The Last Jedi, Revisited
It took almost three years, but I finally rewatched The Last Jedi. I enjoyed it more the second time, which isn’t saying a whole lot. I don’t hate the movie, but I don’t love it, either. Some of it works terrifically well, while other parts are frustrating and disappointing. As a stand alone movie, I think it's pretty good, but not great. As the second part of a Star Wars trilogy, and as the eighth episode of the nine-part Skywalker saga, my view is a bit lower. The reason is the way it handles one of Star Wars’ central themes: destiny.
Like Luke and Anakin before them, Kylo Ren and Rey both have to struggle with the question of destiny. In The Force Awakens, Ren kills his father in an effort to fulfill the destiny of following in Vader’s footsteps, and Rey is confronted with the question of her own destiny when she finds Luke’s light saber calling to her. Destiny is central to both of their inner conflicts, so the second part of the new trilogy should have added new complications on their respective paths toward resolution. Instead, Rian Johnson’s film effectively puts an end to the issue altogether.
Kylo kills Snoke and, now without the Vader-inspired mask, has dispensed with all ties to the past. He is on his own, without any question about his destiny. Similarly, Rey learns that she never had a meaningful tie to the past, and so it was always up to her to create her own destiny. Thus, when the film ends, there is no longer a question of destiny for either character. The only questions are: When’s the next battle, how can the resistance win, and will Kylo Ren eventually turn away from the dark side? Those are important questions, but without the question of destiny, they are incomplete. The reason J. J. Abrams had to walk back some of the developments from The Last Jedi was precisely this: Because he had to revive the issue of destiny so that its resolution came with the final triumph of the resistance. Bringing Palpatine back in some way or other was probably the best way to do that, so Rey could choose the Skywalker path—choose her own destiny—despite her lineage.
I discussed several of the film’s character arcs at length in my previous post on The Last Jedi, but I never got to Rey. Now that I’ve seen it again, I want to finally discuss Rey’s character arc and why I think Rian Johnson’s script doesn’t do her justice. But first, I will revise some of the observations I made the first time around.
Poe Dameron
My view of Poe’s arc has not changed. His resistance to female leadership all but destroys the resistance. There could have been a compelling story about toxic masculinity here, but unfortunately Poe’s story is not developed in a convincing or satisfying way. After he goes so far as to lead an armed mutiny against Holdo, endangering the entire resistance, Leia and Holdo merely smile, calling him a likable troublemaker as if they were talking about a harmless little boy who was still growing up. Yes, Poe soon realizes Admiral Holdo was more of a hero than he thought, but that’s no reason to think he has changed. I don't understand why he is giving orders after that, or why Leia tells everyone to follow him at the end of the movie. Why should anyone trust or even like him?
Finn
Finn’s arc, if he has a coherent one at all, is about heroism. At the beginning of his story, he thinks the resistance is doomed and tries to save himself and Rey. He meets Rose, who calls him a hero, and he rejects the distinction. But suddenly he decides to go along with her to try and save the resistance. Has he changed somehow? And they and Poe decide to do it in secret, because for some unknown reason, none of them trust the resistance’s leadership. Is that also supposed to be heroic? This reckless decision ultimately costs many lives and almost destroys the entire resistance, but nobody seems to care about that in the end. Their irresponsibility is overlooked. In any case, somehow, presumably thanks to his and Rose’s casino escape and rescue success (success? not really, but whatever), Finn has decided to die a hero. He ignores Poe’s orders to call off the attack on the Battering Ram Cannon and is going to sacrifice himself to save the resistance. (Though we have to wonder why the First Order stopped shooting down the rebels when there were only one or two left.) But then Rose stops him in a move that was likely to kill them both, but survives to tell him, before practically dying, that the only way they can win is through saving what they love. This ties in with the theme of compassion, but wasn’t Finn trying to save what he loved? And wasn’t that what he was doing at the very beginning of the movie? There's no clear Finn arc at all.
Kylo Ren
We are led to hope that Ren is becoming more compassionate and turning away from the dark side through his mysterious interactions with Rey. However, as Luke predicts, that doesn’t happen. In The Force Awakens, he killed his father. Now he kills his spiritual leader. There’s no sign that killing Snoke has changed Ren, just like killing Han didn’t free him the way he thought it would. We are still waiting for Ren to grow or change in a significant way.
Snoke
I will note a small arc for Snoke that I didn’t notice the first time around. In classically tragic fashion, Snoke is destroyed by his own hubris. He was so confident in his control over Ren that he created a force connection between him and Rey, knowing it would lure her to him. While his plan seems a bit too unlikely to be taken seriously, it at least gives a somewhat satisfying reason for Snoke’s death. He didn’t know Ren as well as he thought, and so he invited his own downfall. I enjoyed that outcome much more the second time.
Luke Skywalker
I still think Luke’s redemption is the only compelling arc in the film, even if it is hard to accept that he would have so easily turned his back on the Force. The second time around, I noticed a line early in the film that foreshadows his death. When Ren and Rey see each other for the first time, Ren wonders if Rey is making herself appear in front of him; he immediately rejects the hypothesis, saying that the effort would kill her. So if we're paying attention, we shouldn't be shocked when the effort kills Luke.
That’s it for the male characters. As I noted in my previous post on the film, the women in The Last Jedi don’t have compelling arcs of their own. Leia and Holdo make decisions that drive the plot forward, but their conflicts primarily serve Poe’s story. Rose also makes decisions, but the conflicts only serve to (allegedly) teach Finn about love, justice and heroism. So what about Rey?
Rey
Her arc forms part of the backbone of The Force Awakens, so I had high expectations for her role in Episode VIII. Fortunately, she does have some complexity and agency in The Last Jedi, and yet, like all the other female characters in the film, Rey is largely there to prop up the men.
For a long while, Rey has two external goals: persuade Luke to come back to the resistance and become his protégé. She is unable to achieve these goals, which apparently makes her unstable. Luke only agrees to teach her to not be a Jedi. And while Luke does eventually decide to risk his life to save the resistance in the end, this is not thanks to Rey so much as to Yoda. Rey eventually gives up on Luke and leaves (taking the ancient Jedi texts with her) so she can try and enlist Ren to her cause. This allows Ren to kill Snoke, but that is all.
While Rey does have something of an arc, it is somewhat vague and unconvincing. Unlike the independent and powerful Rey at the end of The Force Awakens, this Rey seems much more dependent on men and much less secure in her own identity. Though she chose compassion and the Skywalker path over her family ties in The Force Awakens, she now feels the heavy shadow of her unknown lineage and uncertainty about her identity. Her insecurity amplifies, perhaps because Luke is unable to properly mentor her and unwilling to help the resistance; however, Ren says the problem is that she is looking for parent figures in the first place. Either way, it's not a well-defined inner conflict. For whatever reason, Rey desperately wants to know what happened to her parents and what that means for her--she must known her destiny--and this makes her unstable. Her lack of balance is evident when we see her accidentally destroy a rock with her light saber and, less subtly, when she becomes very emotional talking about it with Kylo Ren.
All this time, she feels a dark hole calling to her from below the island and Luke fears that she is too open to the dark side. But what is pulling her to the dark side? She is not driven by hate. She seems more compassionate than anything else. Her compassion is what (surprisingly quickly) leads her to open up to Ren in the first place. It must be her insecurity about her destiny. So she descends into the hole to look for answers, but she is not satisfied with what she sees (which is an image only of herself, echoing Luke's vision of himself behind Vader's mask in The Empire Strikes Back).
Rey's questions about her lineage are only resolved later, when Ren tells her she doesn’t have one. Perhaps this moment is supposed to be a heavy one for Rey. According to Kylo Ren, she is insecure because she has been too dependent on father figures (Han and Luke) and the idea of her own family. He strips it all away when he tells her her parents were nobodies, and he says that she means something to him. In Kylo Ren's mind, he might be the only option, but we know Rey from The Force Awakens. In that movie, Rey was never so insecure. She never would have seen the dark side as an option, let alone the only one. She already chose her new family at the end of that movie, so why would she abandon them now?
Is it supposed to be a hard choice, then, when she leaves Kylo Ren to help the resistance? If so, it is not convincing. Yes, Rey is devastated--as were many fans--when Kylo convinces her that her parents were nobodies and that she is “nothing.” However, her choice to take Luke's lights saber and help the resistance does not resolve any inner conflict in her, because she was never truly tempted by the dark side. She only went to Ren to recruit him, not to find herself. She was a little unstable earlier, but not so much that it would affect any of her decisions. We never saw her truly doubt which way she should go. Thus, at the end of the movie, she is back where she was at the end of The Force Awakens. Nothing has changed for her, except now she is not troubled by questions about her family or her destiny anymore. She is only concerned about the resistance and how they can move forward. In short, we never see her making a hard choice and changing as a result of it. Thus, she lacks a strong character arc.
If Rey had been given a strong arc in Episode VIII, with her discovering she was a Palpatine, for example, we would have been perfectly set up for a new destiny-centered conflict in the final film of the saga. Yes, it would have echoed the reveal of Luke’s lineage at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, but why is that a bad thing? So many parts of The Last Jedi echo that previous film. By bluntly resolving the question of destiny, The Last Jedi ended a central pillar of the story before it was time. I believe this, and not any plot or character weaknesses, is what hurt the film the most.
Like Luke and Anakin before them, Kylo Ren and Rey both have to struggle with the question of destiny. In The Force Awakens, Ren kills his father in an effort to fulfill the destiny of following in Vader’s footsteps, and Rey is confronted with the question of her own destiny when she finds Luke’s light saber calling to her. Destiny is central to both of their inner conflicts, so the second part of the new trilogy should have added new complications on their respective paths toward resolution. Instead, Rian Johnson’s film effectively puts an end to the issue altogether.
Kylo kills Snoke and, now without the Vader-inspired mask, has dispensed with all ties to the past. He is on his own, without any question about his destiny. Similarly, Rey learns that she never had a meaningful tie to the past, and so it was always up to her to create her own destiny. Thus, when the film ends, there is no longer a question of destiny for either character. The only questions are: When’s the next battle, how can the resistance win, and will Kylo Ren eventually turn away from the dark side? Those are important questions, but without the question of destiny, they are incomplete. The reason J. J. Abrams had to walk back some of the developments from The Last Jedi was precisely this: Because he had to revive the issue of destiny so that its resolution came with the final triumph of the resistance. Bringing Palpatine back in some way or other was probably the best way to do that, so Rey could choose the Skywalker path—choose her own destiny—despite her lineage.
I discussed several of the film’s character arcs at length in my previous post on The Last Jedi, but I never got to Rey. Now that I’ve seen it again, I want to finally discuss Rey’s character arc and why I think Rian Johnson’s script doesn’t do her justice. But first, I will revise some of the observations I made the first time around.
Poe Dameron
My view of Poe’s arc has not changed. His resistance to female leadership all but destroys the resistance. There could have been a compelling story about toxic masculinity here, but unfortunately Poe’s story is not developed in a convincing or satisfying way. After he goes so far as to lead an armed mutiny against Holdo, endangering the entire resistance, Leia and Holdo merely smile, calling him a likable troublemaker as if they were talking about a harmless little boy who was still growing up. Yes, Poe soon realizes Admiral Holdo was more of a hero than he thought, but that’s no reason to think he has changed. I don't understand why he is giving orders after that, or why Leia tells everyone to follow him at the end of the movie. Why should anyone trust or even like him?
Finn
Finn’s arc, if he has a coherent one at all, is about heroism. At the beginning of his story, he thinks the resistance is doomed and tries to save himself and Rey. He meets Rose, who calls him a hero, and he rejects the distinction. But suddenly he decides to go along with her to try and save the resistance. Has he changed somehow? And they and Poe decide to do it in secret, because for some unknown reason, none of them trust the resistance’s leadership. Is that also supposed to be heroic? This reckless decision ultimately costs many lives and almost destroys the entire resistance, but nobody seems to care about that in the end. Their irresponsibility is overlooked. In any case, somehow, presumably thanks to his and Rose’s casino escape and rescue success (success? not really, but whatever), Finn has decided to die a hero. He ignores Poe’s orders to call off the attack on the Battering Ram Cannon and is going to sacrifice himself to save the resistance. (Though we have to wonder why the First Order stopped shooting down the rebels when there were only one or two left.) But then Rose stops him in a move that was likely to kill them both, but survives to tell him, before practically dying, that the only way they can win is through saving what they love. This ties in with the theme of compassion, but wasn’t Finn trying to save what he loved? And wasn’t that what he was doing at the very beginning of the movie? There's no clear Finn arc at all.
Kylo Ren
We are led to hope that Ren is becoming more compassionate and turning away from the dark side through his mysterious interactions with Rey. However, as Luke predicts, that doesn’t happen. In The Force Awakens, he killed his father. Now he kills his spiritual leader. There’s no sign that killing Snoke has changed Ren, just like killing Han didn’t free him the way he thought it would. We are still waiting for Ren to grow or change in a significant way.
Snoke
I will note a small arc for Snoke that I didn’t notice the first time around. In classically tragic fashion, Snoke is destroyed by his own hubris. He was so confident in his control over Ren that he created a force connection between him and Rey, knowing it would lure her to him. While his plan seems a bit too unlikely to be taken seriously, it at least gives a somewhat satisfying reason for Snoke’s death. He didn’t know Ren as well as he thought, and so he invited his own downfall. I enjoyed that outcome much more the second time.
Luke Skywalker
I still think Luke’s redemption is the only compelling arc in the film, even if it is hard to accept that he would have so easily turned his back on the Force. The second time around, I noticed a line early in the film that foreshadows his death. When Ren and Rey see each other for the first time, Ren wonders if Rey is making herself appear in front of him; he immediately rejects the hypothesis, saying that the effort would kill her. So if we're paying attention, we shouldn't be shocked when the effort kills Luke.
That’s it for the male characters. As I noted in my previous post on the film, the women in The Last Jedi don’t have compelling arcs of their own. Leia and Holdo make decisions that drive the plot forward, but their conflicts primarily serve Poe’s story. Rose also makes decisions, but the conflicts only serve to (allegedly) teach Finn about love, justice and heroism. So what about Rey?
Rey
Her arc forms part of the backbone of The Force Awakens, so I had high expectations for her role in Episode VIII. Fortunately, she does have some complexity and agency in The Last Jedi, and yet, like all the other female characters in the film, Rey is largely there to prop up the men.
For a long while, Rey has two external goals: persuade Luke to come back to the resistance and become his protégé. She is unable to achieve these goals, which apparently makes her unstable. Luke only agrees to teach her to not be a Jedi. And while Luke does eventually decide to risk his life to save the resistance in the end, this is not thanks to Rey so much as to Yoda. Rey eventually gives up on Luke and leaves (taking the ancient Jedi texts with her) so she can try and enlist Ren to her cause. This allows Ren to kill Snoke, but that is all.
While Rey does have something of an arc, it is somewhat vague and unconvincing. Unlike the independent and powerful Rey at the end of The Force Awakens, this Rey seems much more dependent on men and much less secure in her own identity. Though she chose compassion and the Skywalker path over her family ties in The Force Awakens, she now feels the heavy shadow of her unknown lineage and uncertainty about her identity. Her insecurity amplifies, perhaps because Luke is unable to properly mentor her and unwilling to help the resistance; however, Ren says the problem is that she is looking for parent figures in the first place. Either way, it's not a well-defined inner conflict. For whatever reason, Rey desperately wants to know what happened to her parents and what that means for her--she must known her destiny--and this makes her unstable. Her lack of balance is evident when we see her accidentally destroy a rock with her light saber and, less subtly, when she becomes very emotional talking about it with Kylo Ren.
All this time, she feels a dark hole calling to her from below the island and Luke fears that she is too open to the dark side. But what is pulling her to the dark side? She is not driven by hate. She seems more compassionate than anything else. Her compassion is what (surprisingly quickly) leads her to open up to Ren in the first place. It must be her insecurity about her destiny. So she descends into the hole to look for answers, but she is not satisfied with what she sees (which is an image only of herself, echoing Luke's vision of himself behind Vader's mask in The Empire Strikes Back).
Rey's questions about her lineage are only resolved later, when Ren tells her she doesn’t have one. Perhaps this moment is supposed to be a heavy one for Rey. According to Kylo Ren, she is insecure because she has been too dependent on father figures (Han and Luke) and the idea of her own family. He strips it all away when he tells her her parents were nobodies, and he says that she means something to him. In Kylo Ren's mind, he might be the only option, but we know Rey from The Force Awakens. In that movie, Rey was never so insecure. She never would have seen the dark side as an option, let alone the only one. She already chose her new family at the end of that movie, so why would she abandon them now?
Is it supposed to be a hard choice, then, when she leaves Kylo Ren to help the resistance? If so, it is not convincing. Yes, Rey is devastated--as were many fans--when Kylo convinces her that her parents were nobodies and that she is “nothing.” However, her choice to take Luke's lights saber and help the resistance does not resolve any inner conflict in her, because she was never truly tempted by the dark side. She only went to Ren to recruit him, not to find herself. She was a little unstable earlier, but not so much that it would affect any of her decisions. We never saw her truly doubt which way she should go. Thus, at the end of the movie, she is back where she was at the end of The Force Awakens. Nothing has changed for her, except now she is not troubled by questions about her family or her destiny anymore. She is only concerned about the resistance and how they can move forward. In short, we never see her making a hard choice and changing as a result of it. Thus, she lacks a strong character arc.
If Rey had been given a strong arc in Episode VIII, with her discovering she was a Palpatine, for example, we would have been perfectly set up for a new destiny-centered conflict in the final film of the saga. Yes, it would have echoed the reveal of Luke’s lineage at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, but why is that a bad thing? So many parts of The Last Jedi echo that previous film. By bluntly resolving the question of destiny, The Last Jedi ended a central pillar of the story before it was time. I believe this, and not any plot or character weaknesses, is what hurt the film the most.
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