Ep. VIII - The Last Jedi
To me, this was a good movie that failed to be great simply because it had some major distractions. It seemed to owe a lot of the fantastic Battlestar Galactica episode titled "33," which, to me, was a great idea. It just fell a bit flat in the execution. As explained in the last section, if two things were tweaked satisfactorily, I think this could have been a great movie. The major complaints that I hear voiced the most (Luke's character, Snoke getting killed off, Rey being a "nobody," and Holdo keeping the escape plan a mystery) completely fall of deaf ears as far as I am concerned. To me, they are actually some of the movie's greatest strenghts and are exactly in line with what I would realistically expect.
Three things that worked:
1. Snoke's throne room. So much awesome.
2. Luke's arc. I get the naysayers. But, to me, this was a VERY logical arc and had a fantastic payoff in ROS. Some of the specifics, like the space cow, were awkward to took me out of the moment. But Luke being cynical and having to be forced to finally grapple with his failures and his fears, and how that manifested itself was done very well.
3. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the "Holdo Maneuver" scene. It was just beautifully shot. Not much more needs to be said.
Three things that didn't:
1. Canto Bight as a whole. So much about this side quest was a mess. I could have lived with it if it were fixed. But as a whole, this entire sequence was a huge miss for me. For starters, to be a casino planet, the scale was totally off. I have been in large casinos. I have been in small, backwater casinos that just felt empty and sad. This felt like the latter. It didn't even have the scale of a single, large casino, much less a casino planet. That set a bad tone right from the get go. And things went downhill from there.
2. Phasma. There was the hope of a payoff for this character that was not delivered on in the previous film. And I think we almost got it. The extended scene got us closer. But it still didn't quite get us there, and I couldn't help but feel that we got teased with a great executioner character that never lived up to the potential that had been teased.
3. Rose stopping Finn from taking out the canon. It was dumb. And pointless. And it created so many other problems (e.g., them being able to somehow get around the walkers and get back into the base). I get the theme they were trying to hammer home here, and it wasn't a bad idea in the abstract. But in the execution, it completely failed.
Minor tweaks that could have made it better: I hate to basically review "the movie I wish this was" rather than "the movie we got," and to substitute my own judgment for that of the filmmakers. But that's kinda what this section is about, to a small extent. To me, other than the prequels, this film could have benefitted the most from a couple of minor tweaks that could have had major impact. First off, given that the entire film's conflict centered around the slow chase, I personally needed a bit more explanation of how and why events played out this way. We got a short line about how the resistance ships were lighter and faster. But I think most of us felt like that wasn't good enough. The First Order needed to grapple with that a bit more. Maybe even a couple of lines where they just said something like, "Well, we could just have a couple of ships jump around in front of them and cut them off, couldn't we?" "Yes, we could. But today we are completely stamping out the last vestiges of this pathetic resistance movement, and we are going to make them suffer through every last agonizing moment of their impending extinction, so let's just follow along behind and toy with them as they experience every last drop of their ability to run gradually evaporate before their eyes." I would have been fine with something like that. It didn't have to be something big. And it didn't have to be militarily sound. The sample dialog I just wrote is stupidly arrogant. But it is the type of stupid arrogance the bad guys in this type of film would display, so it feels logical in the context of the film. I needed something like that.
Second, fix Canto Bight. I mentioned the scale issue. And the tone of it all, and the rest of the execution of it, just felt completely off. From a storytelling perspective, Johnson and co. needed something more fun and up-beat that had a bit of action to it, and I get that. The A and B storylines, while being compelling, were slow by their very nature. They needed something else going on. So Canto Bight, unfortunately, had to exist. But it ended up being a keystone cops sequence, and some badly misplaced attempted social commentary, in an environment whose scale felt unbelievably off and completely took me out of the moment. I'm not going to do my typical thing of providing a concise rewrite because I can't really think of a way to rewrite this plotline. But it badly needed it, in my opinion.