The eighth instalment in the Star Wars saga is a force of
nature.
Picking up from where The Force Awakens left off; The
Resistance are on the run from the First Order, while Daisy Ridley’s Rey
encounters a reclusive Luke Skywalker on a far off planet, discovering that the
forces of good and evil may not be as black and white as they seem…
JJ Abrams had the more thankless job of laying the
groundwork for the new series, confidently dealing with the hard graft of setting
up new characters, developing older ones and augmenting an already expansive
universe. For better and worse, Force Awakens adhered very closely to the '77 Star Wars plot structure, veering a little too closely to the
side of familiarity in some respects, and in others, conveying a pleasant poetic
repetition - an echoing of ideas - carried from the past directly into the
future. The Last Jedi is not a familiar experience at all. It's a film of
bold, controversial and daring choices that turn almost every idea in The Force Awakens on its head.
The Star Wars universe has always hinged on the clear-cut
portrayals of light and dark. In The Empire Strikes Back (the high watermark of all Star Wars movies), the sparse lines of dialogue outlining the cerebral,
passive qualities of the Jedi against the ‘easy and more seductive’
elements of the dark side are expressed with such clarity and precision, it seems almost heretical to tamper with the purity of those ideas. But The Last Jedi chooses to look at good and evil through a different lens, challenging the
thematic foundations of the series, proposing that the world we live in is neither black nor
white, but grey.
On a visual level, Rian Johnson dresses our central
characters accordingly to archetype - heroes look like heroes and villians like
villians - but instead makes their arcs murkier, while introducing new characters
that are more mercurial and ambiguous than we’ve seen before. The film also
plays with the idea of truth as perception, showing us different versions of the
same memory, with the effect of deepening the subtext of the more well-known
characters in the series – all of which is very impressive.
While dealing in darkness and moral ambiguity, Johnson's direction cleverly offsets the heavier moments with an equal balance of humour –
switching seamlessly between contrasting tones. The playful Porgs and other
Monty Python-esque creatures we encounter on Skywalker’s secluded planet
Ahch-To provide much of the comic relief, along with a smattering of other gags -
ranging from laugh-out-loud to eye-rolling-ly cheesy.
The Last Jedi also has some of
the most visually arresting moments of any Star Wars film to date – lightsabre
set pieces have never looked so lavishly staged and the visual effects are put
together with a sense of drama, physicality, and even the abstract and surreal.
