Star Wars VIII: The Lastest Jedi

I don’t know whether Star Wars Episode VIII: Star Wars Presents the Lastest Star Wars Jedi is any good. What I know is I wasn’t moved by it and I am pretty damn fatigued by the familiarity of it all. The more Star Wars movies there are, the more it feels like pro wrestling or a burly soap opera. You have a finite cast of characters, heroes and heels, who clash this way and then that. There are the minor skirmishes building to a fixed allotment of battle royales. To keep it all going, the invisible hand--guided by several scriptwriters and a shitload studio lackeys with their eye on merchandising and sequels--moves the chess pieces around to generate new beefs and tepid twists. All this so everyone can keep fighting forever and ever. New skirmishes, new battles, all familiar and all increasingly incestuous. All without the charm of Mean Gene Okerlund to do some ringside analysis.

Like the tidal wave of fucking marvel comic movies, Star Wars has been going on long enough and the movies are so similar that they no longer get ranked against other movies. It doesn’t matter to people whether Star Wars 8 is any good. What matters is where it sits relative to all the other Star Wars movies. Did they shit the bed again like with the first two episodes, and me the other night? Is it as good as Empire Strikes Back? Or does it fall into that wide chasm where it doesn’t outright suck, therefore, we must like it? It’s a hell of a magic trick that the grassfuckers pull off: making us happy to get anything that isn’t aggressively turdy.

Now is the worst time to decide whether Star Wars 8 is any good within its own little universe. Give it a few years. Digest it. Unless it’s like the Phantom Menace, in which case it will sit in your gut for years like a piece of Bazooka bubble gum you swallowed on a dare as a kid, and which still rattles around your lower intestines if you move just wrong. Right now, all you get are slobbering fanboys who rave about it because it’s the newest and because they got to see it in a theater. Their anticipation had backed up like the jizz in a teenager sharing a hotel room with his parents. The release was just so exquisite, so needed. Hindsight, though, will allow those saliva-soaked slobs to view their stiff sock in a different light. Slowly, complaints will leak out from the bravest and most persnickety among them. This will embolden others to say what they didn’t like. Eventually, most everyone will bitch and moan about something. Star Wars movies no longer have novelty to skate by on. The level of that whininess will ultimately define where Star Wars 8 resides in the canon.

Rey (Daisy Ridley) ended Star Wars 7 by going to seek the help of old man Skywalker (Mark Hamill) as the heel Empire was crushing the hero Rebellion. This movie picks up there, with a visit to an Irish tourist spot. Luke is a crotchety guy. It’s sort of the Jedi way to run away and hide when things get tough. I understand completely. I once hid in a closet for four days after Mrs. Filthy discovered I had eaten all the powdered sugar and yeast.

Meanwhile, the Empire has reduced the Rebellion to a battalion of ships commanded by Leia (Carrie Fisher), and have the good guys on the run. They’re just waiting for the little squadron to run out of fuel. The Rebel’s chances aren’t helped by a hot shot pilot Poe (Oscar Isaac) who can’t keep his blaster in his pants. He wastes fuel and lives on quixotic missions. His actions feel tangential to the plot.

Worse, though, is Finn (John Boyega), a Storm Trooper turned Rebel who really has no good reason to be in this movie other than so we don’t forget about him before he likely plays a bigger role in the next movie. (This is another thing I fucking hate about these “sagas”: the way each exists primarily to promote the next one. It’s like the guy who, every time he has sex with a girl, promises her that next time he’ll be better. Why not just be good now?). Poe consumes about a third of the movie’s overlong time on a mission that has zero impact on the story. He’s just given busywork. Like the time my boss Dipshit Suzanne had me stare at the sulfur lights in the parking lot just to see how long it would take before I went temporarily blind (22 minutes).

The Empire is led by a gimp named Snoke whose provenance I don’t know and don’t care. Just know he’s pretty much identical to Darth Sidious, except without a hoodie. Beneath him in the chain of command is Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), a moodier version of Darth Vader, and the child of Leia and the dead Han Solo. He wants to crush the rebellion for personal reasons that appear to be mostly teenaged sour grapes. He also can communicate telepathically with Rey, and they have bitch sessions about how hard it is to be burdened with so much responsibility.

Ultimately, Rey talks Luke into training her in the ways of the Force and then returning to help the Rebellion. He uses his supermagic powers in much the same way David Blaine uses his and the small sliver of fighters left is saved to fight in the next movie.

There is an enormous amount of fluff and baggage in Star Wars 8. So many threads felt episodic and unimportant. They are probably important to people who are keeping score over nine movies. C3PO, R2D2 and Chewbacca all make appearances that pad the movie’s length and have the worthlessness of a Stan Lee cameo. It’s all brand protection, not storytelling. Yoda also shows up, but he’s pretty fucking funny. New characters are introduced that we are supposed to care about, but I didn’t because their stories don’t mesh well with the main plot, and because they’re throwaways.

The problem is that great stories almost always start with great characters. The story is about how they react under stress. Star Wars is entirely about a very structured and predetermined destiny, and the gadfly writers and directors Disney hires and fires are forced to try to squeeze a little bit of personality into the cracks in the structure. Nobody in charge of this universe gives a fuck about the characters, just that we get to the next big battle and then promote the next movie.

The special effects are fantastic. There are some stunning visuals, such as a blood-red planet encrusted in glaring white salt. The sound editing is probably top-notch. I wouldn’t know. The screaming ambivalence to character personality drowned it out. There are cute animals created specifically to be sold on bedsheets and as stuffed toys. In other words, it’s a Star Wars movie, hemmed in by modest expectations. Maybe it's even a good one.

But it’s kind of a turd as a moviein the larger universe. Where’s Randy “Macho Man” Savage when a you really need someone to shake things up? Two Fingers.