Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
Directed by Rian Johnson
Rey develops her newly discovered abilities with the guidance of Luke Skywalker, who is unsettled by the strength of her powers. Meanwhile, the Resistance prepares to do battle with the First Order.
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43 films that influenced Star Wars: The Last Jedi
What critics say influenced Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Johnson embraces and extends George Lucas’ original Akira Kurosawa fetish, incorporating visual nods to Kagemusha and Ran while borrowing a bit of Rashomon for the most important backstory reveal.
The director takes Luke into territory just about no one saw coming, making him a lone samurai full of heartache and regret more akin to heroes in Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo or Kagemusha than he is the dashing young champion of something like The Hidden Fortress .
A climactic confrontation between the beleaguered Alliance and the First Order boasts a visual splendor that recalls “Kagemusha” and “Ran.”
Johnson embraces and extends George Lucas’ original Akira Kurosawa fetish, incorporating visual nods to Kagemusha and Ran while borrowing a bit of Rashomon for the most important backstory reveal.
A climactic confrontation between the beleaguered Alliance and the First Order boasts a visual splendor that recalls “Kagemusha” and “Ran.”
Writer-director Rian Johnson approaches the franchise with a bold new vision, influenced by everything from Ran to Spaceballs.
Johnson embraces and extends George Lucas’ original Akira Kurosawa fetish, incorporating visual nods to Kagemusha and Ran while borrowing a bit of Rashomon for the most important backstory reveal.
One scene is replayed three times with different interpretations but it’s hardly Rashomon and a movie this long can’t afford to dawdle.
Luke's selfish reasons for tutoring Rey, along with multiple Rashomon-like flashbacks revealing the betrayal of his former apprentice, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), reflect a modern-day cynicism that fans of the original Star Wars trilogy might find jarring (but not Jar Jarring, fortunately).
And her unexpected connection with Kylo (they’re on a first name basis now) complicates matters, as does the Rashomon like retelling of what really went down at Luke’s doomed Jedi academy.
It leads to a series of flashbacks that might have come across as contrived in lesser hands, but Johnson conceives these past skeletons as a “Rashomon”-like puzzle.
This is explained to Rey by both Skywalker and Ren, with Johnson cleverly using a “Rashomon”-like storytelling style to do it.
The director takes Luke into territory just about no one saw coming, making him a lone samurai full of heartache and regret more akin to heroes in Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo or Kagemusha than he is the dashing young champion of something like The Hidden Fortress .
There’s Kurosawa in it, both the rowdy fabulism of The Hidden Fortress and the impressionist choreography of Ran , a sword fight in a scarlet throne room that draws on Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffman , even an overt nod to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch .
(All very fitting since, after all, “A New Hope” is a loose remake of Kurosawa's “The Hidden Fortress.”)
The director takes Luke into territory just about no one saw coming, making him a lone samurai full of heartache and regret more akin to heroes in Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo or Kagemusha than he is the dashing young champion of something like The Hidden Fortress .
While The Last Jedi isn’t a mirror image of The Empire Strikes Back in the same way that The Force Awakens was to A New Hope, there are intentional parallels between the sophomoric chapters in these respective trilogies.
For all its parallels to The Empire Strikes Back in structure, themes, and existential crises, The Last Jedi is the funniest of all the Star Wars films (not including the unintentionally funny Star Wars Holiday Special ).
While there are elements nodding to “The Empire Strikes Back” — the second and best of the original three — “The Last Jedi” is no copycat.
Yes, The Last Jedi does reference Empire Strikes Back to a certain extent but not as slavishly as The Force Awaken s mirrored A New Hope .
There’s a reprise of the Empire Strikes Back cave scene (this time rendered as a hall of mirrors) and a hint that Rey is in thrall to the Dark Side, a twist that is unoriginal and half-hearted, comes out of nowhere, and feels completely wrong for a character who radiates goodness.
In the way that The Force Awakens echoed A New Hope , there are definitely some (although far, far fewer) parallels between The Last Jedi and The Empire Strikes Back , but Johnson has a much lighter touch than JJ Abrams.
The impossibly British General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) has found a way to track the rebels through hyper-speed, meaning that the good guys have to constantly keep leaping to safety—an idea that recalls the first episode of the Battlestar Galactica reboot.
It's reminiscent in some ways of the 2003 Battlestar Galactica miniseries where humanity is being rapidly blown to bits by cylons who can track them anywhere.
In a plot point that feels cribbed from an episode of Battlestar Galactica, The First Order now has the ability to track the Rebel fleet through their lightspeed jumps making it only a matter of time before the Resistance fleet runs out of fuel and is overtaken by the First Order.
And while the plot of the First Order chasing down the resistance fleet was exciting, it felt very much like an episode of Battlestar Galactica entitled “33” where the Cylons doggedly pursued the refugee ships through faster-than-light jumps.
Instead, the events with The Resistance take on more of a ticking-clock space opera more similar to the 2004 Battlestar Galactica series.
Poe is faced with issues related to the chain of command, especially in times of crisis – there’s a not too subtle influence of Battlestar Galactica present here.
At one point, he throws in a visual gag that could be interpreted as a nod to Mel Brooks’ 1987 parody “Spaceballs.”
From the very beginning Hux’s scenes are made to feel like lost reels from Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs, and poor Boyega can’t catch a break as Finn is saddled with lame one-liners at every turn.
The beginning of Star Wars: The Last Jedi has more in common with Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs than it does any previous Star Wars , and comedics don’t stop there.
There’s a touch of “ Spaceballs ” and “Robot Chicken” to some of the jokes.
Moments later we see Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren removing that stupid Spaceballs helmet he wore for no reason in the previous picture and smashing it into a thousand pieces.
Writer-director Rian Johnson approaches the franchise with a bold new vision, influenced by everything from Ran to Spaceballs.
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A nostalgia machine it may be, but The Force Awakens was exactly what the Star Wars franchise needed – a loving nod and reminder of why we still look to the stars 40 years after the first entry in the series.
It all started with 2015’s The Force Awakens , when J.J. Abrams decided to turn Episode VII into an ultra-safe reboot of the 1977 original, echoing the story beat for beat in an all-too-lazy attempt to “make things right,” as Max von Sydow cheekily states in the movie’s opening.
It’s surely purposeful for this latest chapter to pay homage to its predecessors, but there’s a limit to the nods, which shouldn’t be surpassed, for fear that it succumbs to the main criticism of “The Force Awakens”: that it’s essentially a remake.
As the second film in the new Star Wars trilogy that began with 2015’s The Force Awakens , it is littered with parallels and allusions to Empire .
If J.J. Abrams’s franchise-rebooting The Force Awakens (2015) was the creation of a boy who lovingly dusted off old toys and put them through their expected poses, its superior sequel is made by a more inventive kid—maybe one with a sideline as his block’s most inspired D&D Dungeon Master—who asks: Why can’t a Rebel fleet be commanded by Laura Dern in a purple wig?
There is something biblical about Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a movie that really wants us to love it, even more so than its crowd-pleasing predecessor, The Force Awakens.
There are fine adventures to be had on that planet, including a stampede of space-horses and a reintroduction to the child-slavery theme that made The Phantom Menace such a hoot.
As bad as the the prequels were (beginning with The Phantom Menace in 1999), they couldn’t take away the magical mythology of my youth.
It calls to mind the droid factory in Attack of the Clones and the pre-podrace sequence in The Phantom Menace .
At 152 minutes, The Last Jedi is the longest of the nine Star Wars films to date — it’s also the only one where the length is felt (that riveting Trade Federation chat that opens The Phantom Menace, though…).
Two, porgs are not the new Jar Jar Binks, but they might end up the new Ewoks (OK, this might have been something only I was concerned about, but ever since “The Phantom Menace,” there is always the danger of the Jar Jar Factor”).
That approach was probably the right move for those films but if the new films continued to focus so intently on the past glories of the saga, they threatened to run the franchise into the ground even more completely than such missteps as “The Phantom Menace” and that “Clone Wars” animated feature.
Unfortunately, The Last Jedi has almost as much Attack of the Clones as it does The Empire Strikes Back in that it’s overlong, under-edited and has at least one particularly long-winded CGI flurry of a sequence that harkens back to the darkest days of the franchise.
Now: I say this as a critic, and as a civilian, who holds little affection for George Lucas’ second trilogy (“Phantom Menace,” “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith”), or for “Return of the Jedi,” for that matter.
It calls to mind the droid factory in Attack of the Clones and the pre-podrace sequence in The Phantom Menace .
The movie-long chase scene (DID YOU KNOW: a star destroyer can be outrun almost indefinitely by a transport), which ends in both awesome and logically maddening fashion, serves primarily as a means to give Finn and Rose (Tran) something to do, but their jaunt to the casino planet of Canto Bight serves little purpose besides introducing Del Toro, updating the cantina scene, and offering up a tired CGI chase scene that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Attack of the Clones.
The longest Star Wars film before Episode VIII was Episode II: Attack of the Clones , which was mired with pacing issues, and Last Jedi is unfortunately no different.
From a technical standpoint, the sequence recalls the opening fight of Revenge of the Sith , where Anakin and Obi-Wan lead a mission to rescue Palpatine from Dooku.
Now: I say this as a critic, and as a civilian, who holds little affection for George Lucas’ second trilogy (“Phantom Menace,” “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith”), or for “Return of the Jedi,” for that matter.
The better-than-anticipated atmosphere paves the way for a briskly-paced second half that culminates with an enthralling battle between Anakin and Obi-Wan, with the film's final stretch leading quite nicely into Lucas' original (and superior) trilogy - which, in the end, secures Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith 's place as a strong capper to an underwhelming prequel series.
That frisson of moviegoing delight was something I hadn't felt from the popular sci-fi franchise since Anakin Skywalker, the future Darth Vader, used his lightsaber to massacre grade school-aged Jedi pupils in “Revenge of the Sith.”
A shade darker than The Force Awakens (but, as an aid to parents, nowhere near as nasty as Revenge Of The Sith ), The Last Jedi does have some lighter moments.
There was Jar Jar Binks; there was Hayden Christensen as a young Darth Vader; there were plans to re-release “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith” in 3D.
One long shot even brings to mind a sword fight in Michael Curtiz's “The Adventures of Robin Hood.”
There’s Kurosawa in it, both the rowdy fabulism of The Hidden Fortress and the impressionist choreography of Ran , a sword fight in a scarlet throne room that draws on Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffman , even an overt nod to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch .
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This is the Michael Powell section of the film, evoking both the weird dreaminess of the great English filmmaker’s Black Narcissus and the rugged half-natural half-mystical landscape of his Hebrides love letter The Edge of the World.
This is the Michael Powell section of the film, evoking both the weird dreaminess of the great English filmmaker’s Black Narcissus and the rugged half-natural half-mystical landscape of his Hebrides love letter The Edge of the World.
Instead of achieving grand operatic depth or the emotional intensity of Fritz Lang’s Die Niebelugend and John Boorman’s Excalibur , Johnson is just goofy enough to keep fans holding on, renewing their dedication to the series and leaving them, like Elvis movie fans, content with their own complaisance.