SPOILERS AHOY (Last Jedi)

[mellicious]

NOTE: this is all very hastily written and stream-of-consciousness, and I'm not going to apologize for that, really. But let me just repeat that it is also totally FULL OF SPOILERS. I put it in the title but if you read it in my journal style the title is not very noticeable.


I'm not going to even try to write anything spoiler-free about The Last Jedi. I... liked it pretty well, that's all I can think of to say that's spoiler-free. But it also had some problems, and a hella lot of surprises, and all that is obviously spoilers, so I'm just rolling with that. Oh, also, lemme say that I don't even know the names of a lot of these characters, and I'm sure I'll figure all that out later (because I've watched The Force Awakens about 17 times and Rogue One maybe 10 times, so I think we can assume I'm going to see this in the theater at least one more time) - and probably I'll look at IMDb and figure some of this stuff out, sometime soon. But right now I'm not worrying about all that. 

I love the surprise of it - it just went off in directions you weren't expecting. (There, a whole basically spoiler-free sentence. Although I suppose you could say that that in itself is a spoiler.) Like Luke at the end - and Luke at the beginning, for that matter, with the lightsaber and the crazy. Also the question of which way Kylo will jump, light or dark? And then they give you a false answer on that for a minute, too, and then switch again. Although I do think the answer they ultimately came up with is the one that feels right to me. I don't much buy that he's savable. (I do buy that he would want Rey as his queen or whatever, but it'd never last 'cause she's too mouthy and he'd want to shut her up eventually. He's that kinda guy.)

Can I just say, OH THANK GOD, NO MIDICHLORIANS. I know, it wasn't in the last movie either, but this was the first (and by far the best) explanation of the Force that I've heard since the very first movie. But I hated the whole idea of the damn midichlorians.

And I kind of love the idea that Luke burns (or well, Yoda does) the whole Jedi library, and Rey hasn't read it and doesn't appear to have any training about it either, and she has no clear notions at all about the old Jedi traditions, so from that standpoint Luke is actually the last Jedi. I really got the idea more from playing a Jedi in The Old Republic game than anywhere else, that the Jedi traditions kinda suck. So there will be Force-users from here on out but no old-school Jedi. (ADDED: I saw a video that said Rey secretly saved the library, so all of this may be technically untrue, in the end. But clearly the idea that the Jedi are changing is correct.)

Questions:
-- I kept waiting for them to say that Benecio Del Toro's character was actually the guy they went to find, but no. They don't actually say one way or the other, but as far as we know he's not, really. We see some other guy who's wearing the flower or whatever it was, for like two seconds. My theory was maybe the other guy had stolen his pin and Benecio was the real guy, but who knows?

-- I've watched a couple of YouTube videos and I agree that the whole casino thing slowed the movie down. (I also told Rob that rich people are the new bad guys, because, you know, who else is left, I guess?*) I liked Rose, and I liked Rose and Finn as a team, but that plot was just ill-conceived, I thought. That whole thing seemed like they didn't think they had enough plot so they came up with this whole big red herring about needing codes. (Also, were they implying Rose/Finn there at the very end? Oh, and then you get Oscar being all, "Hey there, I'm Poe," to Rey, and I'm going, wouldn't these characters have met before? That was mainly why I noticed Finn hovering at Rose's bedside in that scene.)

-- Here's another thing: Did Gwendoline Christie just not want to put a lot of time in on these movies, or something? Because I have a Phasma bobble-head, and I feel like she's ultimately such a minor figure that I wouldn't have bothered if I'd known. (I wanted to collect female Star Wars characters, for a while, and I got up to three - Rey, Leia, and Phasma - and then I just kind of gave up on that. I eventually added Obi-Wan and some random robot, and decided to stop there, because Funkos, much as I love them, kind of take up a lot of room that we really don't have.) I thought she would have a big scene in the first movie and then when she didn't, I was expecting it in this movie, and instead you get about 10 seconds of fight and she's dead. (Another late addition: I'm kidding myself to say I "collected" the Phasma bobblehead in particular - I got it in a Funko box and I think it was limited edition, but I didn't actually pick it out. I think it was more that I got the idea from having the Phasma, and then I went and ordered the LE Rey from Hot Topic to go with it.)


*When I was growing up the bad guys were communists. Then later the bad guys were Iranians or Al-Qaeda or something. I'm kind of glad to see them getting away from the whole ethnicity aspect of it, but while I'm complaining about tax cuts for the rich as much as anybody else, I also think that's kind of an easy target, what with Trump and everything. I don't guess "bad guys" as a concept is going away any time soon, so it'll be interesting to see if rich people or Russian oligarchs or something sticks - we could go back to the Russian accents for that one - or if somebody will come up with something else.)