4 / 10
Official trailer
Star Wars: The Last Jedi is the middle entry of the Disney-era sequel trilogy. Rian Johnson wrote and directed. Mark Hamill returns as Luke Skywalker, now an aged hermit on the island of Ahch-To. Daisy Ridley plays Rey, who has come to bring Luke back to the fight.
Adam Driver plays Kylo Ren. Carrie Fisher plays Leia Organa in her final completed film performance. John Boyega plays Finn. Oscar Isaac plays Poe Dameron. Laura Dern plays Vice Admiral Holdo.
Kelly Marie Tran plays Rose Tico, a Resistance maintenance worker introduced in this film. The plot follows the Resistance fleet’s escape from First Order pursuit while Rey trains with Luke on Ahch-To. Luke Skywalker as a punchline was a betrayal then and still is. The good parts only make the bad parts sting more. The 4 is for the craft, because Johnson can shoot action and the throne room proves it. Everything else is a film arguing with the people who bought the tickets.
The film made about one billion three hundred and thirty-three million dollars worldwide on a two hundred million dollar budget.
The commercial performance was strong but below expectations for a middle Star Wars film. The critical response was sharply divided. The audience response was the most negative in franchise history at the time. The 2019 sequel The Rise of Skywalker was visibly engineered to walk back this film’s choices. The Last Jedi remains the most polarizing Star Wars film thirty years after Phantom Menace.
What Made It a Woke Disaster
The film builds its story around the idea that the previous generation of heroes failed and must be discarded.
Luke Skywalker, the most beloved character in the franchise, comes back as a bitter old man who tried to murder his nephew in his sleep and then ran from the consequences. His first action on screen is to take the lightsaber Rey offers and toss it over his shoulder off a cliff. That shot is the film’s thesis, and it’s the moment I stopped liking the film.
Rey’s arc is the inverse. She arrives at Ahch-To already powerful, learns nothing significant from Luke, and ends the film as the franchise’s most capable Jedi without having earned any of it. The film’s argument is that her power requires no training, no lineage, and no traditional structure of mastery. The previous trilogy’s apprenticeship structure (Obi-Wan teaches Luke, Yoda teaches Luke, Luke earns the title) is rejected as patriarchal. Rey is powerful because she is, and the audience should accept this without explanation.
The Canto Bight sequence is the film’s most direct ideological lecture, and I’d cut every minute of it. Finn and Rose travel to a casino planet to find a codebreaker, and the film spends about twenty-five minutes on a sermon about war profiteers, animal cruelty and class.
Rose delivers a speech about how the wealthy patrons are the real enemy. The codebreaker mission fails, nothing the characters do there matters, and the plot sits parked while the film lectures.
The Holdo subplot is the film’s clearest gender-politics statement. The film repeatedly humiliates Poe Dameron, the trilogy’s most charismatic male lead, for being a man with initiative. Holdo refuses to share her plan with him because his masculinity is the problem. The film’s argument is that Poe’s instinct to act is dangerous and that Holdo’s superior judgment must override it. Poe ends the film having learned to stand down and defer. The Holdo plot exists to teach Poe (and the audience) that male agency in leadership is itself a problem.
For Writers
A sequel that wants to teach its protagonist a political lesson has to show what the lesson costs. The Last Jedi’s Poe arc teaches him to defer without showing his initiative producing actual disasters. The audience reads the lesson as imposed instead of paid for. The lesson is that character arcs require the character’s choices to produce the consequences they then learn from. Lecturing the protagonist into compliance isn’t the same thing as the protagonist growing.
The Contempt for the Audience
Specific staged moments express the film’s contempt for its own fans.
Luke milks an alien creature directly into his mouth, a scene engineered to disgust returning audiences. Luke tosses the lightsaber over his shoulder without ceremony, the franchise’s central object treated as a joke. The porgs keep turning up as if the film knows they’re cynical marketing. The Yoda cameo has Yoda burning the Jedi sacred texts and laughing. Every time, the message says attachment to franchise history is the problem, and that attitude does more damage than any single bad scene.
The “let the past die, kill it if you have to” line spoken by Kylo Ren is the film’s most-quoted moment.
Rian Johnson has stated in interviews that this is also the film’s argument. The film is making the case that Star Wars must destroy what it was to become something new. The audience that came to Star Wars because of what it was received this argument with predictable hostility. The film treated their attachment as a failure of imagination.
For Writers
A franchise is a contract with the audience. The audience comes to franchise work because they want the franchise’s familiar feel. A creator who decides the franchise needs to be destroyed has chosen a position that puts the work in opposition to its audience. The lesson is that working in established properties carries an obligation to the property’s existing identity. Innovate within the contract. Subverting the contract entirely is a different kind of work than continuing the franchise. Pick which one you’re doing.
The Rose Tico Problem
Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose Tico is introduced as the audience’s moral conscience. Her function in the script is to deliver lectures about the right way to think about war, animals, wealth, and love. Her romantic arc with Finn is the franchise’s first explicitly Asian-American romantic lead. The character was a marketing centerpiece. The audience response to the character was largely negative. The negative response was real, and some of it was racist harassment. Most of it was about the character.
The film’s defenders have argued that the response to Rose was entirely racist and sexist.
The simpler reading is that the character was written as a lecture-delivery mechanism instead of as a person. Rose’s most-criticized line, delivered after kissing Finn, is “we’re going to win this war not by fighting what we hate, but saving what we love.” The line is corporate-poster philosophy in a war film, delivered by a character whose action moments before was to ram Finn’s speeder so he couldn’t complete his suicide mission.
The criticism was that the line was sanctimonious, that Rose’s action made no military sense, and that the kiss had no setup. None of those criticisms require racism to make.
My problem with Rose is on the page. Tran does what she can with a character built to hand out slogans, and I’d have liked to meet the maintenance worker before the script turned her into a mouthpiece.
For Writers
A character whose primary function is to deliver the writer’s politics rarely survives audience contact. The audience reads function from the page. If a character exists to lecture, the audience experiences the character as a lecture. The lesson is that diverse casting works when the diverse characters are written as full people. Diverse casting fails when the diverse characters exist to show the writer’s commitment to diversity. Write the person first. Identity is detail.
Craft Note
The throne room fight is the film’s strongest sequence and one of the better lightsaber set pieces in the franchise. The choreography stages Rey and Kylo as competing agendas instead of as coordinated partners. They’re fighting the same enemies but for different reasons. The audience reads the alliance as temporary. Rian Johnson is a capable director of action geography when the script gives him a clean dramatic problem. The film’s larger structural choices undercut what the throne room earned.
The sequence is what The Last Jedi could have been if the script had trusted action and character over thesis statements.
Should you skip Star Wars: The Last Jedi?
It’s a 4, and the throne room fight, where Johnson shows he can stage action, is most of the reason it isn’t lower. The Holdo subplot, the Canto Bight detour and what the film does to Luke are the choices that sink it for me, and I resent them because this cast deserved better. The Rise of Skywalker exists because Disney decided this one broke too much. Watch it to see why the sequel trilogy ended where it did, and put Empire Strikes Back or any of the originals ahead of it.
