To the extent that The Last Jedi has a villain, and to the extent that Snoke is that villain, it’s a close call whether The Last Jedi or Justice League has the year’s dullest, least consequential villain.
Introduced in The Force Awakens as a giant hologram, he returns to this film as a sort of amalgam of the Emperor and Darth Vader - except he’s ultimately a zero. Start with Supreme Leader Snoke, the mysterious computer-generated leader of the First Order played by Andy Serkis. (I’ll try to avoid overt spoilers, but if you care deeply about remaining totally unspoiled, stop reading now.) The Force Awakens wasn’t a great film, but The Last Jedi makes it worse in its failure to pay off or follow up on the first film’s mysteries and promises. Yet as the complicated, messy plot unfolds, the lack of a larger vision in this new trilogy becomes more glaring. Is this enough? I’m sure it will be for many fans. Oscar Isaac’s hotshot pilot Poe Dameron would be the film’s swashbuckling hero, if there were one. To the extent that The Last Jedi has a villain, and to the extent that Snoke is that villain, it’s a close call whether The Last Jedi or Justice League has the year’s dullest, least consequential villain.ĭaisy Ridley’s Rey is back, of course, and it turns out that her key relationship in this film is with neither Finn nor Luke, but Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren - a dynamic that gives both their characters what interest they have. To this we can add an increasingly diverse portrait of the Resistance, from an ingenuous maintenance worker named Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran, of Vietnamese descent), who’s briefly starstruck by John Boyega’s runaway stormtrooper Finn, to the pink-haired Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo (Laura Dern), a character reminiscent of Mon Mothma, but with a more pivotal role. There’s a payoff of sorts going back to Return of the Jedi and an epic confrontation like nothing in any previous Star Wars movie. Mark Hamill and the late Carrie Fisher, in her final performance as Leia, both get at least one dramatic moment of fan-service awesomeness, though Luke’s is crucial to the plot and Leia’s isn’t, alas. The Force Awakens had all those things, but The Last Jedi also has fresh story beats and new ideas. The Last Jedi offers humor, excitement and spectacle, with space battles and lightsaber duels. The Last Jedi, from writer-director Rian Johnson, continues that trajectory, though in a more entertaining and crowd-pleasing vein than Rogue One. By contrast, Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One jettisoned the mythopoeic and even partially deconstructed the traditional heroism of prior films. Abrams’ The Force Awakens tried, too derivatively, to recapitulate the flavor of the original trilogy.
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