It's long, I know. Sorry. What Rian Johnson has done requires exploration.I'll start by saying I'm a lifelong Star Wars fan and I've seen TLJ twice now. I love the movie, but not necessarily because I think it's an amazing Star Wars movie. Rian Johnson (and by extension Kathleen Kennedy) have done an incredible job really turning Star Wars on its head while still being...well...Star Wars.Star Wars fans, including myself, have become accustomed to a straightforward style of storytelling. What you see is what you get. Good guys, bad guys, light, dark, big scary bad ship/weapon/base, space wizardry, lazer swords, uppity droids, and so on. All the stuff we love. It's all very on-the-nose, very straight forward, often very serious...and amazing.Rian Johnson provides some of this in TLJ. We know the good guys and the bad guys. The bad guys have big scary ships and weapons, and the good guys are on the ropes. Our heroes eventually overcome the long odds and live to fight another day. Buuuut, there's something not quite right about it. Something that feels kind of off. Sure enough, if you check twitter or much of reddit you'll see people discussing and describing the issues with TLJ. The pacing, the scattered and sometimes frivolous plot lines, the Deus Ex Machina used to resolve many tight situations, and on and on.This is the movie on the surface. This is the first level of The Last Jedi. This is the level that casual moviegoers will see, the level that doesn't sit right with many Star Wars fans, and that will probably be hated, at least at first, by fanboys.The Tragedy of General Hux The GoonThe opening sequence sets up so much of Rian Johnson's intention. It establishes General Hux as the stereotypical evil Imperial Officer. He's so arrogant, so sure of victory, so quick to claim victory. It borders on caricature really. When Poe hails him he immediately flies into an arrogant tirade, like we're familiar with from Tarkin, Palpatine, Dooku, and so on. This is what we want to see, this is what's familiar.But Johnson immediately exposes the some of the silliness of this character type, and turns Hux into a joke. Johnson is pointing out that the downfall of many of the Star Wars villains have been caused by a borderline comic level of arrogance leading to an inability to use the most obvious strategies or precautions. This plays out with the Dreadnaught's captain literally calling out all their mistakes, in play-by-play. Poe is only one fighter, it doesn't make any sense that he would be trying to destroy this huge ship. He's attacking the surface guns, they should have launched the fights five minutes ago, CHARGE THE CANON, and so on. If they just would have immediately launched fighters... Tarkin's arrogance and the fatal flaw in the original Death Star (Rogue One's explanation not withstanding) is a great past example of what Johnson is calling back too. Hux is the ultimate Imperial goon, over confident and blind all-the-way even as he's bested again and again, not to mention toyed with, berated, and abused by his Sith overlords.Poe Dameron - The John McClane of Star WarsThere are many more examples of this throughout the movie. Poe's character is treated the same way. His 'shoot first, ask question later' attitude is what we're accustomed too, but there are never any consequences. Johnson shows us that acting like that HAS consequences, like losing the entire bombing fleet. Things can't always magically work out. Leia herself points this out several times. Johnson wanted to make sure the audience got the message.Johnson designed the movie to serve these purposes. This is why some of standard Star Wars elements don't quite fit right. Couldn't Vice Admiral Holdo just tell Poe that the plan was to slip away using a stealth generator to a nearby Rebel base? Later on in the film, after he sends Finn and Rose on an impossible mission, starts a mutiny, and gets stunned by Leia, he agrees that it's a good plan. He literally says it something like "That might work." So why not avoid ALL of that and just tell him the moment he first asks Holdo about the plan? Yet again Johnson is using tropes and foibles of Star Wars to prove a point.But....why?I could go on forever with everything Johnson has done to flip the script (I don't know if the pun is intended or not.) I haven't even touched on Luke, Finn and Rose's round trip of unimportance, Snoke's untimely demise, Rey's parentage. Over and over again Johnson subverts expectations.Real quick - Two of my personal favoritesWhen Luke is giving Rey her first lesson. He describes the force, not unlike how Obi-wan described it to him in ANH. It's what seems like a great call back moment. Luke finally passing on what he has learned, Rey learning the true nature of the force for the first time and how does Rey respond? "Yea, but...what is it?" Immediately to a joke. It's like a Star Wars fan explaining the force to someone who has never seen a Star Wars movie.The second one is Luke's brief interaction with R2 on the Falcon. Luke says he will never help and R2 plays the original "help me Obi-wan Kenobi" recording. Tugging at the heartstrings of Star Wars fans everywhere. Luke literally says "That was a cheap move." Because using nostalgia like that, though enjoyable, is a cheap move.The intention here is not to spoof or make fun of Star Wars. It's not to piss off fans. It's too start to build a (hopefully) even better Star Wars. Free of the baggage we all, as fans, carry with us. Metaphorically ripping off the band-aid. To point it out to us, to make it painfully obvious.We can still get everything we love out of Star Wars movies - Lightsabers and blasters, space battles and ground assaults, Space wizards, practical effect creatures, and uppity droids. Most importantly we can have characters we love in the world we love. What we don't need is the characters of the past turned into repetitive caricatures. The uber arrogant Imperial officer making the same mistakes, the all knowing teacher giving the same lessons, the overly impulsive hotshot who never loses, and so on.Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.-Kylo RenThen again, maybe I'm giving them too much credit. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ via /r/StarWars http://ift.tt/2BFAxa1
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