Star Wars is such a monolithic pop-culture entity that reviews for its latest instalment, The Last Jedi, probably won’t sway potential viewers either way. The film, propelled by a bolted-on fandom and staggering marketing budget, would likely triumph at the box office even if critics found flaws capable of hobbling films of a lesser franchise. The takes are non-essential.
That said, it’s fortunate that reviewers have found the middle component of the latest Star Wars trilogy to be… well, pretty good. It has heroes, it has villains, and in true Star Wars fashion, they’re pretty easily distinguishable.
But the critical consensus, delivered in the hours before The Last Jedi’s debut on Australian screens, is that Rian Johnson‘s blockbuster is a totally competent addition to the canon which only occasionally dabbles in the sublime. The prevailing narrative is that the film is largely constrained to the conventions of what Lucasfilm and parent company Disney believe a Star Wars film should be.
For The New Yorker, Richard Brody writes “twist after twist, touch after touch, line after line has the feel of the compulsory, of homework done elaborately, with extreme labor,” adding “the movie’s cinematic fabric is cut too tight, the frame is too constraining” to allow any surprising deviations from the norm.
Discussing the “unified corporate aesthetic” meted out by the powers that be, Variety’s Peter Debruge says “there’s only so much wiggle room Johnson has to play with a property that seems destined to generate a new installment/spinoff every year until we die.”
The A.V. Club’s A.A. Dowd says “narratively speaking, [Johnson’s] playing with, not transcending, the ancient hero’s-journey template of the series,” but concludes “The Last Jedi gets some new life out of those conventions.” Manohla Dargis agrees in The New York Times, writing Johnson “may be checking off some those boxes in an ode to George Lucas,“ but “only infrequently comes across as dutiful or as overtly brand-expanding.”
As far as performances go, there are no clear weak-points. Critics have praised the literally commanding presence of the late Carrie Fisher, and the rag-tag bunch of Resistance fighters she oversees. Hell, Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson even adds that “it’s wholly more inspiring to see an array of different faces (and bodies, and species) banding together to fight oppression. That’s how it should be.”
And yes, the action sequences are as good as ever, and there’s mention of a duel as exhilarating as the three-way battle in The Phantom Menace. All of that leads readers to one conclusion: yup, The Last Jedi is definitely a Star Wars film, and IGN’s Joshua Yehl reckons it may even be comparable to The Empire Strikes Back. Just don’t expect this middle-child epic to break any fundamentally new ground. Maybe we shouldn’t ask it to do so.
The Last Jedi premieres on Australian screens tomorrow.
