Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
Having taken her first steps into the Jedi world,
Rey joins Luke Skywalker on an adventure with Leia, Finn and Poe that
unlocks mysteries of the Force and secrets of the past.
Director:
Rian JohnsonStars:
Storyline
Having taken her first steps into the Jedi world, Rey joins Luke
Skywalker on an adventure with Leia, Finn and Poe that unlocks mysteries
of the Force and secrets of the past.
Plot Keywords:
star died before release | star wars | eighth part | part of trilogy | sequel |Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)
Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action and violence. | See all certifications »Parents Guide:
View content advisory »Details
Country:
USALanguage:
EnglishRelease Date:
15 December 2017 (USA) See more »Also Known As:
Ratovi Zvezde: Epizoda 8 - Poslednji Džedaj See more »Company Credits
Technical Specs
Runtime:
Sound Mix:
DTS (DTS: X)| Dolby Surround 7.1 | Dolby Atmos | Dolby Digital | 12-Track Digital Sound (IMAX 12 track)| IMAX 6-TrackColor:
ColorAspect Ratio:
2.39 : 1Did You Know?
Trivia
In the original trilogy, Mark Hamill received top billing in all three films. In "Star Wars: The Force Awakens", Harrison Ford had received top billing while Hamill was second to be billed. Hamill will receive top billing once more in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi." See more »Goofs
When the hospital ship runs out of propellant, it gets slower and starts tilting to the back without any apparent outside influence. This would not happen to any object in space that simply stops being propelled - it would continue on its exact trajectory until stopped by reverse thrust our outside force. See more »Connections
Follows Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983)
Writer/director Rian Johnson’s “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” is a sprawling, incident- and character-packed extravaganza that picks up at the end of “Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens” and guides the series into unfamiliar territory. It’s everything a fan could want from a “Star Wars”
film and then some. Even the sorts of viewers who spend the entire
running time of movies anticipating every plot twist and crowing “called
it!” when they get one right are likely to come up short here. But the
surprises usually don’t violate the (admittedly loose) internal logic of
the universe George Lucas
invented, and when they seem to, it’s because the movie has expanded
the mythology in a small but significant way, or imported a sliver of
something from another variant of Lucas’ creation (Genddy Tartakovsky’s
magnificent TV series “Clone Wars” seems to have influenced the last
act).
The first part of “The Last Jedi” cross-cuts between the remnants of our heroes’ ragtag fleet (led by the late Carrie Fisher’s Leia) running away from the First Order, aka the next-generation version of the Empire; and Rey (Daisy Ridley) on the aquatic planet Ahch-To (gesundheit!) trying to convince the self-exiled Jedi master Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill,
whose sandblasted face becomes truly iconic in close-ups) to overcome
his grief at failing a group of young Jedi trainees and rejoin the
Resistance. The New Order's Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis plus CGI) has grand plans for both Rey and his Darth Vader-obsessed apprentice Kylo Ren (Adam Driver).
The leathery old coot may not be a great bad guy—he’s too much of a
standard-issue deep-voiced sadist, in a Marvel mode—but he is quite the
chess player, and so is Johnson.
I’m being vague here
on purpose. Suffice to say that, despite being comprised of variations
on things we’ve been experiencing directly (in “Star Wars” films) and
indirectly (in “Star Wars”-inspired entertainment) since 1977, “The
Last Jedi” still manages to maneuver in unexpected ways, starting with
the decision to build a whole film around a retreat where the goal is
not to win but to avoid being wiped out. Along that narrative backbone
“The Last Jedi” strings what amount to several tight, often hastily
devised mini-missions, each of which either moves the heroes (or
villains) closer to their goals or blows up in their faces. The story
resolves in lengthy, consecutive climaxes which, refreshingly, don’t
play like a cynical attempt to pad things out. Old business is resolved,
new business introduced.
And from scene to scene, Johnson
gives veteran characters (Chewbacca and R2-D2 especially) and those who
debuted in “The Force Awakens” enough screen time to showcase them at
their best while also introducing compelling new faces (including a
heroic maintenance worker, Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose Tico; a serene and tough vice admiral in the Resistance, played by Laura Dern; a sort of “safecracker” character played by Benicio Del Toro).
Johnson’s
script does a better job than most sequels of giving the audience
both what it wants and what it didn’t know it wanted. The movie leans
hard into sentiment, most of it planted in the previous installment,
some related to the unexpected passing of one of its leads (Fisher—thank
goodness they gave her a lot of screen time here, and thrilling things
to do). But whenever it allows a character to cry (or invites us to) the
catharsis feels earned. It happens rather often—this being a film
preoccupied with grieving for the past and transcending it, populated by
hounded and broken people who are afraid hope will be snuffed out.
Rey’s anguish at not knowing who her parents are and Kylo Ren’s
trauma at killing his own father to advance toward his "destiny"
literally as well as figuratively mirror each other. Lifting a bit of
business glimpsed briefly in “The Empire Strikes Back” and "Return of the Jedi,"
Johnson lets these all-powerful characters telepathically “speak” to
each other across space as easily as you or I might Skype with a friend.
This gimmick offers so much potential for drama and wry humor that you
might wonder why nobody did it earlier.
Sometimes "The
Last Jedi" violates our expectations in a cheeky way that stops short of
telling super-fans to get over themselves. There’s a touch of “Spaceballs”
and “Robot Chicken” to some of the jokes. Snoke orders Kylo to “take
off that ridiculous helmet,” Luke chastises an old friend for showing a
nostalgic video by muttering “That was a cheap move,” and an early gag
finds one of the heroes calling the bridge of a star destroyer and
pretending to be stuck on hold. This aspect adds a much-needed dash of
self-deprecating humor (“The Force Awakens” was often a stitch as well,
especially when Han Solo, Chewbacca, BB-8 and John Boyega’s
James Garner-like hero/coward Finn were onscreen), but without going so
meta that "The Last Jedi" turns into a smart-alecky thesis paper on
itself.
The movie works equally well as an earnest adventure
full of passionate heroes and villains and a meditation on sequels and
franchise properties. Like “The Force Awakens,” only more so, this one
is preoccupied with questions of legacy, legitimacy and succession, and
includes multiple debates over whether one should replicate or reject
the stories and symbols of the past. Among its many valuable lessons is
that objects have no worth save for the feelings we invest in them,
and that no individual is greater than a noble idea.
Johnson has made some very good theatrical features, but the
storytelling here owes the most to his work on TV’s “Breaking Bad,” a
playfully convoluted crime drama that approached each new installment
like a street illusionist: no matter where you decided to fix your eyes,
the source of delight was always in the hand you weren’t looking at.
There are points where the film appears to have miscalculated or made an
outright lame choice (this become worrisome in the middle, when Dern’s
Admiral Holdo and Oscar Isaac’s
hotshot pilot Poe Dameron are at loggerheads), but then you realize
that it was a setup for another payoff that lands harder because you
briefly doubted that “The Last Jedi” does, in fact, know what it’s
doing.
This determination to split the difference between
surprise and inevitability is encoded in “The Last Jedi” down to the
level of scenes and shots. How many Star Destroyers, TIE fighters,
Imperial walkers, lightsabers, escape pods, and discussions of the
nature of The Force have we seen by now? Oodles. But Johnson manages to
find a way to present the technology, mythology and imagery in a way
that makes it feel new, or at least new-ish, starting with a shot of
Star Destroyers materializing from hyperspace in the sky over a planet
(as seen from ground level) and continuing through images of Rebel ships
being raked apart by Imperial cannon fire like cans on a shooting range
and, hilariously, a blurry video conference in which the goggle-eyed
warrior-philosopher Maz Kanata (voiced by Lupita Nyong'o) delivers important information while engaging in a shootout with unseen foes. (She calls it a “union matter.”)
There’s
greater attention paid here to color and composition than in any entry
since “The Empire Strikes Back.” Particularly dazzling are Snoke’s
throne room, with its Dario Argento-red walls and red-armored guards,
and the final battle, set on a salt planet whose flat white surfaces get
ripped up to reveal shades of crimson. (Seen from a distance, the
battlefield itself seems to be bleeding.) The architecture of the action
sequences is something to behold. A self-enclosed setpiece in the
opening space battle is more emotionally powerful than any action
sequence in any blockbuster this year, save the "No Man's Land" sequence
of "Wonder Woman," and it's centered on a character we just met.
There are spots where the film can’t figure out how to get the
characters to where it needs them to be and just sort of shrugs and
says, “And then this happened, now let’s get on with it.” But
there are fewer such moments than you might have gone in prepared to
forgive—and really, if that sort of thing were a cinematic crime, Howard Hawks would have gotten the chair. Most importantly, the damned thing moves, both in a plot sense and in the sense of a skilled choreographer-dancer
who has visualized every millisecond of his routine and practiced it to
the point where grace seems to come as easily as breathing. Or
skywalking.
FINAL RATING: 9/10 FOR THE GENRE AND 8/10 OVERALL. THE MOVIE IS STILL A GOOD ONE AND FANS LIKE I AM WILL LOVE IT AND WATCH IT SEVERAL TIMES BUT IT TRULY HAS IT'S WEAKNESSES AS POINTED OUT WHICH I DID NOT EXPECT.
Thanks for reading and have fun watching movies.
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