Enough with the whiny movie critics complaining about the new Star Wars movie. Like them, I was fully prepared to hate the thing when I arrived at the screening, but that prejudice was overcome by the movie’s wondrous look and by its fascinating, multilayered plot.
Yes! I hear you fans saying. Yes! He gets it! But a few of you (whichever ones of you follow me on Twitter) may be confused: Wait, wasn’t Podhoretz ragging on The Last Jedi all weekend? Yes, I was. The fact is I didn’t write the sentences above just now. I wrote them in the New York Post 18 years ago, in 1999, upon the release of The Phantom Menace, the first Star Wars movie made since the original trilogy.
Which is to say, I was once like you Last Jedi fans. I scoffed at criticism of The Phantom Menace. So be forewarned: That review has been thrown in my face for nearly two decades. Having praised The Phantom Menace is like having spoken favorably of Sarah Palin in 2008. It’s the sort of thing that induces a defensive explanation: “Well, you have to understand, she seemed so fresh, so new …”
Five Star Wars movies have been made since The Phantom Menace, and every one of them has been hotly defended, to a greater or lesser degree, upon its first release. The difference between then and now is that the lion’s share of the nation’s film critics from 1999 have since been forcibly retired by their places of employ.
Many if not most of those arguably more pretentious and middlebrow critics were skeptical of science fiction pictures and their sequels and mass-marketed movies more generally. So if you have a bias toward the contrarian, as I do, saying something nice about a big-budget wannabe crowd-pleaser in 1999 had a dual purpose: You were showing off your populist instincts and thumbing your nose at conventional wisdom.
The opposite is true today. Those out-of-work critics have largely been supplanted by bloggers and fans, and their instincts and impulses are radically different. Fans are fans. They like most everything, especially if it’s “genre” and provides them with special “fan service” moments—scenes that delve into the arcana of “canon” and delight those who have spent an inordinate amount of their lives thinking about the comic books or movies they loved as children and teenagers. Some bloggers have a direct financial interest in keeping on the good side of their movie-obsessed readers (lest they lose clicks) and the publicity machines that offer them junkets and interview access—and awards-season advertising.
As a result, while earlier critics had a hoity-toity bias against sequels to popular science fiction fare of the past, newer voices have an emotional bias toward them enhanced by fear—fear of alienating social-media rageaholics who will denounce them in comments and on Twitter, and of the loss of their somewhat elevated status with the powers-that-be in filmdom. They want to love them. They need to love them. So there ain’t no way they ain’t gonna love them. Even when they don’t deserve the love.
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My problem with The Last Jedi is simple: Until the last 20 minutes, when it catches fire both visually and dramatically, I found it excruciatingly boring and startlingly devoid of any meaningful plot. This is a movie whose story literally centers on how much gas is in a spaceship’s tank. The daredevil pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) is working with Princess/General Leia (Carrie Fisher) to save the last remnant of “the Resistance” to the New Order fascists now running the galaxy before the needle points to E.
Meanwhile, Rey (Daisy Ridley) from The Force Awakens has been sent by Leia to learn Jedi secrets from her old and embittered brother, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). While Rey does so, she’s being seduced telepathically from afar by the tempestuous Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), who killed his father Han Solo in the last picture.
These two storylines come together in the end. But there’s a third. Finn (John Boyega) from The Force Awakens goes off to try to find a way to disable a piece of technology on the big New Order spaceship. He finds himself on a planet that’s a big casino. He locates a guy who can help him. They are chased. They get off the planet. They go to the bad spaceship. They’re caught. They fail. That’s it. The entire plotline takes half an hour of screen time and adds up to nothing.
Half an hour of pointlessness is a lot. So, too, are the endless minutes during which Rey must plead with a recalcitrant Luke to show her his Jedi tricks. She says please. He says no. She says please. He storms off. She’s like a stalker. She’s creating a hostile Jedi environment. Finally he says yes. When Luke and Yoda played this game in The Empire Strikes Back it was over very quickly. This one takes forever.
Like I say, very boring, but at least The Last Jedi ends with a bang—not a logical bang, but a bang nonetheless. Still, that bang comes at the cost of betraying all kinds of Star Wars mythology. Primarily, it seems, the Force is no longer just the energy that flows through the universe. It’s more like Samantha Stephens’s powers on Bewitched—these characters can do anything with it as long as the plot needs them to. Now that the Force is just sitcom magic, you can bet that Episode IX will feature time travel, the deadly scourge of all that is good in science fiction. No matter. People will love it. And then, two years later, they will say it was a disappointment. Just like the people who love The Last Jedi will call it a disappointment two years from now.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
