Star Wars is Unhinged, Insane Joy — Why The Last Jedi is Awesome

Note: Art is always a subjective experience, especially for an Expanded Universe as massive and all-encompassing as Star Wars. So, your mileage may vary, and you may disagree with me on this. This is fine! Enjoy Star Wars (or don’t) on your own terms. But you’re wrong. Don’t @me.

Also, this contains The Last Jedi spoilers. Obviously.

The Last Jedi is by no means perfect. It’s too long, tries to cover too many stories and is generally in too many places at the same time. But for all that, The Last Jedi is a fantastic Star Wars movie because it embraces what Star Wars is all about — pure, insane joy and chaos.

Let me back up a bit. There’s one sound that tells me very clearly that I’m watching a Star Wars film. It’s not the snap-hiss of a lightsaber, a Wilhelm scream or the sounds of blaster fire. It’s the yell WHOOOOOO!!! as a spaceship (usually an X-Wing) speeds into impossible odds, nuking a bunch of enemies into oblivion.

It’s in the original Death Star run:

It’s in Return of the Jedi:

It’s in the Empire Strikes Back:

It’s in the Force Awakens:

It’s even in this deeply exploitative Battlefront ad:

That primal yell gets to the core of what Star Wars is — hotshot heroes taking on impossible odds to save the day, in a glorious, chaotic mess. The Last Jedi fully embraces that ethos — sometimes to the story’s benefit, sometimes to its detriment, but always hitting the throttle and speeding into impossible odds, screaming WHOOOOO!!! the whole time. It’s awesome.

Star Wars and its Hotheaded Heroes

The Jedi get all the cool Force powers in Star Wars, but I’d argue the true Star Wars fantasy figure isn’t really a Jedi — it’s a hotshot pilot. Jedi have lightsabers, true. But Jedi also have to follow rules, listen to a lot of instructions and make good decisions, which is honestly fairly lame. The incredibly boring Jedi of the prequel trilogy argue fairly comprehensively that a galaxy full of Jedi kind of sucks.

No, the archetypal Star Wars hero is a hotshot pilot who will shoot off their mouth, fly into impossible odds, make dumb decisions and look awesome doing it. Yeah, Luke is the hero of the first trilogy. But Luke isn’t just a Jedi, he’s also the best pilot in the galaxy and his coming out party is nuking the Death Star. One of the best things the new Star Wars trilogy did was make sure two of the new heroes were fantastic pilots.

Actually, scratch that. There ARE interesting Jedi in the Star Wars films. But they tend to be the incompetent, flawed and stupid ones. Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan is extremely compelling, even amid the overstuffed and bad prequels, because he is in over his head and is just trying to keep things together. Original Trilogy and The Last Jedi Yoda is a smarmy, unhelpful troll and he’s hilarious. Luke Skywalker runs off to Cloud City despite being explicitly warned not to, and gets owned by his dad. Rey has no concept of danger and constantly makes the worst possible choices.

That’s because the best Star Wars characters in general are kind of nuts. Han Solo is an aggressively amoral smuggler with serious commitment issues. K-2SO is a psychopath. Lando Calrissian betrays his best friend, and people get over that pretty quickly? Donnie Yen is a totally blind Force devotee who has no fear whatsoever. When competent, sober people show up in Star Wars, they’re either there to be supportive side characters who back up the main characters’ insane plans (Mon Mothma, Admiral Raddus) or aggressively undermined (Cassian).

And why not! This is a universe where the bad guys keep making giant superweapons that get nuked because no one patches their one glaring vulnerability. The bad guys also have an inexhaustible string of exchangeable mooks, even though the logistics cost of completely outfitting millions of Stormtroopers must be completely nuts. If a serious logistics and supply chain officer ever looked at the Empire or Rebellion’s plans, they would immediately fire everybody involved. No wonder the best characters in this franchise are crazy, nothing about this series makes sense. WHEEEEEEEE!!!

As a sidebar, this is also why Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor: Ragnarok weirdly feel kind of like Star Wars movies. They’re all about an intergalactic crew of misfits facing down insane odds, strapped to a ship they’re piloting into the face of overwhelming evil. And they’re also awesome.

Star Trek characters have thoughtful, long discussions about the best course of action and the philosophical implications of each choice. Star Wars characters fly their ship into impossible odds, kicking butt and having a ton of fun. Star Trek is good. Star Wars is AWESOME.

Embrace Chaos

Rian Johnson fully understands this, and so The Last Jedi full-heartedly slams its foot on the accelerator and barrels heedlessly into chaos.

• A throne room battle between Kylo Ren, Rey, Snoke and the Imperial Guards that reads like it was written as a fanfic? Done.
• Shirtless Kylo Ren and Rey can now read each other’s minds? Absolutely.
• AT-ATs facing off against landspeeders on a red mineral planet? Beautiful, I love it.
• Send two of the main characters to Space Montenegro, where they stage a rebellion with small children and giant antelope? Love it.
• Drop in Benicio Del Toro’s character with no explanation, reveal him as a dick, then parachute him out? IN THE MOVIE.
• Wait, Captain Phasma’s back? WHO CARES LOL THIS WILL BE AWESOME!!!

Some of these choices really work (Luke Skywalker phase shifting to the mineral planet), some of these really don’t (Leia using the Force to pull herself back into the ship), and some of these open up huge plot holes that will have to be retroactively corrected by a one sentence throwaway in a tie-in novel that will be extensively analyzed on Wookiepedia (Vice Admiral Holdo’s hyperspace ramming).

But all of it is completely awesome, done with such total commitment to the bit that you can’t help grinning. In doing so, not only does The Last Jedi deliver a fantastic viewing experience — it actually helps strengthen some of the weak points of The Force Awakens.

• Were you annoyed by Rey’s obsession with her parents, and the obvious foreshadowing therein? Well, her parents don’t matter at all. Her desire to know more about her parents is just an orphan’s wish to add meaning to her life, adding an important layer of weakness to the character.
• Frustrated that Finn was just a bumbling coward in The Force Awakens? Watch him finish his transformation from coward, to righteous hero, to man who learns that heroism isn’t everything.
• Roll your eyes at Kylo Ren’s obvious Darth Vader cosplay? Supreme Leader Snoke agrees! Kylo Ren beats the shit out of his helmet ten minutes into the movie.
• Want more of General Hux? Watch him get hilariously owned by every single person he talks to. It’s awesome.
• Want more of Poe Dameron? See maybe the best and most compelling character arc in the movie.
• Wish there was more BB-88? He’s taking over A GODDAMN AT-ST.

The Force Awakens was a fine movie that had to pull off an insane balancing act, and somehow turned out okay. It’s an okay movie! But not only is The Last Jedi a fun movie, it makes The Force Awakens fun too.

Finally, The Last Jedi’s almost total commitment to insanity means that when they do decide to subvert expectations, it hits HARD. The entire movie sets you up to believe that Finn, Rose and Poe are the plucky underdogs needing to save the crew from their stupid, incompetent Vice Admiral Holdo. Then, when the twist comes that actually, Holdo’s the good one and they’re the incompetent ones, it blows you out of your seat. This is a huge and extremely difficult to pull off shift that’s needed to complete Poe’s arc of maturity, and the movie pulls it off beautifully.

The Joy of Fighting Inevitable Evil

Some of the complaints I’ve seen about The Last Jedi center on the unexplained origin of Snoke and The First Order. There is some argument to be made that the new trilogy misses out on a storytelling opportunity by not covering the rise of the First Order — where did these guys come from, and what happened after the good guys won?

There’s some truth to that, and there’s a part of me that wishes they’d made a more serious effort to adapt the Thrawn trilogy of novels, which does that story very well. But that argument misses that we already had a version of the “evil corrupting the system” story in the Star Wars universe. That was the prequels, and they sucked.

Now, the issues with the prequels go extremely deep, but it is important to note that Lucas was trying to do something different with these movies. He showed a world where the Jedi had won, where the galaxy was at peace, but there was a rising, creeping evil. And those movies totally blew.

Part of the reason, I would argue, is that it’s very hard to embrace the joyful chaos in a movie where the evil is creeping and insidious, rather than powerful and overwhelming. Most of the prequels involve Obi-Wan and Anakin investigating trade deals, noticing small areas of corruption, and slowly discovering there is an issue. Which, yeah, is boring and badly written. But it’s also realistic! Who would Obi-Wan even charge into impossible odds against? His side controls the government!

In fact, the best WHOOOO!!! moment in the prequel trilogy probably comes when Chancellor Palpatine goes completely nuts on Mace Windu and a bunch of Jedi. It’s got everything — overwhelming odds against Palpatine, an awesome charge, and a couple amazingly corny and awesome Star Wars lines (“I am the Senate” and “It’s treason, then”).

Thanks in part to a limp script, and an inspired performance by Ian McDiarmid, somehow the best Star Wars moment goes to the bad guy. That’s just messed up.

So, I’m actually glad they took they took the direction they did. The best Star Wars story is about the fight of an upstart underdog, fighting for what is good and true against an overwhelming evil. It’s what shows the brilliance of heroes like Rey and Luke, brings some optimism back to dispirited pessimists like Finn and Han, and gives warriors like Poe and Leia something bigger to fight for. The best Star Wars is when there is unstoppable evil to be fought, faced and dunked on by a tiny but motivated force for good.

That means for there to be a good Star Wars story, there has to be an unstoppable tide of evil, somewhere. The forces of light may prevail, and Darth Vader may throw the Emperor into the Death Star’s core, but eventually Supreme Leader Snoke will arise from ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to lead a First Order to dominate the galaxy, necessitating the rise of a new generation of heroes.

So yes, Rey and Finn and Poe will probably eventually triumph over the First Order, and get their happy ending. But then there will almost certainly be a new tide of evil that rises to take over what they’ve created. This will continue until Disney gets tired of printing money (never).

Is this depressing, that your heroes will eventually be overcome by the tides of darkness? Maybe, a little bit! You could sit and be sad about the inevitability of evil in this universe.

Or you could pick up your lightsaber, grab the nearest bunch of scraggly ne’er do-well smugglers, jump in your X-Wing and yell WHOOOO!!! as you charge straight down the throat of impossible odds. Because this is Star Wars, the galaxy of adventure and chaos, and if you’re not having fun facing down unstoppable evil, you’re doing it wrong.