Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi Reaction/Review (No Spoilers)

Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi Reaction/Review

This is going to be a pretty short review. 

The Last Jedi is the best Star Wars movie since the original trilogy. See it. 

Really, I could just end it there, but I’ll go into a bit more detail. No spoilers, though. 

I’ll answer a few questions I had going into the movie: questions I’m sure many others will have. 

1) Is it just a remake of Empire Strikes Back, the way The Force Awakens was essentially a remake of A New Hope? 

No. A word that’s going to be thrown around a lot when discussing this movie is “bold”. And it’s true. I so hoped this movie would take risks. It does, and they paid off big time. That’s not to say it doesn’t borrow elements from Empire and make plenty of references to the original trilogy, but unlike with Force Awakens, every one of the call backs to the old movies felt purposeful and meaningful, not just there for nostalgic reasons. 

2) We know Luke Skywalker will play an important role in this one. How was he? 

Mark Hamill gave the best performance I’ve ever seen from him. His chemistry with Daisy Ridley (and others) was off the charts. He truly delivered on bringing back the legendary character in a way that worked perfectly for the story. Unfortunately, every scene with him is so strong, when it cuts away to the other storylines, they don’t feel as strong. It’s not that I didn’t like the storylines with Poe and Finn and newcomer Rose (who all have much more depth/screen time)—in fact I really liked all of them. It’s unfair, because how could anything live up to the majesty of Luke Skywalker, especially when his scenes are written so perfectly? 

3) Is there a big twist? 

Don’t go in expecting a one-sentence “I am your father” type of twist, but Luke’s line in the trailer, “This is not going to go the way you think”, is extremely accurate. For the first five or ten minutes, things felt…normal. Suitably exciting, but, not particularly show stopping. Then around the twenty minute mark, it kicks into gear and continually left me with my jaw hanging open, taking turns I absolutely did not see coming.

Here’s a shortlist of the things I didn’t like. 1) The opening title crawl. I think because it so closely follows up The Force Awakens, the information came off as a bit redundant, but also the wording didn’t seem quite right. 2) The humour. There’s a joke early on that did not work for me, and there are a few jokes throughout that fall flat, but thankfully many of them land. I was glad the sense of humour from The Force Awakens was retained, but if you didn’t like it before, you definitely won’t like it this time. 3) There’s a part of the story where some characters travel to a planet that did not look or feel quite right. It felt too modern and not enough like Star Wars. I liked the concept, but the execution seemed off. At this point, we meet a minor character who has an annoying stutter that was entirely unnecessary. 

 

And that’s about it. I found The Last Jedi to be an improvement over The Force Awakens in nearly every regard. The story is much more original, the characters drive the story even more and are explored in greater depth, the acting, though great before, is even better this time, the music is incredible, the visuals are striking, the action is better, the dialogue is quotable, and it packs in so much excellent material, the two-and-a-half hour runtime flies by. In fact, it’s so good, they’ve screwed themselves for the next one. I don’t even feel like I need a third and final movie for this trilogy. The Last Jedi is so grand and satisfying just on its own, that I highly doubt the next movie will be able to live up to this one. 

So that’s all I have for now. It’s certainly the kind of movie that I’ll need to see multiple more times, and perhaps my opinion will change, but for now, I absolutely loved The Last Jedi, and am shocked by the initial rejection of it by so many fans. Then again, when Empire Strikes Back first came out, this is how people reacted: “Why isn’t it as fun as the first Star Wars?” “Why was it so dark?” “Why was Luke trained by a little green puppet?” “How could Darth Vader be Luke’s father?” I’m guessing people are just taken aback by how different The Last Jedi is from previous Star Wars movies, and the general opinion will change after some time has passed.