Having taken her first steps into a larger world in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens", Rey continues her epic journey with Finn, Poe and Luke Skywalker in the next chapter of the Star Wars saga.
WHAT I LIKED: Star Wars has always been an epic tale of good vs evil, but following on from the seeds planted in 'The Force Awakens,' Rian Johnson's subversive 'The Last Jedi,' is a tale mostly about rejecting absolutes.
For one, that's because much of the script is devoted to exposing the similarities between the goodies and baddies. The opening sequence is all about extensive casualties under Poe's gung-ho resistance tactics. The casino sequence on Canto Bight is there to show how the same disgusting profiteers gain from both sides. And the central "hero," Rey and "villain," Kylo Renn even draw a literal parallel through a strange force connection and realise they're similarly struggling with the expectations of their respective masters.
But most of all, the film's thematic message is brought to life by the relationship between Luke and Rey. When we find him, Luke doesn't run back to join the Resistance as many expected, but scurries off and reveals he's denounced the ways of his religion after failing to teach Kylo Renn and realising that the Jedi's arrogance has been a major cause of suffering in the galaxy. On the other side of the coin, Rey comes to him with unblinking hope having swallowed the legends about the Jedi Knights, believing she must follow in Luke's footsteps and take down the first order.
Helped by an appearance of force-ghost Yoda, the two eventually realise that the best way forward is neither to reject nor mystify the past, but to learn from its mistakes. After Rey fails to get Kylo Renn to do the same (like Luke at the beginning of the film, he wants to "let the past die"), the pair rejoin the Resistance with a newfound perspective on achieving peace, and that journey does make for some fascinating character arcs, but mostly a thought-provoking deconstruction of Star Wars' usual themes that at the very least deserves some serious respect.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: The third act would have been far more satisfying thematically if Kylo had decided to join Rey rather than things descending into another samey fight between good and evil, but that's what the next film is all about.
Instead, the real problem here is that almost every scene is played for laughs, and completely falls flat on its face. Luke's reaction to Rey arriving is to toss his lightsaber off a cliff, go fishing and drink from the teet of a giant monster with a ridiculous expression on his face, and that undermines how depressed we learn he's supposedly feeling. As he starts to understand and even teach Rey, her struggle and trepidation is undermined completely by jokes about "reaching out," and their antics wrecking the island. And that's not even to mention the ridiculous reintroduction of Finn which is treated as one big joke itself.
Of course, humour is never objectively a problem, and, as has sometimes been the case in, say, the better Marvel films, it can be used to have characters bond with each other or cope with hardship just like in real life. But here it's used to simply diminish the impact of dramatic conflicts or how characters are feeling. Granted, that may not have been such a problem had everyone not been split across the galaxy, but the necessarily choppy structure means we get less time to develop the emotional engagement anyway, and many previous characters are sidelined in favour of developing strange new ones.
In the end, that all makes what's often an interesting watch a rather frustrating one, and I would argue that it's for those reasons that it's not worked for most people, and that it's nothing to do with the subversion of expectations or little plot inaccuracies.
VERDICT: 'The Last Jedi,' is a fascinating tale about rejecting absolutes, but the fact it's so messily delivered and exploited for unfunny humour makes it as frustrating as it is interesting.
