Before I begin, full disclosure, I am a Star Wars fan. I own a lot of memorabilia, my bed was draped in Star Wars sheets, I had the toys. As an adult, I have lightsabers – Yeah, I’m pretty geeky. But I’m not the nerd who reads all the books.
I saw The Last Jedi, twice. Once in 2D and another time in 3D. There’s really no difference, so seeing it in 2D is a.o.k.
Did I enjoy the movie? Well, as a Star Wars fan, it was fun. But the writers of The Last Jedi, failed miserably.
The screenwriters self-projected their own fears about life onto the Star Wars characters. Most artists, especially the great ones, are usually on a lifelong journey finding themselves. They are natural introverts, retract from society because they don’t feel they belong, and emerge to reconnect once they create an identity. Their new identity is usually extreme, very expressive, and different from the norm. Doesn’t this sound like almost every character in The Last Jedi? Internally lost, searching for their meaning, their purpose, in life? Everyone was just so confused in The Last Jedi, especially Luke Skywalker, who only found his purpose – after death. Such an artists view.
One of the biggest no-no’s in writing is to write yourself into the book (unless you’re completely honest with yourself). These screenwriters not only wrote themselves into this book, but made every character like themselves.
Hero’s in the story were idiots. Did you notice that?
When Princess Lea gets knocked out of power, the next in line commander thinks it’s a better idea to keep her plan of escaping to a secret rebel base, secret. Especially from Poe. Since when is keeping a life-saving plan away from your entire crew a good idea? Never. And the reason she gives Poe, for keeping a plan secret, is some metaphoric interpretation of hope (another artist reason) Poe and Fin’s idea fails to save the day, or course, because it actually makes sense. That’s fine to leave in the script. But why spend almost three-quarters of the entire movie setting the audience up for no payoff? Watching this was just a waste of the audience’s time.
The screenwriters also tried to make some political statements. One statement was about the military-industrial complex, which the writers truly don’t understand that well. In real life, there are only a handful of companies that sell weapons to the military, keyword “companies” not “people.” And to my knowledge, one company who makes the tie-fighter does not also make the x-wing fighter. But if this were true, wouldn’t the rebels or the empire target the military supply company, rather than just being a customer? The empire targeted a single engineer in Rogue One. The writers are just not thinking things through.
Screenwriters need to think……think, think, think. There is really a lack of thinking going on at Disney.
Want to hear some extraordinary examples of non-thinking by screenwriters in The Last Jedi?
In their space, there is gravity! Remember the bombs that needed to be dropped? Well, that won’t happen in space, unless there’s gravity. How does one drop bombs in space? And Space Bombers wouldn’t travel slower in space than x-wing fighters, everything is weightless – unless space is not a vacuum. There’s no reason for a big heavy bomber to fly slowler in space, that only happens on earth! And why did spaceships need gas to continually travel forward – in space? Asteroids, the earth, satellites, and anything in space doesn’t need gas to set things in orbit once it gets going. These writers forgot simple elementary science. Talk about bad.
So, Luke Skywalker in his send-off didn’t even get to go out with an awesome swordfight. Boo…. I thought Jedi’s fight.
Luke Skywalker could have killed Kylo Ren multiple times, but didn’t.
Yoda, who can control lightning, could have rescued the rebels, killed Snook, killed Kylo Ren, but didn’t. Talk about how useless he is. Instead, he just burns books.
Kylo Ren is the Supreme Leader, a powerful immature young adult who has no idea how to control a military. Geez, isn’t that a smart move. Now there’s no strong antagonist for the franchise.
All of these obvious concerns are truly simple script problems that should have been resolved through multiple rewrites. But the problem here is that you have a director/writer who thinks he can get away with this because it’s fiction, or it’s plain out hubris.
The best intergalactic screenwriting going on these days? Try Orville or Voltron on Netflix. The Last Jedi is just a failure.
Steve Young
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