Stars Wars: The Last Jedi
J. Plascencia
Star Wars: the Last Jedi is, despite some seeming controversy around it, a Star Wars movie, and due to that there’s not a lot I can help you with as a reviewer. There are big laser fights in space and there are bad guys and good guys and a little robot ball whose purpose I am unsure of. I should mention that this is actually the most suspenseful and possibly most cinematic of these films, and the narrative structure is quite interesting at times. This is all to say that I liked it, but I don’t feel qualified to talk about the Star Wars-ness of it all. I would, however, like to discuss one of the more interesting factors of the film: its discussion of modern communication.
The film opens with a humorous scene in which one of our heroes essentially prank calls his enemies to bring their guard down. The scene is funny, but it also establishes a recurring theme of the film making the most explicit social commentary of the often politically charged franchise, about the benefits and shortcomings of modern methods of long-distance communication. Holograms and communicators, connections and projections through the Force serve as futuristic analogues for discussion through text or social media throughout the runtime of the picture.
The most interesting example of this comes from a subplot involving the characters Rey and Kylo Ren. Their connection through the Force leads each of them to learn more about their counterpart throughout the first few acts of the story, from the other person’s perspective. This leads Rey to believe that Kylo Ren can be turned good, and Kylo to believe that Rey can be turned evil. Both are proven wrong in the end. It’s a reflection of a kind of incident that can happen all too often through the internet, of anonymity leading to manipulation or misunderstanding on both sides of a relationship, and it’s surprisingly topical from a series of films that frequently seems to rely on callbacks to its glory days to pull in an audience.
Then there’s the final encounter between Kylo and Luke Skywalker, a dramatic exchange of words and blows that ends in the reveal that Kylo has been swinging at an ethereal projection. This could be a comment on the aggression some of us build up on Twitter, attacking people that users aren’t even really seeing. The sequence also ends in the death of Luke Skywalker, through exertion rather than combat. Perhaps a grim reminder of the inability for some members of older generations to keep up with changing times, or a choice to live without that technology. Either way it marks a step into new territory for the franchise in more ways than one.
These scenes and others show an interesting willingness to explore (admittedly not extremely important) issues of today in a way that is uncommon for other studio blockbusters of the same kind. Hopefully it is a sign of more things to come, rather than an outlier in a sea of similarity.
