There's Nothing You Can Say To Change My Mind

Well, my reverse-order rewatch of The Last Jedi was way overdue, but I finally got to it tonight. I wish I hadn't delayed so long; part of the idea behind an endeavor like this is to have the films benefit from close juxtaposition. But things have been weird lately, and a couple of nagging worries made me less enthusiastic about watching TLJ than I wanted to be. One, of course, was the exhaustingly intense squabbling in the fandom over TLJ being better than TROS or TROS being better than TLJ. There's been so much ugly strife over these films, and I didn't want it at the forefront of my thoughts as I watched. Another bit of anxiety was the possibility that rewatching TLJ would bring down my opinion of TROS ... or that having liked TROS so much would lower my appreciation of TLJ.

But after watching TROS a few weeks back and watching TLJ tonight, I can safely say, people who hold one of the two up as a masterpiece while trashing the other are kind of full of it. Either they're both great filmmaking, or neither one is. Both of them have lots of dumb things in them, and both of them have amazing scenes and performances and a terrific underlying spirit.

I'm going to go with both of them being great, and please don't bother trying to debate me on that.

Anyway, some thoughts on TLJ in the context of TROS:

Knowing that Leia completed her Jedi training years ago makes her Force abilities in The Last Jedi really leap out. When Kylo Ren is shooting up the cruiser and swinging around to target the bridge, the intercutting of their faces and the interaction of their expressions couldn't be more obviously a Force connection. When Leia uses the Force to fly back into the ship after the bridge gets blown out, it's clearly something she intended to do, not just an instinctive activation of latent power. When Luke arrives at the end, gives her Han's golden dice, and kisses her forehead, she totally knows that he's not really there.

Next, what's likely a very unpopular opinion: Rose Tico is just okay in this movie. Kelly Marie Tran's performance is fine but unexceptional, and the character has no developmental arc of her own to speak of. She's a foil and a catalyst for Finn's growth story, she has some endearing qualities, and she's admirable for being a very ordinary person demonstrating heroism. But while I really wish TROS had given us more of the scenes they supposedly filmed between her and Leia at the base, the people who expected Episode IX to put her on equal footing with the main three characters obviously had a whole different experience of her in this movie that I did. If TLJ had been bold enough to actually have Finn die flying into the battering ram cannon, I would have been fine with her becoming the third leg of a trio in the final movie. As it is, though, TROS really needed to showcase the relationship between Rey, Finn, and Poe, because they'd never been together prior to that. So I'm fine with her not tagging along to Pasaana and elsewhere.

Another possibly contentious admission: this viewing confirmed my opinion that people are simply off-base when they say TROS retconned TLJ or demeaned and insulted it. This movie starts off with Luke tossing away his father's lightsaber, but it ends with him deliberately choosing to appear on Crait with that same saber. We're expressly shown that he has changed his thinking in radical ways over the course of the film. He spends most of the movie insisting that Kylo is beyond redemption, then tells Leia at the end that, "No one's ever really gone," in response to her saying that her son is truly lost. He literally does exactly what he said he wouldn't do by walking out with a laser sword to face down the whole first order and be the inspiring hero Rey asked him to be at the start. So in TROS, when he talks about having been wrong, he's only stating out loud the things we see him acting upon at the end of TLJ.

Likewise, the next film doesn't run down Admiral Holdo or write off the Holdo Maneuver as a fluke. It establishes very plainly that people are aware of Holdo's heroic sacrifice and want to be like her. It even shows a Holdo Maneuver having worked over Endor at the close of the movie. The fact that Poe thinks it can't be reliably duplicated isn't a diss -- it's a testament to how well Holdo timed her lightspeed jump and how well she piloted the ship.

So ... how did The Last Jedi hold up in the context of The Rise of Skywalker? Well, the fact is, the unexpected death of Snoke ought to rank right up there with "I am your Father" as one of the great cinematic shockers in science fiction. The confrontation between Luke and Kylo on Crait is similarly right up there with some of the best moments in all of Star Wars. And the reveal that Luke is still back on Ahch-To is frankly genius-level stuff. I saw TLJ nine or ten times in the theater, and that revelation audibly blew people's minds over and over.

It's a heck of a film.