Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson. 2017.
OK, I’ve seen the other new Star Wars films… I think… And I saw the original ones back in the 80s. And I saw the first of the prequels.
In short, I’m not really a Star Wars fan, but I though the previous one was pretty entertaining and the makeup film was even better.
But I’m having some problems trying to remember who all these characters are. We don’t really get any “as you know Bob, you’re the evil emperor of the Empire” stuff, which is great! But also bewildering.
So I’m reduced to a state of watching a bunch of people I can vaguely remember seeing having a lot of dramatic moments and wondering whether they mean anything.
There’s a lot of portentous stuff here, but the director goes for the laughs in basically any scene. It’s an approach I would guess really freaks out the most deranged Star Wars fans, but it does make for a pretty amusing film.
That said, it’s also a supremely stupid film, and when it’s this stupid, it makes scenes that would otherwise be fun tend towards the tedious. But imdb-ing the director’s career it all makes sense: He did all those risible Breaking Bad episodes that were hailed as the best thing ever in the history of anything. So the sheer stupidity of the film is understandable, but that it’s this amusing is a surprise.
This blog post is part of the Century series.