 |
| Image credit: Polygon |
Well friends, it’s that time of year again: another Star Wars movie to get excited about! I must say that this time
around I was a little more excited about the nostalgia aspect of this movie
rather than Force Awakens, which left
me completely in the lurch. With Last
Jedi I was excited by the posters and how they were, aesthetically, an
inviting time warp back to the 1970s, rather than a newfangled labyrinth of
multiple characters blending in to one another and all encompassed by a giant
lightsbaber or Darth Vader mask. As to the movie itself, nostalgia screwed me
over again!
The film picks up where Force
Awakens left off, with Rey finding Luke Skywalker in the hope of recruiting
him to help the Resistance overthrow the First Order, ruled by Overlord Snoke
and Kylo Ren. Meanwhile the Resistance, led by Princess Leia, faces troubles
keeping out of the First Order’s clutches as they are ambushed and left with
limited fuel and a tracking beacon aboard their fleet. Finn wakes up with a risky
plan to disarm the tracker, but time is against him as their enemies close in.
Director Rian Johnson doesn’t so much make a Star Wars movie with this flick rather than pays homage to the original
classics and it really just proves that maybe the franchise should not have
been continued… The thing that annoyed me most of all with The Last Jedi is its almost shot-for-shot, plot point-for-plot point
resemblance to both Empire Strikes Back
and Return of the Jedi. So many huge
and climactic scenes are carbon copies of the originals and this decreases the
suspense and thrills and completely throws off the pacing of the entire film
with where they occur within the story. So many scenes that are obviously meant
to be dramatic and significant end on an anticlimactic note and, as if
in response to this, the film continues to roll on rather than just end. Then
we have the added appearance of random cute pokemon that really have no place
in the story other than to make people squeak with “aw”, which is a pretty lame
writer’s move and a little reminiscent of the prequels, which many of us don’t
care to recall.
 |
| Image credit: Star Wars Underworld |
In the catch-22 that is fast-becoming this instalment of the series,
nostalgia is working against me –seeing as I can only speak for myself. Force Awakens promised to transport me
back to being a kid and watching A New
Hope and then totally reneged. This time around I was expecting
nothing -the safest mindset to be
in- and I was still screwed over as I felt warm nostalgia with the multiple plots, which are
totally those of Empire and Return of the Jedi, got excited at the
feeling, and then proceeded to suffer from massive displacements of time as
scenes from the end of Return
happened before opening scenes of Empire
and argh *goes cross-eyed*. As a result of this I found myself feeling that the
entire film lacked original flavour, it was simply loaded with MSG, and I
didn’t care about any of the characters, what they stood for, or what they were
doing. Indeed, my enjoyment of the movie came from being that person who was
making comments and laughing at my own jokes throughout the film.
While CGI has progressed to the point of being able to cast dead actors
–may Carrie Fisher rest in peace- I still felt that this movie was a little
overloaded with it, thus suffering a little as the prequels did with Hollywood
techno-glamour and two-dimensional characters.
I love Star Wars, I really do,
but the franchise has not so much been resurrected from the shambles of the
prequels as sewn together from its dead and dismembered parts a la Frankenstein
and I am finding myself more and more disillusioned as the starry blue credits
and accompanying fanfare roll.
Starring: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Daisy
Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Lupita Nyong’o, Domhnall
Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Gwendoline Christie, Kelly Marie Tran, Lilly Cole,
Laura Dern, and Benicio Del Toro
Year: 2017
Rating: M
No comments:
Post a Comment