The Last Jedi fulfills the promise of Star Wars

The Last Jedi: Five Years Later

Today marks five years since the release of Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi. It’s a movie that, we’re told, sparked as much controversy as it did hope. To me, it’s a film I’m grateful for, that I dearly love, and that gave me the Star Wars I’d been waiting for all my life.

I’ll start off by saying I’ve never been entirely persuaded by the idea that The Last Jedi was organically controversial. 2017/2018 was a particularly heightened time in the social media wars. All the places where debates about The Last Jedi could be found were generally cluttered with bots, trolls and individuals whose entire business model was to attack popular content. If you look at The Last Jedi from a business perspective, it made $620 million domestically and $1.3 billion worldwide. According to Box Office Mojo, that means The Last Jedi is still the 11th ranked domestic movie of all time , and the 16th highest worldwide box office film of all time. Top Gun: Maverick being treated like a box office juggernaut at $1.4 billion worldwide, for contrast. The Last Jedi made a lot of money and was a very popular movie by all sane measures.

The narrative around The Last Jedi, though, was that it made less than The Force Awakens and that was somehow because the movie dropped the ball. It made less just like Empire made less than Star Wars and Return of the Jedi made less than Empire; just like Wakanda Forever is making less than Black Panther despite being a fantastic film. There are cultural special moments like The Force Awakens and Black Panther that cannot be replicated by their sequels and that’s pretty typical. What The Last Jedi did as business was exceptional, even so.

But I’m not an investor in Star Wars, so it’s success in business is really besides the point. What it did for Star Wars as a story was irreplaceable. The Last Jedi is more than a sequel, it is the penultimate Star Wars story in every way, the culmination of the Saga. It’s the spiritual conclusion to many of the themes and threads that had been woven together throughout the preceding seven films. And, it’s just a beautiful film.

When being interviewed about working with Rian Johnson, Carrie Fisher said that he did not have a dominating personality but had a dominating vision. Johnson, as a director, clearly comes from the mold of a Spielberg and a Lucas. JJ Abrams reveres Spielberg and has made a career as a kind of brilliant synthesizer of his heroes. Johnson seems to me to be writer as much as a director, an individual driven by story and how stories work, what they are for. He revels in surprise, in hiding things in plain sight, in things adding up, in story structure.

With The Last Jedi, his screenwriting instincts drive every choice. He has taken the information we have about the characters and made choices in the film intended to grow each in a purposeful, active way. Each of the main trio in the new trilogy is given a threat that is in direct opposition to their baseline character, and it creates a film full of growth and obstacles.

This is why Luke Skywalker is portrayed the way he is in the film, and I think most people didn’t quite catch that. Luke Skywalker is (in a way in keeping with Rian Johnson’s other screenwriting choices) Rey’s obstacle. Rey has come to Ahch-To seeking a mythological warrior, carrying the hope of the entire Resistance with her, and also, her personal hope that Luke can help her “find her place in all this.” She’s beaten Kylo Ren in the race to find the Island, and she stands at the precipice, awaiting a savior.

“You don’t need Luke Skywalker,” is his response. Luke has come to the island because he, like Han and Leia, has been traumatized by what is essentially the death of a child. Kylo Ren is what is left of his nephew, and Han and Leia’s son. His erasure, his fall, has shattered the trio. Luke’s determination? The Jedi Order’s legacy is failure. The cycle of Sith versus Jedi leads nowhere. He failed his nephew and the galaxy is worse off for it. He has come here to leave the fighting and the Force aside.

Even the lessons he agrees to teach Rey (prompted by his wonderful reunion with Artoo on the Millennium Falcon) are designed to teach her that the Jedi Order is not what she thinks it is. He teaches her that the Force is a connection between all living things and that connection is not the provenance of one particular religion. He properly diagnoses the story of the prequel trilogy, calling out the hubristic Jedi as they are actually portrayed in Episodes I, II and III. (In that moment, Luke seems like the only character from the original trilogy who knows what happened during the fall of the Republic.)

All of this is happening because of its impact on the character of Rey. Her self-actualization comes from her frustration with her reluctant mentor. Rey is our hero, and Luke is there to make her a better one. Even though she leaves him an anger, on a doomed quest to save a dark prince who does not want to be saved, she has gone from a fierce but innocent person, to someone who now has interacted with the history of the Jedi, confronted a haunted man, and has recommitted herself to action.

This is real growth for a character that mere revelation cannot create. Rey grows more in The Last Jedi as she faces disappointment and uncertainty than she does in The Rise of Skywalker when she is given a definitive answer about her history. Answers don’t always lead us to growth. Questions do.

The Last Jedi does this time and again with our leads. Take, for example, how The Last Jedi seemingly wholly invents an entire character for Poe Dameron over the course of its two hour and twenty-odd minute runtime. Poe, in The Force Awakens, is a dashing pilot and a very brave guy but what else is he? Oscar Isaac’s charm and his relationship with Finn are wonderful but Poe is mostly an action hero-type more than a whole person when we meet him.

The Last Jedi shows us the heir apparent to General Organa who is straining under that expectation. He is a man of action. That desire to act, to take charge, to win every fight at any cost, is not going to make him an effective leader in the long run. Leia knows it, and when Holdo is confronted with his entitlement and frustration, she dismisses him.

Poe cannot allow himself to be less than the lead character in his own story, so he rages and rebels and mutinies. He doesn’t trust Holdo, commits to a plan that he believes is better than hers, throws all his chips in behind a risky bet. It’s exactly the kind of risky plan (find a Codebreaker! Sneak onto the ship!) that in another movie would work. But in The Last Jedi, it’s a plan concocted out of misunderstanding and immaturity.

Poe’s journey to maturity is a tough one to watch, people die along the way, Poe makes big mistakes. He loses his defining weapon - his X-Wing- and flails. But Leia and Holdo both like him and see their own rebelliousness in him. This is war and they need him to step up. They know he is the leader they need, if and when he can get his head out of his cockpit. When he eventually does, when he sees, at last, that his job is to keep everyone alive, to live to fight another day, it is a greater victory than he could ever achieve just by blowing something up.

As for Finn, I’ve written about the oft-dismissed Canto Bight sequence here. In summary, I believe it’s a path to Finn’s growth, a widening of the lens of a person who has barely seen the galaxy and whose loyalties begin and end with Rey. Canto Bight, his relationship with Rose, and his confrontation with Phasma grow him up, just as we’ve seen with Poe and Rey as well.

In fact, Kylo Ren’s ultimate failure in The Last Jedi is his direct contrast to the other characters. He is given the opportunity to mature, to grow, he’s offered a true friend in Rey…and he doubles down on callowness and unforgiving teen rebellion. It is his refusal to grow that separates him from Rey, who is a wiser, richer person by the end of Episode VIII.

Star Wars is about many things but growing up, passing from adolescence to adulthood, is one of its central themes. The battle between light and darkness is perpetual, but our lives are not. We grow, we learn, we age, we move through phases. The Last Jedi is a passage from one phase to another for our new characters, giving them weight and experience designed to make them stronger, better defined, and more adult.

But The Last Jedi also speaks to another phase of life. When we meet Luke Skywalker, we expect to see a man who has matured, a Jedi Master who has outgrown his flaws and become some kind of spiritual guru or guide. Instead, we find that Luke Skywalker is still Luke Skywalker. Luke was never perfect, and he is not perfect now. He still has growing to do, even at this phase in his life.

This, my friends, is how we all really work. Are your parents now free of the flaws they had when they younger? When they were raising you? Are your grandparents perfect? Look at the Baby Boomers who largely run our society. Has age taken away their prejudice, their inadequacies, their blind spots?

When I met Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight, it was 1983. I was seven. Luke become a Jedi by overcoming his anger and throwing down his weapon in a moment of realization. He became the equal of those who seemed, at first, beyond him. He mastered his emotions, saved himself, his father, and the Light of the Force. It is a formative, deep memory of mine, watching Luke Skywalker say “I am a Jedi, like my father before me” at a movie theater in Essex Green Shopping Center in West Orange, NJ. We were sitting close to the screen. I didn’t know anything about Joseph Campbell or writing or story structure. I was a child watching a story without an extra layer of distance. I just wanted Luke to be okay and I was afraid for him, until, at last, I wasn’t.

I wanted to be a hero in my own life because of Luke Skywalker. To stand up for my friends and family, to represent what I saw as the good. Luke Skywalker represented striving for the future, a far off version of myself, self-actualization. He strives, he seeks, he finds, he does not yield, as Tennyson wrote of Ulysses.

Now, at 47 years old, I still have the desire to be that hero, but it’s harder than it used to be. Of course it is. I have seen villainy live consequence free. I have seen suffering. I have seen loss. I have felt despair. I have failed to appreciate what I have. I have not shown up when I wanted to. I have embarrassed myself. I have let myself down. I have felt the weight of years of hope. Sometimes hope is heavy.

So, seeing Luke Skywalker, who started as a farmer and ended as a fisherman, have to overcome himself in order to be what others need him to be? That resonated with me. In The Last Jedi, Luke’s doubts about the Jedi are not refuted, his feelings of failure remain until the end. He does, though, give the galaxy what it needs from him. He embodies his legend.

Star Wars is often called modern mythology. But what does that mean? What is the value of mythology? Is mythology just a method of telling a story? To hear most conversation about it, about Campbell and story structure, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s just a proven architecture on which to hang a narrative.

The Last Jedi is not just adding to the legend, it has something to say about the value of legends. The legend of Luke Skywalker is more than the story of Luke Skyalker. The human being that is Luke can be whiny, brave, unreasonable, stubborn, sometimes pompous, other times hilarious. In Episode VIII, we see all these parts of Luke, the best and the worst of him, in easily Mark Hamill’s finest on-screen performance.

Luke Skywalker, the person, is not the same thing as Luke Skywalker, the legend. But the legend is something that Luke can provide. While The Last Jedi is skeptical of sacrifice for its own sake, Luke’s sacrifice is exactly what is required of him. He saves his greatest act of heroism for his last.

Luke’s final confrontation with his nephew is both a trick and a treat, but it also shows us something we’ve seen far too rarely in Star Wars: a true Jedi.

Throughout the Star Wars story we are told about the ideals of the Jedi. The Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never attack. “Wars not make one great.” But in the prequels, the Jedi are ambassadors and soliders, ruled by rules, diminished and ultimately defeated. In the original trilogy, Luke is only, at last, a baby Jedi and the Jedi he meets are either exiles or ghosts.

Even Jedi Master Luke Skywalker we meet in The Mandalorian is more warrior than sage, his triumph a wish-fulfillment moment of watching him slice stuff down, an inverted version of the Vader scene in Rogue One.

How perfctly ironic, then, that Luke in The Last Jedi, at the moment that he is most disillusioned with his path and most ready to ‘burn it all down,’ is the finest example of the Jedi path we have yet seen. He uses every resource the Force can afford him to appear invulnerable, to overcome his enemies, to provide a manner for the light to survive, and to inspire the best in others…without spilling a drop of blood. He comforts Leia, winks at C3-PO, and walks through fire to protect the Resistance from his greatest failure. Is this real or an illusion? Or is it exactly what a Jedi is meant to be? Selfless and inspiring, in the face of doubt, imperfection and failure. I’m Luke Skywalker, he might have said, I’m here to rescue you.

We are even given a coda where we see that he’s become a new story for children, acting out his scene with makeshift action figures. Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master. Those children in the Star Wars universe see him as their hero; in the same the way I saw him as mine in the real world.

As much as The Last Jedi takes all the themes of Star Wars and brings them together (What does it mean to be a family? Why should we fight and how? What does one generation leave for another? How do we pass from adolescence into adulthood? What does it really look like to fight for the light? What is the nature of the Force? What does it mean to be a hero?) it also rhymes with the other Star Wars films in the way Star Wars should. It gives us echoes of Hoth, echoes of Bespin, echoes of Dagobah, echoes of Return of the Jedi. It even intercuts a series of action sequences in a very Lucas-esque way: Finn and Rose infiltrating Snoke’s ship, Holdo’s breathtaking lightspeed attack, and Rey and Kylo’s battle in Snoke’s Throne Room all weave in and out of each other until the silent, culminating blast of light. It’s a movie that doesn’t fight against Star Wars’s action movie heart, it just organically inserts those scenes into its story, instead of composing a film out of a series of sequences.

The original trilogy is a heroes journey, Buck Rogers dipped in old serials. The prequels are Lucas’s histories: it’s Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and Kurosawa’s samurai pictures. The sequels are wrestling with Star Wars as Star Wars. They responds to the public’s reaction to the prequels, they diversify and modernize the cast, and they present a galaxy that feels the same way about the Star Wars story as the audience does. The Force Awakens’s response to this was to return Star Wars to the wonder and worship of the 80s films we lionize. The Last Jedi takes that worship and makes it a burden for the characters to carry. By doing so, it takes the legendary status of its story and turns that, itself, into the subject at hand.

I can analyze The Last Jedi all day, but in the end, I think the most important thing is the feeling. Star Wars is as old as I am. I was born in 1975 and A New Hope came out in 1977. When I watched The Last Jedi, I cried. I still cry when I watch it. It’s a movie that returned my favorite character to me in a way that I didn’t even know I needed. And it’s a Star Wars film that seems uninterested in the fear that so many Star Wars stories have of the audience’s reaction. Rian Johnson clearly respects the audience enough to give us a story based on tried-and-true principles of storytelling, based on a literate and thoughtful take on Star Wars itself.

I will admit, it’s been hard to write this, even as it’s so easy for me to buttonhole a friend and tell them how much I love this movie. It’s easier to write criticism than unabashed approval somehow. That’s why we find so many more ‘hot takes’ that are about what’s wrong with things than what’s right: it’s easy to tear things down. Sincere pleasure is harder to explain, sometimes. I don’t feel like spending a lot of time saying “amazing, every word of what you just said was wrong” to The Last Jedi’s critics. They’ve had plenty of time at the microphone and don’t need more attention paid.

Plus, it can be easier to break off parts of a movie like this and write about those parts (how The Last Jedi properly diagnoses Snoke, for example; how Episode VIII responds to the idea of heroic sacrifice) so I’ll save those digressions for another day.

I just want to say, The Last Jedi makes me very happy, and it makes me feel seen, and it moves me. So much of what I always hoped Star Wars could be is embodied by this story of the Resistance on the run. Epic, mystical, fun, shocking, mystifying and ennobling, this is Star Wars in Capital Letters, written with a stubbornly singular voice, in love the with subject and unafraid of it.

So, thank you for a Star Wars film that elevates the new generation and challenges the last, a film that confronts history while it propels the story forward.

Thank you for The Death of Luke Skywalker in the midst of a bold, wild tribute to Luke Skywalker.

Thank you for giving me a model for heroism I can embody now, with all my failures and flaws, not just a tribute to a feeling I had when I was young.

May the Fifth be with you, Episode VIII!