Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Alas, poor Kylo! I knew him ...

Grade: B –

Director: Rian Johnson

Starring: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Kelly Marie Tran, Laura Dern, and Benicio del Toro

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 32 min.

The deepest emotional resonance in Star Wars: The Last Jedi occurs during companion scenes in which Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) engages with Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher). The first features the playback of an iconic hologram once sent by a young princess and freedom fighter, the second being a face-to-face farewell between aging siblings, warriors, and cultural touchstones. If anyone was expecting a truncated appearance by Leia in The Last Jedi following Fisher’s untimely death nearly a year ago, think again. She figures prominently throughout, but no longer as the damsel in distress from A New Hope or the love interest in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. She’s now a rightly revered leader who, after all, was already spearheading rebellion when Luke was still a farm boy and Han Solo a two-bit smuggler.

Leia’s earned stature aligns with a new gender dynamic being formed in this latest Stars Wars sequel trilogy. Women comprise the emerging vanguard—the spotlight shines brightest on Leia and Rey (Daisy Ridley), the new trilogy’s lead hero—while men equivocate, undercut, oppose, and even abuse. When Leia’s vice admiral (Laura Dern) temporarily assumes command of the rebel fleet, she’s immediately doubted and then targeted for mutiny by flyboy Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac). When Rey visits Luke’s island hideaway seeking the training and services of the aging Jedi to battle the First Order, a haggard Luke plays Hamlet, dithering and fretting over fears and old regrets. Luke, later visited by an virescent old master, accurately casts the legacy of the (notably patriarchal) Jedi Order as one of failure. Rey is later taken before Supreme Commander Snoke, leader of the First Order and master of Ben Solo, aka Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), where Snoke growls “give me everything” before prostrating and mentally raping her.

It’s a pity that this more woke Star Wars is saddled by a slipshod storyline and scant sense of discovery that’s previously propelled the saga. While the nostalgia is strong in this one, no enduring characters are introduced and precious little is learned about the existing ones—don’t expect much eye-opening info on Snoke’s identity, Rey’s parentage, or anything else you didn’t already know. Of the tri-headed plotline that fills the film’s opening half, one part is the equivalent of a low-speed car chase. Meanwhile, defrocked Stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega) and a new puckish partner (Kelly Marie Tran) embark on a related mission that ultimately matters not a whit. They detour to a planet with an opulent casino frequented by upscale arms dealers—the latest update of the Mos Eisley cantina—who’ve made a killing selling to both sides of the galactic war and off the toil of enslaved children. But writer-director Rian Johnson doesn’t spend much time on this populist and anti-colonialism subplot, instead racing away in the blur of a CGI stampede.

Remember how Luke’s Jedi training on a distant locale and his later attempts to turn an evil contemporary away from the dark side of the Force were spread over two movies? Well, Johnson crams the same story arc for Rey into ninety minutes, including a reprise of the Dagobah evil cave sequence that reveals nothing besides Johnson’s affinity for the hall of mirrors scene in The Lady from Shanghai. A burgeoning connection between Rey and Ben carries the promise of gleaning gradations in the Force atwixt its light versus dark extremes. But that, too, evaporates once the characters, and with them the narrative, retreat to their familiar camps in time for a climactic confrontation featuring yet another assault on another rebel compound.

The Last Jedi subsists on its iconography, including ragtag rebels who intone about igniting “the spark that will light the fire” of rebellion, a variant of the same mantra we’ve heard in every previous Star Wars film. The Last Jedi flirts with hope and change, but it’s mostly sound, fury, and force signifying little.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

I'll take a Wookiee over Shia LaBeouf any day

Grade: B +

Director: J. J. Abrams

Starring: Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong'o, Andy Serkis, Peter Mayhew and Max von Sydow

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 16 min.

“You changed your hair,” Han Solo (Harrison Ford) tells Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) the first time they see each other in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. “Same jacket,” Leia replies, eyeing his garb.

It’s a moment that wouldn’t feel out of place in Richard Linklater's Before Trilogy, the sort of warm yet uneasy exchange between an estranged couple still harboring mutual affection. But their references hold particular import in the Star Wars ethos, for those who recall Leia’s iconic hair buns and Solo’s trademark black jacket. These dual concepts of legacy drive The Force Awakens, both set and released about 30 years after The Return of the Jedi. It’s a film focused on fate and family. Like Creed, it’s also aware of its wider cultural significance and leverages the same.

Under the direction of  J. J. Abrams, this Star Wars is still an epic space adventure but with a slightly harder edge. The film opens with a My Lai-type massacre, executed by Stormtroopers who actually shoot straight and bleed. The carnage shakes the resolve of one, nicknamed Finn (John Boyega), who becomes a conscientious objector and aids the escape of ace starfighter Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) and eventually Poe’s BB-8 droid carrying Vital Information™. Finn’s odyssey soon crosses paths with Rey (Daisy Ridley), a young raider on the planet Jakku who scrapes by scavenging parts off derelict starships half-buried in the desert’s sands.

The Force Awakens lifts the narrative elements of A New Hope, adds a dash of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, then puts them in a blender for a sequel that’s not an upheaval, but rather one that splendidly repackages the Star Wars saga. The erstwhile Civil War between the Rebel Alliance and Galactic Empire has morphed into a clash between the Resistance, dedicated to the Republic, and the First Order, which adopted the mantle of the Empire. The First Order’s “emperor” is Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis in motion-capture), while its dual commanders are General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson), the Tarkin of this story, and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), a cruel, masked discipline of Darth Vader skilled in the Force's dark arts.

There’s a cantina scene; Jakku is basically Tatooine; icy detours recount Hoth. There’s a bigger, badder Death Star, yet with only a fraction of the buildup of the previous ones. “How do we blow it up? There’s always a way,” Solo almost quips as the Resistance plans their attack on this latest planetary war machine. And there's a search for a self-exiled Jedi, this time Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), a mission announced during the film’s opening crawl and the closest thing to an Abrams-esque MacGuffin in this tale.

From another viewpoint, The Force Awakens is how A New Hope would have felt had it been made and released after the comparatively antiseptic Episodes I-III. The film's true force is found in the ties between characters and their destinies, the perpetual struggle between good and evil and the film’s unavoidable intersection of nostalgia and discovery. A chase through a canyon of derelict Star Destroyers is a plaintive backdrop for thrilling action sequences that marry new age technology with old school visual effects like models, expansive sets and matte paintings. It’s great to see Harrison Ford finally having fun again, and Fisher now looks and sounds like her mom, Debbie Reynolds. Yet Ridley is effervescent, holding her own physically and when Rey must match witticisms with Solo (no easy task). Both she and Boyega are new protagonists for a new generation of fans.

It’s also a milieu where Luke Skywalker is regarded as a “myth” and Han Solo the stuff of bygone legends. The Force Awakens isn't a great movie—the storyline is openly derivative and grows repetitive over the final third, with the trademark cross-cutting battle scenes coming at the expense of the fertile character development. But it's a great Star Wars movie, building on its mythology in the best tradition of epic storytelling. When Solo declares, “Chewie, we’re home,” as the smuggling duo finally returns to Millennium Falcon for the first time in decades, it feels like he’s speaking for all of us.

Inside Llewyn Davis

Grade: B +

Director: Joel and Ethan Coen

Starring: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, Adam Driver, Stark Sands, John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund and F. Murray Abraham

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 45 min.

Traversing the basket houses and back alleys of the early 1960s, pre-Dylan Greenwich Village music scene, Inside Llewyn Davis is the Coen Brothers’ ode to the fuzzy line separating artistic purity from creative recalcitrance. Driven by a melodious period soundtrack, the film is part O Brother, Where Art Thou? and part Barton Fink, but with a brooding mood and protagonist that envelopes its occasional humorous flourishes.

For the uninitiated, part of the film’s fun is connecting its fictionalized characters to such real-life inspirations as Tom Paxton, Doc Pomus, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Peter, Paul and Mary. The titular folksinger is directly drawn from Village legend Dave Van Ronk, who once releasing an album titled Inside Dave Van Ronk and, like Llewyn, stubbornly stuck to folk forms in lieu of more mainstream or “marketable” deviations. “I thought you said you were a musician,” growls cantankerous jazz player Roland Turner (John Goodman) after Llewyn informs him he plays folk songs.

Llewyn’s also a hard person to like, as the perpetual dark cloud hanging over his head is often self-made, whether he’s sleeping with his friend’s wife (Carey Mulligan) or distaining a share of performance royalties to a novelty song written by that same friend (Justin Timberlake) that eventually becomes a hit, because Llewyn deems the diddy as beneath him.

Indeed, while Inside Llewyn Davis looks and sounds gorgeous, its message remains as enigmatic as its surly, depressed protagonist. A quick glimpse of a young up-and-coming legend taking the Gaslight Cafe stage near film’s end posits that perhaps Llewyn’s troubles are a consequence of the man, not his music.

*Originally published at Indyweek.com