Disney
Here’s what I think about Star Wars: The Last Jedi, on the whole: while it’s certainly flawed, its third act (about the last hour, hour-and-fifteen-minutes) is Star Wars at its absolute peak, at least in terms of emotion and excitement. Other than Rogue One — the GOAT Star Wars movie, sorry not sorry — it’s the best Star Wars film that Disney has produced. This is my opinion and I stand by it.
What makes me enjoy The Last Jedi even more, though, is the fact that it seems to deeply trigger a very specific type of Star Wars fan, the ones who I believe give fandom, in general, a bad reputation.
Art — and Star Wars is, in fact, art — is meant to be shaped and molded by the beholder. There is no “correct” way to make a Star Wars film just like there’s no “correct” way to paint. And so the issue that a certain portion of the Star Wars fan base has with The Last Jedi is, in actuality, a grievance with creativity in and of itself. And I find that sad for them and funny for us.
The real enemy of Disney’s Star Wars sequel trilogy was the lack of a cohesive plan from the top, and not Johnson’s creative swings. But that’s another article for another day. Plus, in addition to Knives Out, Glass Onion, and The Last Jedi, it’s crucial to remember when discussing Johnson that he’s also responsible for Looper, one of the best sci-fi films of the century so far, and the “Ozymandias” episodes of Breaking Bad, one of the greatest hours of television ever made.
With Johnson now back in the headlines and giving interviews thanks to the release of Glass Onion, he’s obviously been asked questions about The Last Jedi, thus giving him the opportunity to trigger butthurt Star Wars nerds all over again.
“Look, in terms of the Star Wars movie I did, I tried to give it a hell of an ending,” Johnson told The Atlantic about the film’s controversial conclusion.
“I love endings so much that even doing the middle chapter of the trilogy, I tried to give it an ending. A good ending that recontextualizes everything that came before it and makes it a beautiful object unto itself — that’s what makes a movie a movie. It feels like there’s less and less of that. This whole poisonous idea of creating [intellectual property] has completely seeped into the bedrock of storytelling. Everyone is just thinking, ‘How do we keep milking it?’ I love an ending where you burn the Viking boat into the sea.” [via The Atlantic]
Glass Onion, which stars Daniel Craig, Edward Norton, Kate Hudson, Janelle Monae, Dave Bautista, Kathryn Hawn, Jessica Hewick, Leslie Odom Jr., Madelyn Cline, and Ethan Hawke, is now streaming on Netflix. As for The Last Jedi, you can find that over on Disney+.
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