Post by rflowings on Jan 2, 2018 20:02:24 GMT
Ahoy!
I always seem to go underground in winter (which is odd, as the Celts and Anglo-Saxons venerated the season as the time for board games) and I kicked off last year with an extremely sour review of Mass Effect: Andromeda. I thought this year I would post something more positive about what I think was a solid return to another much-loved franchise.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi was jolly good fun. I had some reservations about its predecessor, The Force Awakens, and while I thoroughly enjoyed Rogue One, even it had its faults. This time, though, I feel like I was watching an intelligent, thought-through sequel to the Original Trilogy, that honoured the past and the spirit of the original movies while genuinely being unafraid to move the story past its original protagonists and even engage with the premise of the old films on a critical level.
Flash-Gordon astrophysics and Weird War 2 aesthetics are back in highly enjoyable form (I note that the successor state to the Galactic Empire, the First Order, manage to have even more camp and gloss-varnished uniforms than their Imperial predecessors, much as the Nazis created a foppish rococo version of the Kaiser's army). In line with some of the more military-minded choreography of Rogue One, we get a real sense of the proficiency of the average TIE fighter pilot, they give a good account of themselves in this film, shredding Republic fighter squadrons and generally maintaining a decent level of air superiority throughout. There is even a subtle allusion to the criticism that the Resistance in The Force Awakens were still using X-wings in the final battle, which sees our heroes engage a heavily-armed First Order contingent using only a handful of battered landspeeders.
(Personally I always assumed that The Resistance were actually the Galactic Civil War Veteran's Association, and rapidly re-armed the memorial flypast when war broke out).
Overall this is some of the best star war I have seen in a while. And to top it off, Domhnall Gleeson is back chewing the furniture as the psychotic General Hux, whose frothing insanity was a bit out of place in The Force Awakens but is neatly offset in this movie by an assortment of world-weary junior officers. His warships still retain the old problem of blowing up with unfortunate rapidity, although we learn that the First Order is actually funded by a sort of plutocrat's joint venture which didn't feel the need to build safety features or redundancy into its fighting platforms (red tape saves lives, guys!). This same joint venture also sees fit to deploy, at one stage, a miniaturised Death Star designed for the incredibly niche military role of destroying big doors in mountainside fortresses. This is laughable, but has definite historical parallels.
[spoilers ahead]
In terms of character, I was thrilled to bits with how Luke Skywalker was dealt with in this film, although apparently Mark Hamill has his reservations. As a world-weary, disillusioned Jedi Master in retirement, we see him grapple with the pressure of his own legend and deliver some genuinely interesting insights into The Force which have been MIA since 1983. Daisy Ridley's Rae feels a bit like a meta-character throughout the story, going through the motions of redeeming the troubled Sith apprentice Kylo Ren, but finding that the traditional "Star Wars" plot doesn't go quite the way she expected. The death of Supreme Leader Snoke is probably the thing I enjoyed the most from the film, and his revelation as basically just a Weinstein-esque creeper in a gold lamé bathrobe pretty much sold me on the movie permanently.
There is legitimate criticism of the film to be made; the plot is a bit of a shaggy dog story which ends where it begins, there are a great many visual parallels with the Empire Strikes Back (although it deliberately subverts the plot) and John Boyega's joyous ex-stormtrooper Finn had very little of anything to do in the film (although I did enjoy his subplot with Kelly Marie Tran's Rose for worldbuilding purposes). The unkindest cut, of course, is Carrie Fisher's actual real death which leaves the writers in a corner, as Leia is the only character of the "big three" to survive the movie. She brings a lot of gravitas to the cause of the Resistance and it is interesting to see this, her final performance, as a kind of redemption of Princess Leia's legacy, as a character in pop culture.
Overall the old Star Wars concepts of confrontation, moral struggle, and redemption are explored intelligently and enjoyably in this film. I hope you enjoyed it, if you saw it, and I hope you go and see it, if you didn't. It's a lot of fun.
I always seem to go underground in winter (which is odd, as the Celts and Anglo-Saxons venerated the season as the time for board games) and I kicked off last year with an extremely sour review of Mass Effect: Andromeda. I thought this year I would post something more positive about what I think was a solid return to another much-loved franchise.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi was jolly good fun. I had some reservations about its predecessor, The Force Awakens, and while I thoroughly enjoyed Rogue One, even it had its faults. This time, though, I feel like I was watching an intelligent, thought-through sequel to the Original Trilogy, that honoured the past and the spirit of the original movies while genuinely being unafraid to move the story past its original protagonists and even engage with the premise of the old films on a critical level.
Flash-Gordon astrophysics and Weird War 2 aesthetics are back in highly enjoyable form (I note that the successor state to the Galactic Empire, the First Order, manage to have even more camp and gloss-varnished uniforms than their Imperial predecessors, much as the Nazis created a foppish rococo version of the Kaiser's army). In line with some of the more military-minded choreography of Rogue One, we get a real sense of the proficiency of the average TIE fighter pilot, they give a good account of themselves in this film, shredding Republic fighter squadrons and generally maintaining a decent level of air superiority throughout. There is even a subtle allusion to the criticism that the Resistance in The Force Awakens were still using X-wings in the final battle, which sees our heroes engage a heavily-armed First Order contingent using only a handful of battered landspeeders.
(Personally I always assumed that The Resistance were actually the Galactic Civil War Veteran's Association, and rapidly re-armed the memorial flypast when war broke out).
Overall this is some of the best star war I have seen in a while. And to top it off, Domhnall Gleeson is back chewing the furniture as the psychotic General Hux, whose frothing insanity was a bit out of place in The Force Awakens but is neatly offset in this movie by an assortment of world-weary junior officers. His warships still retain the old problem of blowing up with unfortunate rapidity, although we learn that the First Order is actually funded by a sort of plutocrat's joint venture which didn't feel the need to build safety features or redundancy into its fighting platforms (red tape saves lives, guys!). This same joint venture also sees fit to deploy, at one stage, a miniaturised Death Star designed for the incredibly niche military role of destroying big doors in mountainside fortresses. This is laughable, but has definite historical parallels.
[spoilers ahead]
In terms of character, I was thrilled to bits with how Luke Skywalker was dealt with in this film, although apparently Mark Hamill has his reservations. As a world-weary, disillusioned Jedi Master in retirement, we see him grapple with the pressure of his own legend and deliver some genuinely interesting insights into The Force which have been MIA since 1983. Daisy Ridley's Rae feels a bit like a meta-character throughout the story, going through the motions of redeeming the troubled Sith apprentice Kylo Ren, but finding that the traditional "Star Wars" plot doesn't go quite the way she expected. The death of Supreme Leader Snoke is probably the thing I enjoyed the most from the film, and his revelation as basically just a Weinstein-esque creeper in a gold lamé bathrobe pretty much sold me on the movie permanently.
There is legitimate criticism of the film to be made; the plot is a bit of a shaggy dog story which ends where it begins, there are a great many visual parallels with the Empire Strikes Back (although it deliberately subverts the plot) and John Boyega's joyous ex-stormtrooper Finn had very little of anything to do in the film (although I did enjoy his subplot with Kelly Marie Tran's Rose for worldbuilding purposes). The unkindest cut, of course, is Carrie Fisher's actual real death which leaves the writers in a corner, as Leia is the only character of the "big three" to survive the movie. She brings a lot of gravitas to the cause of the Resistance and it is interesting to see this, her final performance, as a kind of redemption of Princess Leia's legacy, as a character in pop culture.
Overall the old Star Wars concepts of confrontation, moral struggle, and redemption are explored intelligently and enjoyably in this film. I hope you enjoyed it, if you saw it, and I hope you go and see it, if you didn't. It's a lot of fun.