Star Wars technology has not changed since 1977. The Empire, and the Rebellion, seem to suffer from the galaxy’s most shagged-out designers.
The best movie of all time
What a brilliant movie! Full of breathtaking, blow-you-away moments, unpredictable plot-twists, and unforgettable images and ideas!
I speak, of course, of the original 1977 Star Wars.
Great sci-fi
I love movies and adore sci-fi. The original Star Wars sent me into a drug-like high when I saw it in Dolby Sensurround at the Odeon Marble Arch in 1977. So did parts of the original Guardians of the Galaxy, not to mention the hilarious Galaxy Quest. I gave a strong review to The Force Awakens, despite initial misgivings. Most recently I thought Avatar: The Way of Water outstanding (see below).
“The Last Jedi”: duff Star Wars technology and plot
Then I saw “The Last Jedi”. The movie had a massive budget. The back story is epic. The franchise has millions of fans, waiting faithfully and patiently. Yet the movie is 80% as dull as ditchwater I felt personally betrayed. Here are 7 reasons why The Last Jedi is, by the standards of what could have been, an inter-galactic train-wreck.
Boring?
“The Last Jedi” is beyond boring. In fact, it is the first movie in which I have actually fallen asleep in the cinema, ever. The scenes of Rey and Luke discussing obscure stuff on an island go on and on and… dear God, please can something happen soon?
I can’t feel the Force
The Force plays no role. In particular, the allegedly awesome ability of goodie Rey and baddie Kylo Ren to channel The Force at no point has any impact on the plot – apart from an incident involving arch-baddie Snoke, whose daft name always made him hard to take seriously anyhow. When Kylo and Ren fight faceless henchpersons in Santa outfits (presumably designed with a Christmas release of the movie in mind), they do hand-to-hand combat. In fact, the only time The Force plays a role is when Rey literally lifts some rocks.
Where are the jokes?
The humor, or humour, has vanished like a struck-down Obi Wan Kenobi. This is a cruel disappointment, since The Force Awakens – see my review at link – was crammed with laugh-out-loud jokes. The only laughs in The Last Jedi revolve around pointless creatures with big eyes looking dismayed.
Wooden, turgid, self-important
The self-awareness has gone, too. In its place, the turgid self-importance of the fourth thru sixth movies – so-called episodes 1-3, “the movies about which Star Wars enthusiasts do not speak”.
Power up the Yawn-o-matic!
Because the plot makes no sense, the film contains no dramatic tension. For at least seven hours of the movie a fleet of gigantic First Order warships chases a pitiful shoal of rebel spacecraft, lobbing an occasional shell into their protective force-fields while waiting for them to run out of fuel (ice-cream, anyone? I might just nip out and check the weather). Each of the pursuing craft is at least a million times larger and more heavily-armed than the tiny craft they are chasing. But they can’t catch them, or even damage them. When the rebels flee in unprotected escape pods, the pursuing fleet has to pick them off one by one, at a lackadaisical pace (turns over and sets alarm). Do they only have one gun, or what?
Star Wars technology – stuck in the past. Avatar – all-new ideas
Most important, and depressing: what is it with this Empire/First Order gigantomania that they keep building huge, yet completely ineffective military Star Wars technology? Maybe they have a single, tiny unit of shagged-out designers required to staff not only the infamous Death Star Reconstruction Committee; but also the Stormtrooper Body Armour Division; the Stormtrooper Sharpshooting Academy; the Empire Battle Tactics Seminary; and the TIE Fighters Modernisation Task Force.
I recently watched Avatar: the Way of Water. Having adored the original Avatar, I was bracing myself for disappointment. But to my surprise, I found the new edition engaging, original and fun. One of the best things about it was the technology. The original Avatar was stuffed with intriguing technology, from space ships to fighting exoskeletons. The Way of Water is stuffed with all-new technology, not all highlighted but going on quietly and impressively in the background. When we fly in over “Bridgehead City” and see the ugly, industrialised city the bad humans have built on Pandora, or when the bad humans go hunting intelligent whale-like creatures with submarines and depth-charges, all the technology looks real. This is the effect we got in the original Star Wars when we entered that frontier bar full of weird creatures interacting. Sadly, the subsequent eight movies somewhat lost the plot.
No twists
Finally, The Last Jedi contains no surprises. No character makes a cunning intervention which changes the balance of the story, least of all the permanently catatonic, baffled-looking Luke Skywalker or the promising but woefully underwritten Rey. Because the story begins and ends with the rebels roughly in the same pickle, nothing that happens in between seems to matter.
What to do next
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