Rewatching The Last Jedi, it astonishes me how many opportunities the movie chose to squander. I have never seen a sequel so determined to do absolutely nothing with any of the setups or characters from a previous installment, or to remove the scenes that would carry the most emotional weight, and it’s really, really depressing to me.
It retreads the Empire-Rebel conflict. The setup was there for a small, outmatched First Order, which had lost most of its resources with Starkiller Base, up against a mostly-intact New Republic, but I guess no one in the NR cares enough about the state of the galaxy to fight back. The NR is completely ignored and never even seen as a functioning entity, and everyone seems to use “Rebels” and “Resistance” interchangeably.
A Force-using protagonist was introduced who’s shown to be quite aggressive and reckless, potentially making her a more morally-grey character, then she turns out to be good by definition no matter what she does because she only exists to balance out the evil antagonist.
A former member of the Evil Army of Evil, who turns out to be one of the most empathetic characters in the saga, who used to be a cog in the machine, deserted them on moral grounds. You want subversion, there it is. A faceless, disposable mook became the deuteragonist. Or he was. Now he has his experiences as a child soldier played for laughs by making it seem like he was the entire First Order’s janitor instead of an capable, promising soldier who rejected them.
They had an antagonist who’d modeled himself after Darth Vader and was deliberately shown to reject redemption when offered, then the second movie is devoted to showing he’s potentially redeemable only to reiterate the same point.
There’s a journey to the first Jedi temple. Nothing is learned about the origins of the Jedi, or who the first Jedi were. The original Jedi texts are present. They are never read from. Very little information about the Jedi can be gleaned from this location, aside from what appears to be a focus on balance between the light and dark, judging from one mosaic. Luke’s criticisms of the Jedi apply to the order during the prequels, he doesn’t explain anything about how they began.
The temple has been watched over by a group of caretakers for an unknown amount of time and for unknown reasons. They appear in two scenes, both of which are comic relief, and answer next to nothing about them or their culture.
Rey’s training under Luke consists of two lessons (out of three he had promised, the third was deleted) and swinging a lightsaber around, unsupervised, for about thirty seconds.
Rey picking up the use of the Force so easily was a waste. Characters training in fiction is a great opportunity to see how they face and overcome challenges, and in the case of fantastical settings, to build up the mechanics of the world and how scifi/magical elements work. This is why Luke’s training with Yoda in ESB was so interesting. We can’t see Rey siphoning the skills from Kylo’s brain, we need to be told that’s what’s happening to explain how she got so strong so fast. The fact there’s an explanation for it doesn’t make it interesting to watch.
They didn’t even go all in with making Rey a completely independent character. If you want to contrast her with Kylo, being someone with no significant background or family vs someone born to a legacy and loving family who spat on it all, show why she’s worthier of it. Now instead of showing she’s a better heir than Kylo while having no blood relation to Luke, her interactions with him are tense at best and physically violent at worst. Instead of the expected outcome of her being important because she’s related to Luke, she’s important because the Force made her Kylo’s antithesis and dumped a bunch of power on her. Another character is still the source of her involvement in the narrative, just for a different, less-interesting reason. Instead of having the torch passed to her by her father, Rey gets shackled to a Neo-Nazi school shooter.
They wanted to show a hero coming from an unassuming background, and did nothing with Finn, whose background is unknown, never implied to be important, and considering the FO probably doesn’t bother to keep detailed records of its child soldiers, potentially impossible to find out.
Didn’t have Leia mourn Han at all, and removed his funeral from the film despite initial plans to include it.
They deleted the scene showing Luke grieving over Han’s death.
They deleted the scene that develops Phasma by exposing her cowardice, develops Finn by letting him be the one to confront her over Starkiller’s destruction, and develops the stormtroopers by depicting them as real people with their own doubts and the potential for revolt. All that was gone in favor of “Let’s go, chrome dome”.
They deleted the scene set during the evacuation depicting Connix warning Poe that they needed more time to escape, which is what motivated him to go against the FO fleet and buy time, showing his devotion to his comrades and willingness to throw himself in danger to protect them. This is cut, and Poe is repeatedly implied to be hot-headed and glory-seeking despite his actions being based around the aforementioned motives and no alternative scenes were included, we’re just told he was being reckless despite his behavior in both movies being inconsistent with that. Poe’s actions cost the bombers, but it took out the dreadnought and saved the people on the transports.
With all the talk about the core theme of “failure”, instead of having the Resistance attack on the dreadnought fail, it succeeds. They could’ve shown the plucky, rag-tag fighters utterly fail against the First Order’s indomitable war machine, but instead, they accomplish their goal. Yeah, they lost their bombers. Costing about 50 casualties and the most incompetently-designed ships in the franchise doesn’t matter much compared to 215,000 enemy combatants and the FO’s second-largest warship getting taken out. That’s a damn good resource exchange and I don’t know how much better than a 4000:1 kill ratio Poe would need for people to stop criticizing him. It’s probably higher than that already depending on how many people went down with Starkiller Base. The attack on the first Death Star cost all but three of the fighters sent to destroy it, suffering heavy losses doesn’t make it a defeat.
With Paige dead, and the movie treating the successful destruction of the dreadnought as a disaster and entirely Poe’s fault, Rose never confronts him about how he led her sister into the battle that killed her despite interacting after Rose’s introduction focused on her grief.
Rose is established as a mechanic, and never shown making use of those skills.
Admiral Ackbar is killed after giving him a single line anyone else could’ve delivered. Yeah, he’s liked by fans almost solely because of the “It’s a trap!” line, but that’s no reason to do absolutely nothing with him.
Jessika Pava and Temmin Wexley are just gone, apparently. They were minor characters, but they were still there, they could’ve been interesting, and now they’re gone. They’re either dead, which sucks, or they’re off with other Resistance forces elsewhere, which undermines the FO’s single-minded focus on the fleet we’re shown. A sequel should not rely on people being ambivalent to characters from previous installments to make sense.
Finn and Poe are prevented from interacting by separating them.
Rey and Finn are prevented from interacting beyond a hug, and they deleted a scene where Finn sees Rey’s parting promise to meet him again, shown to him by BB-8, who tries to comfort Finn. Like with Poe’s deleted scene, this provides context to his actions and was removed to make the character look worse, even though we can infer his motives from his development in the last movie.
Luke and Leia are prevented from interacting by putting Leia into a coma.
Leia is put into a coma so she can’t do anything else, either. When she’s finally out of the coma and calls for help from her allies across the galaxy, no one responds. Leia Organa, the last princess of Alderaan, who was present at the biggest battles of the Galactic Civil War, who led the Resistance against the galaxy’s would-be oppressor, can’t inspire anyone to action.
It’s asserted that the Jedi do not own the Force, which is a well-established aspect of the universe in many other Star Wars works. Then no new insights into it unconnected to Jedi teachings are provided. The film ends with Rey carrying on the Jedi’s legacy anyway.
Maz Kanata, a Force-sensitive non-Jedi, appears for a brief cameo and is not connected to the whole anti-Jedi bent the film’s on at all.
Both Rey and Kylo state they’ve had visions of each other’s future which inform their actions and expectations of each other. Neither are shown or described in detail. In Kylo’s case this might be understandable because he’s almost never the viewpoint character, but Rey was shown visions of herself by the Force in that cave, something could’ve been added there.
What happened to Luke’s green lightsaber? I assumed it was destroyed when that hut collapsed on him in the flashback, but I can’t find any confirmation of that. It’s the saber he constructed himself and wielded after losing his father’s, it’s relevant to his character, but it’s completely forgotten. Including by Luke himself since he Force-holograms up the old blue one.
No information is provided on the Knights of Ren and the film doesn’t even acknowledge their existence. They are presumably other students of Luke’s, but neither they nor the other Jedi-in-training they presumably killed are seen. Apparently they were considered as replacements for the Praetorian Guards, but were cut because that wouldn’t make sense and there was no room for them otherwise. Here’s a thought: if Kylo Ren is taking over the First Order from Snoke, have him fight the guards alongside the knights.
No information is provided on Rey’s parents aside from their irrelevance. If what Kylo said was true, have the guts to show the damn drunks explicitly and stick to that explanation if you’re going to do it. It also doesn’t address who was on that ship in Rey’s flashback in TFA.
No information is provided whatsoever about Snoke, including him being completely absent from the flashback scenes showing the moments before Kylo Ren destroyed the new Jedi despite his explicitly-stated relevance to Kylo’s development around that time.
It’s nothing. This movie is nothing. The problem isn’t “subverting expectations”, the movie actively doesn’t use what it’s given and then replaces potential payoffs with nothing. These are all setups provided either by The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi itself, and the movie either ignores them or cuts them out for the sake of time. It’s become a cliché criticism to bring up the milking scene, but the fact they left that in while cutting out all those deleted scenes shows how monumentally fucked up Rian Johnson’s priorities are. What really hurts is that it could’ve been great, but everything that could’ve had emotional weight and character depth was deliberately stripped out.
I know this wasn’t in TLJ, and a shame, since it would have made it much less shitty. But I chose this because it actually highlights two things: Finn taking control and Phasma realizing too late that her instincts about him were spot on. He did have the right stuff for leadership. He could rally others to follow him and listen to him. She spotted that he had this ability and wanted to bend it to her will, and now here she is realizing that he can destroy her. The stormtroopers are listening to him. That’s why she kills them. That look in her eyes is fear but it’s also dread that she could not successfully harness that strength of will for her twisted purposes. Finn was too good and too strong for that.
This big change to Luke happening without anyone around also feels like an invalidation of what he learned and went through in the original trilogy. Really, Luke already ought to know better about the hubris and personal pride of the Jedi, because nobody has been failed by the Jedi like Luke has. His most trusted mentors lied to him and held back key information about him and his family, in order to manipulate him into killing his father. Luke ends “Return of the Jedi” disillusioned by his elders, and spends most of that story in pain. Even after redeeming Vader, Luke seems nearly broken by his loss. The ending of “Return of the Jedi,” with his father’s quiet funeral, is a distinctly downbeat moment, during a party no less, because we see a pained Luke struggling with everything he’s seen and experienced.
Luke Skywalker knows better than anyone the failings of the Jedi, because he lived them. To see him repeat the same mistakes of Yoda and Obi-Wan feels like a backstep. The man we watched Luke become and the man he is in “The Last Jedi” are out of sync. We missed what could have made him this way, and a few short lines of dialogue in which Luke explains a moment of weakness seems insufficient when set against three movies of character development.
…
By the end of “Return of the Jedi,” Luke isn’t a guy who sees darkness in someone and fires up his blade to strike them down; he’s a guy who sees darkness in someone, and reaches out a hand to help them.
it’s NOT kelly’s fault that rose is a terrible character, it’s RIAN JOHNSONS fault. it is 100% his fault. his shitty writing is the reason rose is a bad character, not kelly marie tran’s
One very typical beat for a fictional romance is one or both the partners
being “tempted” in some way by another potential partner.
There was a character in The Walking Dead who reminded Rick Grimes of his deceased wife Lori, a development which many fans thought spelled the end of his potential romance with Michonne. Princess Leia kissed Luke in ESB, something I’m sure we’d all like to forget
about. The Hunger Games had the typical YA love triangle which I
read the author didn’t even have in the original version–Gale was
originally Katniss’s cousin, not her potential love interest (Katniss
still comments on their physical resemblance in the book), but the
publisher wanted the triangle to spice things up. That’s how common a
trope it is.
Looking at these examples it seems to me that a lot of these
“temptations” from love have to do with family in some way, or the
unhealthy, traumatic aspects of family dynamics. Rick’s wife Lori
cheated on him and died in childbirth. leaving him to grieve for years. The woman who
reminded him of Lori (I’m so sorry, I can’t remember or find her name)
is an obvious callback to that complicated trauma. Leia and Luke for
obvious reasons, even if the familial relationship was a retcon. Gale,
even when he was no longer Katniss’s cousin, was still explicitly tied
to her identity as a provider and protector to her family. He
foregrounds this himself by saying how her attraction to him, to the
extent it existed, came from knowing he would take care of her family.
Given that Katniss’s need to provide for and protect her family,
especially her sister, from a young age not only drove her character
from the start but was the source of many of her issues and traumas, her
relationship with Gale was similarly based on this unhealthy part of her
family dynamics.
From these observations it seems Finn’s and Rey’s separate plots in TLJ, specifically with Rose and Kylo Ren respectively, have much more in common with temptation plots than endgame love stories. I say “temptation” here as more a plot element than a subjective psychological experience of being tempted. The temptation plot often does come with personal attraction, but in Rey’s and Finn’s cases the attractions do not seem to be romantic or sexual. Rather they seem attracted to things that are promised by or come to them through the tempting character, such as turning a powerful Force user to win the war, or the promise of comfort and freedom.
A couple few years ago, during the time when Rick was given a white “love interest” despite the bond that had develoed between him and Michonne (don’t worry about forgetting her name, we don’t speak it), I wrote a meta called Screw the Slow Burn. It’s not as relevant anymore because Richonne finally did happen, and ultimately, despite the dark time, it was a good slow burn. But at the time, adding a temptation for Rick felt like an aggression against Michonne, even though the temptation arc that leads to the endgame relationship is a common narrative device. Because Michonne is not a white girl.
The device fails when a white character is tempted from a Black character by another white character because a large percentage of the fandom is inevitably unable to see the buildup of the interracial relationship in the first place. The temptation is seen as the first and only love interest. That changes the narrative from a fandom pov. It would be nice if all romantic narratives could be treated the same, but they can’t, because common perception says the all white pairing is the right one. Even though it’s a familiar device used in love stories to the point of cliche.
You see it often with Reylo, people acting like Rey was 100% alone until Kylo tempted her to join the dark side. That makes the actual temptation narrative less effective.
That said, although I don’t believe Rey ever stopped thinking about Finn in TLJ, I do think it tried a temptation narrative, and we see the results of that, how it caused damage to Finnrey’s arc rather than enhance it.
Yeah it’s uhhhh interesting that of the examples I mentioned, only Richonne and Finnrey were declared dead in the water by large parts of fandom while Han x Leia and Katniss x Peeta remained strong contenders despite the respective temptation arcs. It is the job of creators to invoke reactions in their audience, and the audience lives in a world where racism is a reality. So-called colorblind writing often fails for this reason, sometimes because racism is ingrained in audiences (as when they can’t conceive of a Black character as a love interest), and sometimes because the audience has experience with racism (the Violence Against Men Is Funny trope, already worn thin, is emphatically not funny when used against Black and Latino characters).
On the other hand I sometimes get cynical that any amount of explicit writing can convince members of the audience who are determined not to see interracial relationships and Black characters. As shippers have joked, Finn and Rey could be having the raunchiest sex on screen–and already did by Rian Johnson’s metric–and anti Finnreys would still make it about another ship somehow.
my mom literally thought that the red background in the throne room was there bc they forgot to edit in a real background so rian johnson get fucked for having some of the laziest and ugliest set designs me or my mom have ever seen
L.J.'s Obsessions 