The Thrill, Though It's Long Gone, Is Still Interesting To Think About

     When I was a kid, Star Wars was a big fucking deal.  At thirteen I was the right age for exposure to the first film, then called just Star Wars, years before anyone besides George Lucas knew there might be sequels, or, for God's sake, prequels.  In July 1977, when I saw the film in Seattle, I couldn't get enough of it.  Back then, before Internet, nobody had a clue as to what that movie was like--one had to see it.  Battles in space, funny robots that could do interesting and particularized tasks, unknown actors and actresses, along with at least two familiar faces (Peter Cushing and Alec Guinness), laser pistols, swords in the form of light sabers, and a cool villain in black with a deep voice and an ability to squeeze the air out of victims' throats using the specially developed powers of his mind.  Holy shit, it was cool!

     There was the Death Star, a space station the size of a small moon, equipped with a planet-destroying weapon, an alliance of rebels fighting the empire wielding the Death Star, some goofy dialogue written for the twelve to fourteen audience, apparently, but also moments of great dramatic power accompanied by stirring music by a composer, John Williams, as prolific a movie content provider as Irving Berlin.

     I saw Star Wars in the theater six times, haven't seen it in its original form since 1978.  In the 1990s, Lucas re-released the film, along with its two sequels, The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi, to make more piles of money and to prepare young audiences for the upcoming long-awaited fourth film in the series, Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace.

     Episode I?  Well, it turns out that Star Wars from 1977 is actually Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope.  The Phantom Menace, released in 1999, takes place several decades before Episode IV.  Lucas in the 1990s, excited by the progress of computer generated imagery, added to his first three (that is, Episodes IV, V, and VI) movies some CGI.  I saw a few minutes of what he did to the film I knew as Star Wars.  Seeing Han Solo walking side by side with a CGI Jabba the Hutt looked jarring to me, as if Lucas was inexpertly trying his hand at an unsettling new form of collage; an experiment he should've kept to himself.

     Menace proved to be an embarrassment.  Later, finding out that my then eight year old nephew loved that movie and continued to regard it with admiration for many years, I reevaluated it with a subsequent viewing on a library DVD.  I wasn't as bothered by it the second time, found it entertaining in spots, but Lucas's choice of examining the early life of Darth Vader, super villain of the first trilogy, by going all the way back to when he was about ten years old--thus, cute--struck me as a drastic mistake.  He compounded his error with the next two movies, Star Wars Episode II Attack of the Clones and Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith.  In both films, Anakin (the later Darth Vader) is a young man of about twenty-one; a conflicted, wishy-washy non-entity, falling in love with a princess, struggling always to contain anger issues that are never satisfactorily explained, except for his violent reaction to his mother's murder--he massacres the raiders who do the crime.  Supposedly, this is his turn to the Dark Side of the Force, but it seems hardly enough of a goad.

     I never could buy into Anakin's motivations, or put him side by side with who he's supposed to become, the terrifying Sith Lord Darth Vader of the earlier (later?) films.  Anakin in these two films is played by Hayden Christensen, a wiry young guy with a hard to believe glowering look on his face most of the time.  He lacks charisma in the role.  I suspect that had he been better directed by Lucas, he might have turned in a performance at least one cut above ho-hum.  Other usually good actors, like Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor (astonishing in Trainspotting) and Natalie Portman, come across as dullards mouthing lifeless and even absurd dialogue, all of them surrounded by CGI most of the time.  Clearly, CGI was Lucas's key interest in this second trilogy.  Consequently, the films suck.

     Years passed.  Star Wars Episode VII The Force Awakens (2015) can properly be called the first sequel to the initial trilogy.  Han Solo, Princess Leia, and Luke Skywalker show up, but the main focus is on a young woman endowed with special gifts, Rey (Daisy Ridley) and a dour young man, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) who serves the First Order, a horrible new government running things in the post-Empire galaxy.  I liked this film mostly, if I remember rightly, it kept me awake.  Ridley is a good actress--mostly it was her performance that held my interest. 

     Nearly three years passed before I saw Star Wars Episode VIII The Last Jedi, the focus (hard for the reader to believe by this point) of this review.  I bothered to offer some of my thoughts on the Star Wars phenomenon because they illuminate, perhaps, how I felt about this particular film.  It came out a year ago, but I finally watched it on Netflix.  No doubt, the big screen experience would've felt more impressive, but the most powerful visual moments (one involving a collision between two spaceships, one large, the other humongous, the most impressive) came through to me on my modest HD widescreen TV.  

     At two and a half hours, the film's length plays against its effectiveness.  I wasn't tired, but my attention did wander several times in the middle section.  Most of the film is about a rebel fleet (commanded by Leia--Carrie Fisher in her last role--and then by her first officer, played by Laura Dern, with purple hair that looks so off I couldn't take her seriously as an authority figure) trying to get away from the First Order fleet commanded by the Supreme Leader himself.  The Supreme Leader is a CGI baddie missing part of his left cheek.  Why he doesn't get plastic surgery is never explained.  He's just an evil, disgusting thing sitting on a throne in a red room with stadium-high ceilings, accompanied by tall and beefy guards dressed all in red.  The Supreme Leader's abilities with telekinesis are quite pronounced.  He levitates Rey at one point, even does a Three Stooges maneuver on her by making her deactivated light saber fly in a wide circle to hit her on the back of the head.

     That's a thought.  A Star Wars movie featuring a triad of evil Sith Stooges, Darth Moe, Darth Larry, and Darth Curly, all of them able to tap into the Dark Side of the Force.  Getting them to not abuse each other would be the Supreme Leader's biggest challenge.  After Darth Curly dies of a Force-induced heart attack, he's replaced by Darth Shemp.

     It's a family story, The Last Jedi.  Kylo Ren is Ben Solo, son of Han Solo and Leia, thus, Darth Vader's grandson and Luke's nephew.  Luke tried to train Ben, but the lad went to the Dark Side for some reason.  My glibness on this matter stems from my not knowing key aspects of the plot.  He went dark, suffice it to say, just like Anakin goes Dark with little explained motivation.  Luke, as he trains Rey, fears she too may go Dark (again, I have no idea why this might happen).  

     Rey has a telepathic connection with Ben/Kylo Ren.  Ben seems salvageable as a human being, but he's also a power-mad maniac.  In one funny scene in The Force Awakens, Kylo Ren engages in a destroy-this-room rampage using his light saber.  Ever since Orson Welles did it, convincingly, in Citizen Kane, other filmmakers have thought it would be a good idea to have a character go apeshit on their own stuff.  It's a hard scene to pull off, but I'm sure Darth Curly would be great at it.

     A lot happens in The Last Jedi, but the plodding central theme of that rebel fleet struggling to make it to their next base kept pulling me back to a static situation I didn't care about.  

     Laura Dern is wrong for this film.  Meryl Streep also would've been terrible.  The role doesn't require excellent acting.  Picture Gwyneth Paltrow as a battleship captain and you get the idea of Laura Dern as a space admiral.  Add the purple hair and Laura Dern's genteel way of talking and the result is parody.  Oh, they meant well, sure.  Someone thought Laura Dern was the right actress, rather than Kristanna Loken (the menace in Terminator 3) or even Mariska Hargitay, who can hold her own convincingly as a tough broad.  How the casting director or Rian Johnson or whoever fucked up on casting this role is incomprehensible, barring further information as to their motives.  

     For me, the film is a mixed bag of what the fuck? mixed with the occasional yawn, plus some

treats.  The CGI is good and not so invasive and overwhelming (as in Revenge of the Sith) that I couldn't sort out was happening.  Mark Hamill, reprising his role as Luke Skywalker, is quite good throughout, probably the film's best actor.  Carrie Fisher looks tired; frankly, doesn't look good at all, as in she seems to be dying.  She did die before the film came out.  Her voice, in particular, is rough and difficult to understand.  I found her strained performance a distressing aspect of the film.  She spends most of the movie in a stasis pod after surviving a blowout into outer space.  She projects a force field around herself and flies back to the ship, losing consciousness, but briefly acting the role of Magic Granny.  This sets up the uncomfortable arrival of purple-haired miscast Laura Dern.  

     Rian Johnson, the director, made two excellent films, Brick and Looper, both of them highly original.  He put his talent into The Last Jedi, but I hope he returns to smaller budgeted movies where he has control over the unique factors that made Brick and Looper so good and ultimately more memorable than most blockbusters.

     

                                                                            Vic Neptune