Star Wars and the complications of legacy
It’s December of 2019, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is due in cinemas in a matter of days. It’s been an eternity since I’ve anticipated a movie as hotly — partly because Star Wars alone amongst multi-installment film franchises is able to elicit this kind of reaction from me — whilst most others are adapted from other mediums, Star Wars is intrinsic to cinema itself — and because for the first time in my over-twenty year history with it, I am deeply invested in what happens next, but have no idea what to expect. The endgame of the prequels was a foregone conclusion, and I viewed The Force Awakens with a healthy dose of skepticism. And given how many of these nostalgia-driven revivals are content to rehash old content, often with less skill and personal investment, I was right to be. That this Star Wars sequel trilogy has been of comparable quality to the best of its forebears is something to be thankful for in itself — that it remains as vibrant and exciting now as it had been to me as a youth drinking in tales from a galaxy far, far away is practically a miracle. And it’s all thanks to The Last Jedi.
The Last Jedi, Episode VIII in the saga, is, putting it mildly, a fairly divisive entry in the Star Wars canon. It is, however, worth appreciating just how much of a miracle it is that this movie exists the way that it does. It’s the second entry in a series of revival films whose purpose is not only to continue the storyline of the original trilogy of films that concluded with Return of the Jedi over three decades ago, but to evoke the magic of that original run of films, to perform a form of cinematic necromancy that brings Star Wars as it existed in its golden era into contemporary times.
The first entry, The Force Awakens, was extremely successful: it became the fourth-highest grossing film of all time, and more importantly, was warmly received by both professional critics and that ever-fickle demographic of Star Wars fans. This success wasn’t accidental. The film was gloriously and proudly retro, brandishing not only the majority of the original cast and crew (including The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi scribe Lawrence Kasdan), and featuring styles and techniques — such as in-camera practical effects, animatronics, and on-location shooting — that were used to great effect in the original trilogy, but have since fallen out of favour amongst the blockbuster set. And it not only did it, but did it with a conspicuousness that marked it as deliberate.
That they shifted gears seemingly so drastically is testament to the boldness and integrity of Lucasfilm, as headed by Kathleen Kennedy. The rousing critical and commercial success of a profoundly traditional, nostalgic film could result, and has most often in the past, in an attempt to double down. Instead, writer-director Rian Johnson delivered a film that pushed the boundaries of what a Star Wars film is or could be, in the most meaningful way since the very first sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, back in 1980.
He did this in part by pushing the visual language of the franchise forward, giving us perspectives previously unexplored in the franchise: shots of starship pilots from outside their crafts, abstract dream sequences, and edits designed around characters’ subjective points of view. Perhaps more than any Star Wars director preceding, he seemed committed to creating indelible images devised to be seared into audience’s memory banks: the aftermath of a starship lightspeed collision, Luke Skywalker looking out at a binary sunset one final time, and the throne room lightsaber battle, each moment of which could conceivably be framed and put up on a wall. The preview material for The Rise of Skywalker seems to suggest that returning Awakens director J.J. Abrams has taken a few cues — already images of Rey facing down a racing TIE fighter in the desert and a massive iceberg reflected in a pool of water reflect a greater attention to framing, composition, and visual aesthetics than in Awakens or arguably any of his prior films.
But perhaps more importantly, The Last Jedi, as have the greatest sequels — Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Godfather Part II, Spider-Man 2, and of course The Empire Strikes Back — built on and recontextualised the themes and ideas put forth by its predecessors. Star Wars, since its inception, has been about the fight against oppression, a recurring motif in human history (see: the American Revolutionary War, the French Revolution, World War II, and many, many more), writ large against a wonderful, weird galactic backdrop. Its follow-ups, particularly Empire, drew in focus and explored how systemic oppression stems from the choices of individuals, and how those who possess power choose to wield it.
The Jedi’s phantom menace
The Last Jedi is not snobbish about where it draws influence from in the franchise. In what is possibly the only direct reference to the prequel trilogy in the Disney era, Luke Skywalker explains how the Jedi order’s complicity in allowing Darth Sidious (aka Emperor Palpatine) to seize political and authoritative control of the galaxy, and in the creation of Darth Vader, as a key reason for his turning his back on it. Though suffering from many fundamental filmmaking missteps, much around dialogue and the juxtaposition of CGI and live-action elements, the prequel trilogy is key to gaining a holistic understanding of the overall thesis of the entire Star Wars project. Though the Jedi order had been placed on a pedestal throughout the original three-film run, it’s important to note that at the climax of Return of the Jedi, Luke does not follow the path charted for him by his mentors, Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi, the last bastions of traditional Jedi thought and philosophy. Between the Emperor Palpatine goading him to strike down his father Darth Vader in order to take his place at Palpatine’s side, and his Jedi Masters urging him to strike Vader down in order to put an end to the threat he poses to innocent life, Luke takes a third path — one of empathy. Through his choice not to fight, Luke’s love awakens the humanity long-dormant in Vader, and Anakin Skywalker finally fulfills his destiny as the Chosen One who would destroy the Sith and bring balance to the Force. (NB: the wording has caused many to interpret his destruction of the Jedi order as bringing “balance” between light and dark sides of the Force, but my interpretation, and what I think the text points to, is that balance refers to harmony, something the dark side — sentient beings imposing their will to subvert the natural world for self-gain — inherently threatens.)
The thrust of the prequel trilogy — to tell the story of how the good man Anakin Skywalker fell victim to his own worst tendencies to become Darth Vader, an ultimate agent of oppression in his world — was the perfect way to explore this conflict with greater nuance and depth. In it, we see the Jedi order as it really was, not as its mythologising made it out to be — a collective made up by, for lack of a better word, human beings, susceptible to all the flaws that entails. It was composed of human beings who had, due to their personal circumstances, not fully learned to deal with being human. The order was shown to be cultish and dogmatic, enlisting members as infants when they have not yet gained the ability to parse through the information and stimulus from the world around them and draw their own conclusions, and disconnected from the greater society which they seek to serve. Qui-Gon Jinn, who makes a habit of involving himself in the lives of those he comes across, and without whom Anakin would never have been trained as a Jedi, is seen as an odd maverick; he’s also the first to retain his identity past death. Their ideology is to suppress their emotions, their human urges and foibles, so they never learn how to truly master them. Not that they aren’t susceptible to them — to squash them out is ultimately a futile endeavour — Obi-Wan is given to making decisions based on personal loyalty, while Mace Windu is constantly suspicious and distrustful. When Anakin, who had spent much of his early life outside of the order, and so has a more fully developed range of emotions than a typical young Jedi, undergoes a crisis over his powerlessness to control his circumstances, his repressed mentors are completely unable to give the troubled young man guidance.
Despite his mother being left in slavery while he pursued his new life, it didn’t occur to Obi-Wan, Windu, Yoda, or any of the lot that this might be of some significance to the boy, nor did they take any course of action to address his wellbeing over the matter. After all, they had no family outside of the order. When he develops an attraction to his childhood friend, which soon developed into a full-fledged relationship — a natural part of the human experience — Anakin is forced to hide this from effectively the only people in his social circle apart from her. There’s a scene in Revenge of the Sith that distils this failure most succinctly: Anakin approaches Yoda for advice, his power in the Force making him aware of the possibility of losing his wife Padmé, but leaving him unable to do anything to prevent it. Yoda, though the wisest and in many ways the most self-aware and stable of his Jedi superiors, proves completely out of touch, advising Anakin not to worry about the loss of loved ones because ultimately it’s all in service of some grander narrative. It’s easy for Yoda to say this because though empathetic and benevolent, his relationships up to that point were all superficial in comparison to those of Anakin. Unsatisfied with the answer, Anakin is driven into the arms of Palpatine and the Sith, whose ideology in contrast is to completely give in to one’s whims and desires without responsibility or thought about consequence. Windu’s hypocrisy, driven by blind devotion to ancient Jedi ways, over the justification of executing a defeated Sith Lord — something Anakin himself had grappled with and in which his failure caused him guilt and shame — is the last nail in the coffin.
Ultimately, neither line of thinking, the Jedi’s or the Sith’s, is able to equip Anakin, or any fully-realised human being, with the tools he needed to deal with his thoughts, feelings, and desires, and both resulted in the monstrosity that was Darth Vader. Nor did either put an end to him and redeem Anakin Skywalker. But it’s dealing with the legacy of what has come before that forms the bedrock of The Last Jedi’s statement as a work — fitting for the eighth instalment of a film franchise that began forty years before it.
Force ghosts of past, present, and future
This thrust was instrumental in fleshing out Kylo Ren into a fully-rounded character, the perfect antagonist for this new story, and possibly its most nuanced new player. Awakens cast Kylo as a dark side warrior given to personal struggles not unlike those Anakin experienced as a Jedi. Though he aligned himself with Snoke and the First Order, he was given to doubt about his ability and conviction, further complicated by having Leia and Han Solo, two of the biggest opponents to his ideology, as parents. And like Anakin, Kylo chafed against the weight of expectation placed on him by the environment around him. Ultimately though, we get little glimpse into why he had chosen the path he had, what motivated him, and so his character lacked depth much greater than that of a brainwashed child who runs away from home to join space ISIS; he’s a radical, plain and simple.
In The Last Jedi, we see that Kylo’s choices stem from a deep sense of personal betrayal due to the belief that his own uncle and mentor, Luke Skywalker, had intended to murder him. All because as an impressionable youth, whose convictions have yet to be shaped in stone, he had been exposed to the influence of Supreme Leader Snoke. As with Anakin, the failure of his mentors drove him into Snoke’s wings, but there, too Kylo was frustrated. He had replaced one role model for another, Snoke and his own grandfather Darth Vader, but neither gave him the ability to self-actualise. Kylo slaying his master, and the erstwhile primary villain of the new trilogy, was not the defining moment of the film only because it subverted expectations and unlocked a plethora of story possibilities moving forward, but because it was a perfect climax to his character arc up to that point. Disappointed by the legacy his forebears on either side had left him, Kylo’s conclusion was that he needed to seize control of his own destiny and to “destroy the past” entirely.
Similar disillusionment fuels our former protagonist Luke Skywalker, who after an entire movie’s worth of build-up, finally takes centre stage, and steals the entire film. Much has been said about the direction the film takes Luke, but his role as a defeated, embittered old man provided dramatic possibilities that The Last Jedi pays back in spades, and is a natural next step in the character’s personal journey. An all-powerful warrior of light ready to save our heroes in their time of need not only would have been deeply uninteresting to watch, but also untrue to the essence of the character given the circumstances dictated by the sequel trilogy’s scenario as laid out in The Force Awakens. Instead, Luke’s personal growth serves as the vehicle for our journey through the saga’s themes one last time.
At the outset, Luke stands to serve a similar role in The Last Jedi as Obi-Wan and Yoda did in Star Wars and Empire… only he doesn’t. He turns out to be far more apathetic and detached than either of his mentors had been, and his absence in the current galactic conflict turns out to be entirely by design. A lot of people took issue with this, arguing that Luke is one of the most fundamentally most optimistic characters in the saga. While this isn’t unfounded, I believe it’s another of Luke’s traits that fundamentally defines him, moreso than his optimism — his idealism. Like his father before him, Luke is a man of powerful personal convictions, who always chooses to do what he thinks is right regardless of what those in authority, whether Rebel or Imperial, Jedi or Sith, tell him to do, and he lies broken and defeated at the beginning of this film because he believed they — and all the choices he’s made — had utterly let him down. He disdains the Jedi for their flawed ideology and harmful practices, but he blames himself for making similar mistakes that eventually led his nephew Ben into becoming Kylo Ren. And when faced with the possibility of repeating all those mistakes with Rey, he stops the buck and refuses. Where Kylo ultimately confronts and conquers the past, Luke turns his back on it completely.
And the thing is, on its own, Kylo’s victory over the old ways, and all the forces that would seek to seize control of his destiny from him, would be an entirely cathartic story experience, and it remains so in many ways. But it’s in how we see Kylo wield his newfound agency, intimidating those around him to serve his ends and intent on making the galaxy bend to his will, that we realise how hollow his victory is. At the end of the day, Kylo is the antagonist of our saga — as he was always meant to have been. It was he, not Snoke that had been confronting our heroes since the very beginning of the sequel trilogy. But the protagonist of our story isn’t the returning Luke Skywalker, or his heir apparent Kylo Ren; it’s Rey.
Rey, whose motivation throughout the majority of this movie and the last was to reconnect with her past, is faced with the most devastating possibility — that she has none. Whereas Luke and Kylo chafed against the complicated legacies left them by their family and their respective orders, Rey sought some larger framework she could fit herself into, so it could show her her “place in all this”. In the end, she learns the most crucial of lessons: no one can show you your place in the world. It’s up to each of us to define it. Cut off from any possibility of a familial legacy, turned away by the last Jedi Luke Skywalker, and offered the acceptance she’s yearned for her entire life by Kylo Ren and his First Order, Rey nonetheless stakes her ground, proving that regardless of her origin or circumstances, she knows right from wrong.
It’s so that Luke’s decision to do things his way once again pays off. Luke didn’t have it in him to be manipulative like Obi-Wan and Yoda, who had deliberately kept the truth about his own lineage — and the failures of their order — from him, out of fear that he would follow his father down the road to ruin. Instead, Luke told Rey exactly how he sees things — that the ways of his Jedi forebears had failed him and led to catastrophe, and that she shouldn’t waste her time. What he hadn’t counted on was Rey’s resilience and the strength of her character. Instead of letting the mistakes of those who’d come before, and the fear of an unknown future, stop her, Rey took matters into her own hands and did what needed to be done now. With this, the relationship between Luke and Rey transcended simply that between teacher and pupil. Refusing to patronise her, Luke gifted her with the truth, and in turn she gave him a renewed sense of hope in the future.
Ironically it took Yoda, grown wiser since death, to point this out. In a poignant scene that counts among the best in the entire saga, Luke learns, from his old teacher and his new student, one final lesson — that the mistakes of those who have come before us do not define the actions of those who follow us; and our mistakes don’t define them either. Instead, our responsibility is to learn from our failures, and pass these lessons on so our mistakes aren’t repeated. With this, despite all he’s seen and experienced, Luke does a most courageous thing — he chooses to trust Rey.
A story of generations
George Lucas often used the fact that Star Wars was “for children” as an excuse for the more puerile elements in his films. But that Star Wars has continued to hold relevance for me throughout various stages of my life proves it’s far more than just that. The Last Jedi came out at a pivotal time in my life: I’m old enough to have had my share of mistakes and regrets, but also young enough to have many choices ahead of me that will have consequences not only on my life, but on the world around me. And there will be many more after me who grapple with the same dilemmas on their journey as human beings.
Moreover, there will always be intergenerational strife. The temptation is great to face the broken systems and harmful practices of our predecessors with hostility, like Kylo (slicing Snoke in half is the ultimate “ok boomer”). But doing so is just one more way that we let them oppress us, and by forging ahead blindly, we run the risk of becoming oppressive ourselves. Instead, we need the judgment and critical thinking to parse through what is relevant. After all, Rey may not be an adherent of the old order’s ways, being very much in tune with her emotions and acting with empathy, but as Luke said, he will not be the last Jedi. Rey will use her power with the Force to shape the course of history for the better, with her conscience and wisdom to guide her. Social structures and mores have to be dynamic, fluid enough to change to suit the times; it does not mean they are devoid of merit and need to be abandoned completely. In spite of all that she’d learned about the Jedi, and deciding to forge her own path, Rey took the ancient Jedi texts with her.
Luke learned, as his mentors eventually did, that the mistakes we make in our lives, even those with profound and long-lasting consequences, aren’t black marks on our legacies. The onus is on us not to let the disillusionments and prejudices we acquire from our experiences prevent those who come after us from trying to effect change in the world. Human progress is a collective endeavour. The torch had been passed from Luke to Rey — a thousand generations live in her now. And it’s now her fight.
That’s the beauty of stories. They serve as vessels for our insights, and their applicability allows them to adapt to different contexts, helping those to whom we tell them navigate the world in which we live. The Last Jedi performs its final magic trick by finally, definitively ushering the Star Wars franchise into a new era. By film’s end, jaded old hermit Luke Skywalker has become a figure better resembling the awe-inspiring hero we followers of the original Star Wars films remember him to be. And in another one of Rian Johnson’s masterful images, he completes the illusion, projecting an idealised version of himself onto the salt-mine planet Crait to face down his fallen nephew and the army he’s just taken over. In doing so, he’s able to become the saviour he told Rey earlier in the film he couldn’t be, because he’s just one man. Looking back on his life, his legacy, and mirror images of Ahch-To’s setting sun, as he once gazed at the future Tatooine’s suns promised, Luke Skywalker the character ascends into Luke Skywalker the icon — a symbol of rebellion against oppression; inspiring not just Rey but generations of would-be heroes after her, just as he has for generations of us in the real world. It’s likely the apotheosis of Luke’s ideology and worldview is the eponymous Rise of Skywalker of the ninth instalment.
The Last Jedi is not a perfect movie, not in the same way that Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back so nearly are. It’s overlong, stemming from a glut of ideas and plot threads, some of which are left undercooked. The Canto Bight sequence in particular stands out as potentially unnecessary, and while the existence of behind-the-scenes war profiteers is fascinating and true-to-life, it never quite ties into the broader story being told. However, it uses its existence as part of a larger tapestry, and the extreme popularity and establishment of said tapestry, not to rest on its laurels as so many other films in similar circumstances do, but as a buffer to make bold and exciting storytelling decisions that keep the franchise relevant and living. After all, the burden of legacy fell not only on Luke and Kylo Ren’s shoulders, or the shoulders of those of us living in the real world, but on the new Lucasfilm and the filmmakers charged with creating new Star Wars content for the 21st century. Star Wars needed to adapt or die.
“Confronting fear is the DESTINY of a Jedi. Your destiny.”
So go Luke’s words to Rey in the final trailer for The Rise of Skywalker — fear of change, of the unknown, of the past, of the future, of progress. This statement, as with the theme of The Last Jedi’s story, is a challenge — to question norms, the status quo, and social expectations, and to shape the future for yourself and those that come after you. As many other works of great art, especially of science-fiction (if one chooses to view it as such), Star Wars in the Disney era remains ahead of, and will likely continue to influence, changes in society. What’s not to be excited for?
