, and Joe is seen in bed with a topless stripper for one scene.  Drug content consists of futuristic eyedrop addiction.

Be sure to come back next week for a full week’s worth of Taken coverage – stay tuned!