The Last Jedi - spoilers and discussion?

[SouthWestmom]

If you've seen it, come here!

I m a bit sad about there being no more related characters. Dd thinks the kid at the end is a relative of Obi but I can't see how.

Loved the ending with Luke but I was surprised all the old guard have now gone.

Hated the hamster like creatures. It feels like R2D2 was 'cute' so they try to include 'cute' in the films.

Was obvious Kylo Ren and the killing of his enemy.

That explains why my immediate thought on seeing the porgs was "space puffins". They are in fact space puffins.

A time jump makes sense.

I've read the space-jump as being a. a manifestation of the Force working, in a different mode, in Leia - which chimes in with the whole theme of this being Star Wars in a more feminine/less patriarchal key and b. setting us up for the reveal of Luke's projection towards the end of the film. I think both of those make sense.

I think the casino story is really bold. A whole chunk of the film is given over to the failed, 'heroic' mission. And it fails big time. Ultimately, it leads to the decimation of the rebel force when their escape plan (the 'sheroic' plan) is revealed by the coder-trickster character). I've never seen that done in a mainstream film before. Remember: big, dumb films celebrate those masculine, lone hero doing something maverick, plans. You could imagine Bruce Willis heading off to the casino.

It's a huge part of the story, which is about a different way to fight - and it's closely related to the women of the story (the suicide mission of Finn being knocked off-course by Rose kind of encapsulates it in minuscule). And it chimes in with the whole theme about the what we learn from failure. Again, I thought that was really bold. Mainstream films don't, generally, talk about failure. Actually, mainstream culture rarely tells us about failure.

In fact, mainstream culture rarely tells us about the work of collaborative workers, of women's work, of non-heros. Especially not in the 'mythic' genre.

So I did rather love that. I thought it took the whole Star Wars trope of looking at an epic from the perspective of the very small a little further. And it also explored what a myth might look like if re-written taking into account some of the insights of ecriture feminine.

My absolute stand-out moment was the "teachings from the dark side", where she slips into the mirror passage. I thought that was amazing. I think the film there was exploring the whole "Become what you are" thing and doing something very, very interesting with the cinematic representation of time.

Instead of showing a mirror as reflecting what is, or has happened, it tried to show how humans can re-order the past, their past, utterly recreate it, as an aspect of taking control of what they are.

That's a really strange idea. I thought it was really interesting. DH pointed out that it was the sort of cinematic technique that reminded you of early experiments in film, when people were creating a lot of the cinematic tropes we take as givens these days, and exploring the sort of things cinema was visually capable of. It reminded both of us that you see that kind of experimentation quite rarely in mainstream film.

That's a really interesting interpretation, cat.
I had two thoughts on that scene.
Initially I thought it was an attempt to draw her to the dark side, to show one ones greatest desires and lure one on a path to darkness. So I wondered if Rey's greatest desire is to know who she really is and who her family/what her origins are, as it showed only her. Or secondly whether Rey truly has no desires (in a Buddhist way) and is therefore incorruptible.

My second theory was that this place was the dark side version of the treestump in Dagobah, and is the place where you face your darkest fears. For Rey, that is either not knowing who she truly is hence seeing herself, or alternatively she genuinely fears nothing, as fending for herself from age 6 has made her infinitely resourceful and strong.

I am not sure we will get a full explanation tbh. That scene for me was a little marred on first viewing by the screaming in my head saying "don't go down there, Rey, what are you doing??"

Hopefully a second viewing will prove more enlightening.

I love your interpretation of the failed mission thecatfromjapan and I think you're absolutely spot on.

The mirror passage mostly went over my head tbh. I didn't get that abstract a concept of the dark side.

I really like those interpretations. In the way of good art, I think they're all 'true' and thought-provoking. I really hadn't thought about the idea that it might be showing her as desire-less (in the Buddhist sense) - but I like that it might be embedded there, and where that thought leads.

Thank you for sharing that. It's really interesting.

I think the mirror in the dark side means that the dark side is all about the self. Selfishness.

Nobody else cares. That's why the Jedi have schools and train many Jedi, while the Dark Lords have only one master and one apprentice at one time. And the destiny of the Master is to be killed by the apprentice.
Kylo Ren gave up to the Dark Side because he killed Stoke to get power for himself. Darth Vader redeemed himself because he killed the Emperor to save someone else.

I was thinking about the characters. Rey's character background is most like Darth Vader's if we must accept that the 1,2 and 3 films weren't just George Lucas wanting to make money out of a vanity project. Yes, I utterly detest those films

In a sense, Luke and Ben had it fairly easy, brought up by loving families. Rey had it harder than Anakin Skywalker (until they took him away from his mother), no family to guide her and having to develop her own moral compass.

Her character seems much stronger than Luke's, when you first see Luke he's complaining about not being able to go play with his friends until his work is done.

Ooh, I like that Lweji

thecatfromjapan

Also fully agree with the failed mission story.

It's a good dicotomy between the selfishness and profiteering in the wider society vs the for the common good resistance fighting. What allows corrupt, dictatorial, regimes to be established and persist.
It's not all about the New Order vs the Resistance. Something else exists (the people becoming rich from the war, the common people, the vulnerable).

Ahh but kylo killed snoke to save Rey. Otherwise he wouldn't have - although he did seize his opportunity.

I did wonder why the red guard guys started fighting after snoke was dead! This is an issue for me in lots of stories though.

when you first see Luke he's complaining about not being able to go play with his friends until his work is done.

I felt that made him much more relatable. Every child and teen will have been in exactly that situation. It allows you to empathise with him even though his life is very different.

Which reminds me:

Am I the only one who saw an ‘animal rights’ motif?
Look how fucking weird it is to drink the milk of another animal.
Look at the reality of eating meat. It’s not just tasty food it’s a living animal that has died.
Look how animals are exploited for our entertainment.

but kylo killed snoke to save Rey

Did he?
We thought so, but in fact it was all about his rage and how Stokes had put him down. He wanted power to himself and Rey was something to add to it and lift his ego. Rey would become his apprentice.
He never cared about Rey's feelings or her side. It was all about him.

Hmm, maybe that was the point. I don't know, it made him seem a bit spoilt to me.

About the animals, yes! I was a bit squeamish about that scene and then I realised that there's really no difference between that and a cow..

Love this thread. So glad people are sharing their ideas.

The animal rights motif - I think you're right! I didn't notice it but now you draw my attention to it, yes!, I felt a real emotional response when Rose took the saddle from the animal, that I didn't really put into words, even in my head.

By the way, my son tells me that the last scene, with the boy and the broom, is also a reprise of a famous internet video - one of the first internet videos - which features a child with a broom. He showed me it. It was a real moment of my child teaching me about internet culture and the age of the internet. In return, I showed him the Kurosawa influences.

I also loved the contrast/similarities between the posh casino and the Mos Eisley Cantina.
Not that different. Same crooks. Just more polished this time.

Like a space Mar-a-Lago.

Just back from seeing it. I’m so disappointed, I could cry.

It really wasn’t great. So inauthentic, so contrived. It was if it was written and directed by a group of soulless faceless marketing men who had read the plot of the previous movies but never actually seen one, if that makes any sense.

And the Rose character is my new Jar Jar...she was so irritating I wanted to pull off my arm and hurl it at the screen .

@thecatfromjapan That's a fascinating interpretation, and one that makes a lot of sense, but brings me back to my comment earlier that a lot of it comes across as "written for TV" rather than "written for film". You have to take your viewers along with you. And I don't think that part of the film did. For it to have worked, you'd have needed the time and space (which a TV series does over several episodes) to flesh out more characters and point up the possible ambiguities of their actions.

So Holdo would need to be much more carefully drawn (several people have commented that on a casual viewing, it's almost like she's a cardboard cutout to get the Bechdel test pass points), so that we as viewers would be explicitly asking the questions "Is she a traitor? Is she a martinette who can't see further than blindly following the rule book? Is she doing anything deeper here?" That sense wasn't there. You could have filled in some extra scenes with Poe to give the viewer some independent sense of "He's a hot-head", rather than simply having Holdo say he was. (It's complicated to articulate this, but speaking as someone who dabbles a bit in writing fiction, new writers are always told "show, don't tell." But one of the ways of cheating your way round this is to put your authorial voice into the mouth of one of the characters, then say, hands in the air in all innocence, "But I didn't tell, I got one of my characters to observe how they read the situation." The trouble is, if you haven't got that character fully drawn out, and haven't made a case for why they'd put that interpretation on things, you're actually right back to "telling" albeit via a cardboard cut-out proxy for yourself as author - hence the problem with not having the time and space to fill in Holdo's character fully).

You could have filled in some extra scenes with Poe to give the viewer some independent sense of "He's a hot-head", rather than simply having Holdo say he was.

They did show. The first scene that ended up with Leia slapping him.

Hmm, I guess I found that slap-across-the-face scene just too contrived (and also weirdly sexist - generals do not slap captains, not if you want military discipline maintained; the scene turned a commanding-officer-to-subordinate exchange into some sort of parody battle of the sexes from the 1950s exchange). Back to the "pretending you're showing, when in fact you're telling" thing. It was like a neon glowing pointer of "here's what you're mean to think, audience!", rather than letting it grow organically out of observing Poe's actions and their consequences.

For those who hated it, you can sign this petition

Have Disney strike Star Wars Episode VIII from the official canon.

www.change.org/p/the-walt-disney-company-have-disney-strike-star-wars-episode-viii-from-the-official-canon

Personally, I didn't hate it, I enjoyed it as a Saturday afternoon popcorn movie (lots of big bangs and big set pieces). But I thought it was a flawed 3 out of 5 piece of film making, rather than a 4 or 5 (which is what the critics seem to have thought).

There's an interesting piece in today's Torygraph for anyone with a subscription, here.

It rather usefully makes the distinction between people who have considered opinions about why it didn't quite work for them considered as a piece of film-making, rather than those who hate it for reasons other than its quality as a film (usually the kind of Sick Puppies "we hate films/books with women and people from minorities in central roles" response). I presume that petition is aimed at the latter rather than the former. Whereas this thread I thought was doing rather well in discussing the views of people who variously loved/hated/quite liked but found it flawed in various ways.

This is what is getting on my nerves.
So many people are saying ‘oh you just didn’t like it because you don’t like seeing women or people of colour in lead roles.’ Nothing like that at all. I didn’t like it because I found that the script was poor, there was very little characterisations, there was next to no plot and there was too much fan service.
I can list a stack of reasons I didn’t like it and the sex or race of anyone in the cast is not there at all.

I loved the most recent Star Wars!! I thought Ryan Johnson did a great job of directing.

There's an immersive Star Wars pop-up in London until March:

www.culturewhisper.com/r/kids/immersive_star_wars_pop_up/10739

I loved it too. I liked the way it left spaces for interpretation. I think it was generous towards the intelligence of the audience, and permitted freedom. In a way, it creates the children with the eyes to watch it (which I think that last scene really conveyed), and it will give more as time goes on.

I really hate 'big' movies and the way they herd you towards one interpretation and one interpretation only, and signal everything Very Clearly In Advance.

I also loved its intertextuality and interweaving with stories that came after Star Wars, that were influenced by Star Wars, along with other films and stories in the same and adjacent genres. That reminded me a lot of Alistair Reynold's ideas about how narratives and news bend and interleave in a non-linear fashion in non-Newtonian space-time.