Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  DAISY RIDLEY

  We had the most incredible time on the island. It was very nerve-wracking going back. The first time I was kind of bumbling around, but coming back the second time I felt so much responsibility, because I felt like I should already know what I was doing.

  RIAN JOHNSON

  Rey has her expectation of Luke when she shows up at the island. But, the first thing I had to really figure out was what Luke’s deal is. Why is he on that island? Because I know he’s not a coward and I know he’s not hiding. I know if he’s there, he’s taken himself out of the fight, and he must have a reason for doing that. What is that reason? That was the puzzle that I felt like I had to solve before I could start anything. And I worked and worked and thought and thought until finally, I got to something where I could put myself in his shoes. Now, let’s see what happens when Rey comes into his life and messes everything up basically by showing up on his doorstep with a lightsaber.

  RAY MORTON

  Finn didn’t have much to do in The Force Awakens. He has much more to do in this movie. The trade-off is he becomes a coward. Finn enters The Last Jedi near the start by finally waking up from the coma he was put into at the end of TFA. Soon after, the Resistance fleet is attacked and decimated by the First Order. Realizing the Resistance is not likely to survive much longer, Finn decides to split. This is a very puzzling and weirdly disrespectful spin to give a character who was originally designed to be a hero.

  RIAN JOHNSON

  I gave a lot of thought to what Finn’s deal would be after The Force Awakens. His big action was leaving the First Order, but he never joins the Resistance. Finn never joins a side; he never does anything for ideological reasons. He just does it for personal ones. He’s just trying to help his friend. In this film, he’s going to have to be pushed into figuring out what he believes in and what he’s fighting for at the end of the day. That seemed interesting to me. The character of Rose, who is played by Kelly Marie Tran, is a true believer in the Resistance. She is kind of idealistic, but she is also very practical. She’s the one who really believes in the cause, and she’s going to be the angel on his shoulder for Finn.

  RAY MORTON

  Finn is talked out of running away by Rose Tico, a Resistance maintenance worker who catches him trying to steal an escape pod. The two are eventually sent on a mission to the casino planet of Canto Bight to find a master codebreaker who can help the Resistance disable the tracking device the First Order is using to hunt down the Rebels. They aren’t able to wrangle the codebreaker they originally came for, but they do meet up with DJ—a criminal codebreaker played in supremely louche fashion by Benicio Del Toro—who persuades them he can do the job. The team sneaks onto the First Order command ship to disable to tracking device, but DJ betrays them to the enemy before the device can be taken out. Finn and Rose escape and eventually join in a ground battle against the First Order. At one crucial point during the battle, Finn decides to sacrifice himself to save his comrades, but Rose—who, it is suggested, has fallen in love with Finn—rams his ship with her own to prevent him from doing this.

  PETER HOLMSTROM

  (cohost, The Rebel & the Rogue podcast)

  The film ends with Rey/Kylo/Snoke’s confrontation—and then there’s the battle on the surface which is … odd. Finn’s arc is there, choosing to sacrifice himself for the larger good, as is Rose’s, choosing to sacrifice the all for the one. Which, like the best of emotional arcs, is the opposite place from where Finn and Rose started from. However, Rey vanishes, which is a shame. Yes, I know she’s flying the Falcon and “pew pewing” all over the place, but it’s too bad she doesn’t do more.

  RAY MORTON

  To sum up, nothing Finn does in the story has the slightest impact on the outcome. Finn and Rose do not find the master codebreaker, they do not disable the tracking device, and Finn does not save the day by sacrificing himself (which, had he done so, would have provided a solid arc—from selfish coward to self-sacrificing hero, for him). So, although he has much more to do in this movie than he did in TFA, Finn’s role is still entirely superfluous. First a coward and then irrelevant. Poor John Boyega.

  Out of the new main characters, Poe fares the best. He has a great introduction in the film—taunting Hux during the opening battle. From there, his character is given some genuine development as the hotshot pilot gradually learns patience and responsibility as Leia grooms him to eventually become the Resistance’s new leader. There’s a strange and unnecessary bit where the impatient Poe decides to lead a mutiny against Resistance commanders he feels aren’t making the right decisions, but Poe is able to overcome this weird hiccup and, in the end, begins to display the mature leadership qualities Leia has been nurturing in him.

  RIAN JOHNSON

  The theme of mentors runs through this whole series, and to me, it made a lot of sense that Leia would be that to Poe. If Leia is the general in charge of the Resistance, her ace pilot is Poe. He’s a great Star Wars character in The Force Awakens, but there’s not a ton of conflict for him. You know who he is because he’s an awesome Star Wars pilot. And that’s perfect. And you love him from the get-go. But with this I wanted to dig in and push him a little more and put him in a tough spot to test his mettle a little bit. Poe and Leia are kind of parallel and very different, but the same way that Luke and Rey play off each other, Leia and Poe play off each other during the course of the film.

  RAY MORTON

  For some reason, most of Leia’s role in the story is given to Laura Dern’s Vice Admiral Holdo. In the script, Leia is injured and becomes comatose after Ren attacks her command ship and wipes out most of the Resistance’s command team, including poor Admiral Ackbar. With Leia out of commission, Holdo takes over the leadership of the Resistance for the middle section of the movie and thus it is she that Poe mutinies against rather than Leia.

  RIAN JOHNSON

  Holdo is the other part of the triangle with Poe and Leia. So it’s Poe, Leia, and Holdo. It was like watching old war films like Twelve O’Clock High and seeing that dynamic inside a small group of soldiers put under high pressure. Since Leia and Poe have such a tight relationship, I thought we needed someone for Poe to have a little more abrasion with. And enter Admiral Holdo. So, she comes in and shakes up that dynamic a little bit. In casting the part, I wanted someone who was going to bring a really unexpected energy to Holdo. I didn’t want to have just a hard-ass admiral; I wanted someone who was going to be not quite what you would expect. Laura has a real humanity to her; even when she’s being tough, she has a softness to her.

  RAY MORTON

  Leia recovers in time to put down Poe’s mutiny and teach her errant flyboy a few valuable lessons about leading wisely. Later, Holdo sacrifices herself to destroy the First Order’s command ship in order to give the rest of the Resistance time to escape. It’s not clear why Holdo is in the story—Leia could have done everything she did and made it all more meaningful, since she is someone we have known and loved for a long time, whereas Holdo is a character who comes out of nowhere and who we have no investment in. The only logical assumption is that the filmmakers didn’t want Leia to sacrifice herself since she was intended to have a large role in the final sequel, and so they had to bring in a surrogate Leia to take her place. As good a job as the great Laura Dern does playing Holdo, it’s a shame the filmmakers didn’t allow Leia to sacrifice herself, because—apart from the sad irony that Carrie Fisher passed away after filming on The Last Jedi was completed so wasn’t able to play that significant role in Episode IX after all—it would have been the perfect heroic ending for her noble, committed character.

  ALAN DEAN FOSTER

  (author, The Force Awakens novelization)

  I felt really bad for Laura Dern in Episode VIII, because she’s a wonderful actor, she seems like a really nice gal, but I felt that she was miscast in that role. You needed somebody badass to look the part. Not somebody soft. I love her, and I love her acting, but she was just wrong for that role. O
f course, it wouldn’t have hurt if the role had been written logically and realistically. This business that some people seem to like of Laura Dern’s character redeeming herself—really hard to do—by suddenly blasting into the Imperial fleet at lightspeed and blowing them all up. Well, we don’t need starships anymore. If you can do that, get an old freighter, with AI or at least some computer controls, set it for hyperdrive, and you throw it into any ships you want. Nobody gets killed on this side. People don’t think about those things when you’re doing these films.

  KELLY MARIE TRAN

  (actress, “Rose Tico”)

  I think that something about Carrie that I really look up to is, and something I didn’t realize until recently, was just how much courage it takes to truly be yourself when you’re on a public platform or when possibly a lot of people will be looking at you, and she was so unapologetic and so openly herself and that is something that I am really trying to do, and it’s hard. She will always be an icon as Leia but also as Carrie. What an example, you know? And I am so fortunate to have met her and I think that she will really live on forever.

  RAY MORTON

  Rose Tico is an interesting new addition to the cast of characters and she is well-played by Kelly Marie Tran who, unfortunately, was subject to some extraordinarily cruel online harassment by internet trolls in the wake of the film’s release. The problem with Rose is that she is Finn’s partner in his subplot and since that is ultimately superfluous, sadly, so is Rose.

  Like The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi doesn’t tell a single, unified tale. Instead, it presents a collection of subplots, which is a very common thing in modern blockbuster filmmaking. The problem with this is that a collection of subplots just does not have the dramatic focus that a single story does and so it’s never really clear what the overall story is that the movie is trying to tell. Also, a film made up of subplots rather than one that has a strong central narrative lacks the dramatic momentum and build that a single storyline can generate. Therefore, although the film is packed with action and incident, it doesn’t always hold our attention the way it should. Also, the movie goes on forever. The narrative reaches its climax when Holdo rams her ship into the Dreadnought, but then the movie continues for forty or so more minutes until it reaches a second climax when Luke squares off against Ren.

  Although Johnson was able to incorporate a good deal of new material into his story, the script still recycles a lot of elements from the original trilogy. Apart from the entire dramatic thrust of the Ren/Rey subplot, the final battle on Crait is far too reminiscent of the opening battle of The Empire Strikes Back—Rebel fighters battling Imperial Walkers in the snow (yeah, I know Crait is supposed to be a salt planet, but visually it looks like a snow planet). And many of the Luke/Rey scenes feel like repeats of the scenes in Empire in which Yoda trains Luke. Apparently, anyone who flies the Millennium Falcon instantly becomes a badass daredevil pilot. No one ever just flies that ship normally. It must come with Solo drive. And I can’t be the only one who—when Finn and Rose were sent to Canto Bight to find a shady character to help the Rebellion—was really expecting Billy Dee Williams to turn up and was a bit disappointed when they ran into Benicio Del Toro instead.

  The fact that the makers of the sequels did not know where their story was going leads to a feeling of ennui that sets in about halfway through watching The Last Jedi. At this point, we realize we’ve been following this narrative for a movie and a half now and we have no idea what the actual story we’re watching is or is about or where this all might be heading. The problem of there being no overall master play for the sequel trilogy’s narrative is compounded by the conclusion of Johnson’s screenplay, which wraps up most of its loose ends and comes to a pretty definite conclusion. It doesn’t feel like the second part of a three-part story in the way that The Empire Strikes Back or, to a lesser extent, Attack of the Clones did. There’s no sense of a cliffhanger—no sense that there’s more to come. So rather than leaving us eagerly anticipating what will come in the next movie, The Last Jedi leaves us wondering what could come in the next movie, which is a very different and not nearly as compelling of a feeling.

  OSCAR ISAAC

  (actor, “Poe Dameron”)

  I think the thing as well is that often with the second chapter in a story of three, because the first one kind of sets the tone and the world and the new characters, introduces them, in the second one you don’t have to spend so much time doing that, you can really just delve into the story, into what’s happening.

  RAY MORTON

  It’s extraordinary to me that the production entities were willing to invest so much money in a new series of films without ever sorting out what those films were going to be about—what story they were going to tell and whether or not that story had enough material in it to stretch out over three movies. It seems more as if Disney had decided to do a new trilogy simply to do a new trilogy, because all of the previous Star Wars movies were grouped into trilogies and they figured that’s what audiences were expecting—and that it didn’t so much matter to them what that new trilogy was going to be about. Because maybe it really didn’t; that as long as they could get their merchandising out of it, they’d be happy. From a corporate earnings perspective, this was probably the smart way to go. It’s just not a very good way to make satisfying movies.

  * * *

  The Last Jedi was released in December 2017 and was a success at the global box office, costing $317 million and grossing $1.3 billion despite the polarizing nature of the film’s reception by fans.

  GLEN OLIVER

  (pop culture commentator)

  There’s a narrow-minded, rigid toxicity rising within fan communities these days. Star Wars is confronting it, as are Star Trek and Doctor Who, as did Game of Thrones. It’s a dogged sense of ownership—and coarse judgmentalism. An unyielding belief that simply because one invests time and affection into something, one’s hopes for a show somehow gives one an inherent right to demand. Armchair quarterbacking and ill-informed deconstruction has risen to a bizarrely self-righteous fervor. I can’t imagine this proclivity is making the already difficult job of creating these shows any easier for those making them. The expression of opinion should always be protected—I absolutely believe this. But the price for that freedom should be expectations of civility and it should be incumbent on those who are expressing opinions to do so in measured, informed, respectful ways. Sadly, this process seems to collapse frequently these days.

  ANDY SERKIS

  (actor, “Supreme Leader Snoke”)

  I was blown away when I saw the movie. I just was so caught up with it, because it was really intimate and very emotional and I wasn’t expecting that at all. I knew obviously that it was going to go that way, but it was very, very powerful and it touches you and what Rian’s done incredibly is make this dance between these great kind of epic moments and hilarious antics, literally flipping on a dime and then going right into the heart of these beautiful characters, and you really care.

  PETER HOLMSTROM

  Rian Johnson clearly knows how to make a movie, but he’s stuck slightly in that he had to make basically part two of The Force Awakens. So it was limiting. There’s a grandeur in scope to this film that was severely lacking in The Force Awakens. This feels like a motion picture. The characters have emotional arcs in this movie, which is nice to see. Rey, in particular, has a lot going for her here. I love how, at the beginning of The Force Awakens, she’s “no one,” and by the end of The Last Jedi, Poe says to her, “Oh, I know who you are.” That’s nice. Of course, it was meant to set up a Poe/Rey romance in Episode IX that never happened, but whatever. But, the problems are there. Finn and Rose’s subplot means nothing to the movie; Captain Phasma is merely there for a five-second fight scene that Abrams didn’t do in TFA and Twitter complained about; and plot holes abound in general. It’s a bummer. But, I really hope Johnson does another Star Wars movie, because the man clearly loves the franchise and is a great filmmake
r.

  RIAN JOHNSON

  My cinematographer, Steve Yedlin, who I’ve been best friends with since I was eighteen years old, we met in film school, and so to be standing next to each other on the Star Wars set was pretty surreal. I think Empire is the most gorgeous of the whole series. Steve and I looked at the lighting in that; it’s pretty daring in terms of how dark they were willing to go with some of it—literally dark, and how gorgeous they went with some of the choices they made with the shaping of the lighting.

  But then in terms of like an actual visual aesthetic, I made a choice very early where I could either try and copy my idea of what the original movies did, where the camera didn’t move a ton and it was a much more formal-type visual aesthetic, or I realized we’re going to take visual cues lighting-wise and design-wise from the previous movies, but I need to just shoot this movie the way that I would shoot a movie, because at the end of the day, if I’m not engaged with it, and I’m not trying to tell the story the way that really makes me excited, then it’s not going to be up there on the screen. So I kind of cut myself loose camera-movement-wise and shot-wise from trying to imitate the past and just try to tell the story as excitingly as I could up on the screen.