REVIEW: Star Wars: The Last Jedi

It's time for Dan and Suz's Star Wars review! No spoiler warnings – you've had a month to see the film now, it's long beyond time we got round to this and now it's here. If you haven't seen The Last Jedi, I'm sure you've seen the fans' reaction to it. Which is, to say the least, a bit divided.

There are to camps among Star Wars fandom when it comes to this, the eighth episode of the franchise. There are those who, largely along the lines of the critics' response, think it's one of the strongest in the series to date and love that it's doing something a little different with the mythology. And then there are those who are crying about it because it's profoundly and unapologetically feminist in its approach to this Boy's Own adventure. You see, The Last Jedi is a film that directly opposes the usual narrative of Star Wars. Fans have grown up on stories which saw a series of old men training up young men to use violence against violence and make grand gestures in the face of oppression. There's a bunch of memes going around comparing Luke's journey in A New Hope to the radicalisation of a young Muslim, and it's funny because it's absolutely right. The Force Awakens, in that it was a virtual remake of the original Star Wars, changed one major factor by making the new recruit to the Jedi way a young woman, but otherwise it was still full of dog fights in space and hand-to-hand battles.

The Last Jedi makes pains to point out that disobeying orders and going on unplanned incursions into enemy territory makes men heroes, but it doesn't, in the main, win wars. Poe Dameron's headstrong nature is explicitly condemned by the commanding officers of the Resistance, both of whom are women. Finn begins this episode trying to escape the oncoming First Order in a combination of desperation to find Rey and simple (and quite understandable) fear. Neither Poe nor Finn is ever portrayed as a baddie in this film, but they are openly shown to be flawed, childishly so. Finn because he is hugely inexperienced, and Poe because he's got bloody lucky in the past and hasn't yet got himself killed (a possible swipe at the previous film's barely credible rewrite which saw him come back from apparent death with little explanation).

It's the women who come out best throughout the movie. Carrie Fisher gets a great final send-off which allows her to use the Force in a way that shows yes, Leia is just as powerful as Luke and was massively underutilised in the original trilogy. Sure, surviving in the vacuum of space for that long strains credibility to the limit, but given that the Force is, quite simply, magic, it really doesn't bother either of us. Rey shows maturity when confronted with betrayal by the two men who mean the most to her (Luke and Kylo Ren, sorry Finn), and sticks to her principles throughout. Whether her principles are right is still questionable, since she remains convinced of the greatness of the Jedi, something that the film continually calls into question, but we'll come back to that.

And then there's Laura Dern's character, Vice Admiral Holdo, is one of the few new additions to the main cast, and is a revelation. She's the seeming opposite of Leia, in her modern iteration. This is someone who we are told is a powerful commander, and then sashays in all glammed-up with purple hair and a pretty dress. She's an attractive older woman who doesn't apologise for her femininity and who immediately puts the male characters in their place. It's hard to overstate how important a character she is. Holdo is the sort of character who is normally revealed to be a villain in a film like this. Indeed, our expectations in this regard are deliberately played with by writer-director Rian Johnson. We've learned to trust Poe and Finn and to distrust women like Holdo, so we keep expecting them to be proven right and her wrong. Instead, they go and make an almighty hash of their unauthorised secret mission and Holdo is proven to be an intelligent commander with compassion and humility who, ultimately, saves a whole lot of lives.

On the other side of the spectrum is the other new character, Rose, played by Kelly Marie Tran. A lowly technician (read: a very important member of a large and essential team), she has good reason to hate people like Poe who, after all, got her sister killed in his latest heroic mission. Yet she still sides with Poe and Finn in their mini-mutiny. Possibly it's down to her attraction to Finn, although as with all Finn's relationships (including Rey and Poe) it's unclear how much is romantic and how much is just friendship; but mostly it's down to inexperience. Indeed, it's Poe, who's experience has led to his arrogance, who Finn and Rose look to for guidance. They all redeem themselves, but none of them escape this initial flaw of acting without thinking, up to the moment that Rose nearly kills herself to stop the oncoming First Order attack on Crait and Finn nearly fouls up everything rescuing her. Heroics vs. strategy.

The Last Jedi is surely the most critical of Star Wars' essential premise of all the films in the franchise, and it's not as if George Lucas ever wrote the Jedi Order as anything other than massively flawed. Fans have also cried out against Luke's portrayal as an old, depressed and ineffective man who has retired from the Jedi life and hidden out on an island on some long forgotten planet, milking space walruses. This seems to be a strange thing to contest, given that his two mentors both went into hiding as soon as the Empire came to power. At least Obi-Wan tried to stay near to Luke and keep and eye on him, but Yoda went and sat in a swamp on his own for thirty years, becoming increasingly strange in the head. That's what Jedi do when things get tough. The film cleverly plays with this, though, by making it clear that yes, Luke is still pretty damned awesome. He needs Rey to stop looking for the mythologised version of the character and accept the imperfect man that he is. Then he can – in the greatest scene in the film – project his astral self to Crait and take on Kylo Ren what appears to be a display of macho badassery but turns out to be astonishing misdirection. And finally the phrase “more powerful than you can possibly imagine” means something more than wandering around as a ghost for years.

Ah, Kylo Ren. Adam Driver is almost too good for the role. The Force Awakens had already set up this new generation of villains as feeble wannabes with bigger guns than their daddies – Shadows of the Empire, if you will. Space Nazis are scary, but space neo-Nazis are scarier still. It's a perfect update for our time, and what's most frightening is that so many of this fanboys don't realise that they're the target of this satire. While Domnall Gleeson is brilliant here, and we have an unexpected and wonderful role from Adrian “Eddie Hitler” Edmonson, it's Driver's show. It's frankly embarrassing to watch Hayden Christensen try to play the same emotions in the prequels after seeing Driver so convincingly portray a young man tearing himself apart. What's so fascinating is that we genuinely don't know which way Ren will eventually go. This is someone who constructed his villain identity seemingly using an actual “what's your Star Wars name?” meme, who wears a stupid mask because his granddad needed one to help him breathe, and is still one of the most convincingly divided characters ever seen in the series.

Kylo's story is the backbone of the film, with the entire Luke-Rey plotline revolving around their relationship with him and the Resistance plotline extending from his actions. His obsessive hatred of Luke is about the only thing he's sure about. His and Rey's complex feelings for one another are the most believable romantic relationship Star Wars has given us, two hugely powerful characters linked by their uncertainty of how to use those powers. Ren's betrayal of Supreme Leader Snoke, lopping Snoke's head off as he tries to push Rey to the Dark Side, is of course a direct life from the Emperor-Vader-Luke scene at the end of Return of the Jedi, but one that serves to push Snoke completely out of the narrative. That's another thing that fans are wailing about: two years of wondering who Snoke really is and he's just killed off before we find out anything about him. Again, missing the point: Snoke's identity is spectacularly irrelevant. He's just a big scary baddie. (Of course, if he returns as a Force ghost for Episode IX and gives us his eulogy we'll eat our words.)

The original premise of the films and indeed, the Jedi culture, is that we need both light and dark to achieve balance. With one side intent on winning out over each other, this balance can never be achieved. This seemed to be lost somewhere along the way with light and dark vying to have dominion over the other. Perhaps the only one who can see the balance is Kylo Ren, who understands the need to cease the fighting and work together, accepting both light and dark as part of the same parcel and endeavour to find balance. But Ray is too brainwashed by her interpretation of the ancient Jedi religion to see this for what it is; an olive branch and a chance of peace.

Wars will never end if people cant forgive or at least stop the fighting and focus on the future.

Kylo then takes it to the logical next level, if people cant forgive what has passed, and want to continue the fighting, then these warring factions need to be removed in order to make way for peace. A clean slate is a clean slate!

One thing that both of us have been saying for years is that the focus on the Light Side and Dark Side is the big failing of the Jedi and the Sith. Rey's burgeoning Force abilities see her calling on both sides, something that initially frightens Luke as much as Kylo did, but at least he's slowly learned his lesson and doesn't completely drive her away. It's no wonder Kylo turned to the Dark Side – at least Snoke is consistent in his messages – but he gets that the divide is exactly what's led to decades of battling between successive regimes. Suz has more sympathy for Kylo than Dan does – exterminating the entire galactic civilisation and starting over is perhaps a bit far to go for a new ideology – but he is essentially right. The final scene of the film – a young slave boy at Canto Bight uses the Force to shift his broom, looking wistfully up at the stars – is probably intended to be inspiring and hopeful. However, Suz points out that all it really implies is that the fighting is going to carry on for another generation. Particularly off the back of Ray's refusal to take Kylo up on his offer to forget the war. Indeed, it's essentially a callback to how Darth Vader started out, something that led to a complete collapse of galactic order and decades of war.

Star Wars has always had some excellent location work, and The Last Jedi is no exception. The casino city of Canto Bight has taken some flack from critics and fans, but we love it. It's a new environment after The Force Awakens added to the series of desert planets and forest planets and city planets. As well as providing us with the always welcome hive of scum and villainy, it's a glitzy and weird futuristic world with a lot of visual interest. It also adds more to the overall criticism of the light/dark divide, pointing out that there are plenty of terrible people who don't care who buys their weapons or how they make their money, and who couldn't give a damn who runs the Galaxy as long as they're still in their comfy little world. Benicio del Toro's wonderfully twitchy and completely amoral character DJ is the only major character in the film who isn't beholden to the debate and divide between good and evil. Crait is perhaps the most visually arresting location. Deliberately indicative of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back, the decision to film at the salt flats Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia is a brilliant one, utilising one of the most remarkable locations on Earth as a backdrop for the climactic battle of the film.

As always, there are plenty of fun creatures to enjoy – Suz's favourites are the llama-like steeds on Canto, while Dan likes the crystal critters on Crait. For all that The Last Jedi finally takes things in a somewhat different direction for the franchise, it's still very much a Star Wars movie with all the expected trappings. Yoda turns up (as a puppet, pleasingly) and Chewie still gets all the best lines. It occupies the same position in its trilogy as The Empire Strikes Back, and like Empire, ends in pretty crushing defeat for the heroes. Also like Empire, it's a strong contender for the best film in the franchise. The direction, writing and acting are all among the best we've seen in Star Wars. The crying fanboys are just a bonus.