The Last Jedi

J.J. Abrams' 2015 Star Wars movie The Force Awakens was welcomed for breathing some life into a movie series made into a clunky wreck by George Lucas' three prequels. It was also dinged for rehashing plot, narrative strands and other beats from the three original movies and not really doing enough with its new characters. Considered fairly, Awakens earns both its praise and condemntation.

Rian Johnson, who both wrote and directed the new The Last Jedi, fixes some of Abrams' problems but creates enough of his own to leave one of the biggest questions facing Awakens still unanswered.

Three narrative arcs run parallel in Jedi -- Rey has found the gone-hermit Luke Skywalker and works to get him to either rejoin the fight against the First Order's attempt to reestablish the Empire or train her to use the natural Force abilities she has found. Working against them is Luke's nephew Kylo Ren, who has turned to the Dark Side of the Force and tries to lure Rey over to his side in service of Great Leader Snoke. Hotshot pilot Poe Dameron and General Leia Organa try desperately to shepherd the remnants of the Resistance away from a pursuing Snoke and Kylo, working against time and shrinking fuel supplies. Reformed Stormtrooper Finn joins a Resistance mechanic named Rose to search for someone who can help them defuse the First Order hyperspace tracker.

Johnson avoids some of the note-for-note repeats that hobbled Abrams. He also, along with Daisy Ridley as Rey, Adam Driver as Kylo and Mark Hamill as Luke, creates one of the better narrative threads of the entire series of movies. Driver makes Kylo much more than a one-note villain, even in the scenes where he's the most villainous. And 40 years have improved Mark Hamill's acting no little bit -- his grumpy old Jedi turn is magnitudes more convincing than anything he did in the original trilogy. Especially when he questions the whole purpose of the Jedi and their supposed mastery of the Force -- he's deep in bitter despair over failures personal and public. Ridley balances her poles of questing student and self-sufficient warrior well, alternating between asking Hamill to teach her and push him towards rejoining the fight.

The fleeing Resistance ship storyline is less successful, weighed down by giving Laura Dern's Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo a role in the story that could have easily been filled by Carrie Fisher's General Leia Organa. It serves mainly to help cool the hotshot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) by having him clash with the wiser and more seasoned Leia. The character needs it, since he's pretty much directly responsible for massive Resistance ship and personnel losses.

Its companion plot, in which Finn (John Boyega) and a new character played by Kelly Marie Tran travel to a casino planet to enlist a codebreaker who can help them sneak on board Snoke's ship and disable his tracker, is even less successful and has basically no reason to be present. Its removal would drop Jedi back closer to the two-hour range, tighten up the story and reduce the narrative fuzz that weakens the much stronger Rey-Kylo-Luke plot.

The biggest question Abrams failed to answer in Awakens was "Why is this movie here?" The 1983 Return of the Jedi finished and tidied up most of the conflicts set up by Star Wars and expanded through The Empire Strikes Back. Sure, like every major studio release these movies exist to make money for the studio. But there was nothing left to explore narratively that hadn't been explored forwards and backwards by dozens of novels to warrant a trip back to the Star Wars universe. Johnson hasn't answered the question either, and by saddling his one really solid plot with two others that range from "meh" to "WTH?" he can't really cover up that failure. Jedi is definitely better than Awakens, but in the end it's still short of getting over the "So what?" hump.