RE:View – The Last Jedi
You would have to be Glob’s perfect retard to not recognize that this is easily the greatest Star Wars movie of all time. There is literally nothing that this film got wrong. I am left near to weeping just thinking about the perfection that is Ryan Johnson’s magnum opus.
The closest thing to a problem is the opening score. John Williams’s bombastic and overbearing Star Wars Main Title. This ridiculously overblown tone poem of a score has been assaulting the ears of filmgoers for nearly fifty years now. Yet, we have to sit there enduring it once again before we can begin enjoying this paragon of the film-making art.
Right away we get to see the brilliance of Ryan’s inversion of expectations while reading the opening crawl. You might have expected the First Order to have had some trouble after having had their primary weapon destroyed. But it was clearly just a rouse. Think about it. It took the resources of the entire Galactic Empire at its height to build the Death Star and the Death Star ver 1.5. Obviously, the First Order never had anywhere near the resources to produce Starkiller Base. But it takes almost nothing to produce a hoax, which Starkiller Base clearly and obviously was. Destroy five planets at once and be able to see it in real-time from a planet that Han Solo was oh so conveniently standing on? Seriously? No, it was always a fraud meant to draw out Resistance forces and thus give away their position.
This is obviously how the First Order found the Resistance at the start of the movie. And conquered the galaxy when no one was looking.
Hux was clearly the most brilliant military mind in the history of that galaxy far, far away. Which is why his complete humiliation at the start of the movie is such a brilliant subversion of narrative expectations.
Some of the criticism by audiences who sadly had never been enlightened by their own intelligence was understandable by their sadly undemanding standards. They were probably expecting tone to be maintained during a battle scene and thus had their 2-volt minds blown when Ryan shifted their paradigm into another dimension with Poe’s “Yo Mama” jokes.
The subversions continued with the Resistance Bombers. The audience was doubtless expecting a minimum of basic military design competence. Remember how shocked we were by that inversion of expectations that we were laughing in stunned surprise?
Luke throwing away his old lightsabre was truthfully the only thing that wasn’t a surprise. I mean he’d built a replacement decades ago and besides what Luke wanted wasn’t an old laser sword it was the fucking hand that had been holding it. Where was the hand, Rey?
Luke’s contempt for Rey was indicative of his status on this planet as its undisputed tyrant. This is graphically depicted when Luke asserts his dominance by brazenly molesting a nursing mother. The poor creature looks at Rey as if begging for help and Rey looks away, knowing there is nothing she can do for the poor creature.
Likewise, Rey’s unexpected romantic attachment to Kylo Ren was something that was completely expected by any reasonable person. Kylo was clearly a ten on the bad boy scale as well as ten on the axis of his ability to extract resources from others.
You were probably expecting Finn to be the masculine hero of the new trilogy. After all, he had been, by stodgy traditional narrative standards the ideal candidate. He was raised from infancy to be a mindlessly obedient soldier of the New World First Order yet his sense of prudence (of rightness) was so strong that he rebelled against the machine that had raised him from birth. Instead, he was made into a buffoon by a fat Asian girl who humiliated him at every opportunity. The simple truth is that you don’t understand the subtle layers of subtext involved in this brilliant narrative shift. You see so far as Disney is concerned, black men are now the white men of black men. Glad I could help.
Admiral Holdo to the untrained eye comes across as an idealized and pissed-off version of a gender studies professor with a chip on her shoulder. Which is pretty much what she was. That too was a brilliant subversion of expectations because sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and at others, a pissed-off idiotic, purple-haired harpy is just a TikTok meme.
The biggest subversion of expectations was the killing of Snoke. On the surface, it seems like the final destruction of Star Wars is a tale of good versus evil. The film destroyed both the embodiment of good in Luke Skywalker and of evil in Snoke, leaving only it his wake a nihilistic ambivalence. The old fans were meant to be left hoping that this would kill this thing at the second movie. I suspect this was a studio decision to try and make the film more popular with Generation X fans.
Finally, you might have also thought that Liea getting blown out of the bridge and into space was a potentially wasted opportunity to give the late Carrie Fisher’s signature role a poignant sendoff in the wake of her own recent passing. And that having her fly into an airlock like Mary Poppins was another ingenious subversion of expectations. No. That was just fucking retarded. I can’t say otherwise. Even in an April Fools gag.
Okay, I’m done here.
