Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Los Angeles, CA (United States of America). December 15th, 2017 (CNBC). When it was released in 1977, the first Star Wars movie only bore the title Star Wars. Later, the subtitle A New Hope was added — and with it, a subtle intimation of what this series is all about. The Star Wars saga explores lots of ideas, but one it keeps cycling back to is the idea of hope. Where does it come from? Why? And when it looks like the last glimmer of hope has been extinguished, is there any reason to go on?


For decades, each Star Wars installment has explored those ideas, moving from hope to despair and back again as a fundamentally moral political battle wages between a dark side bent on its own immense power and a scrappy bunch of rebels who dare to think everyone matters. And now, 40 years after it all started, the eighth installment in the Star Wars series, The Last Jedi, retreads that basic setup with a mastery that isn't just reminiscent of the series' best entries, but takes its place alongside them.

The strength of 2015's The Force Awakens came from its careful retreading of ground that was already broken by earlier Star Wars films, in ways that pleased fans who were terrified this new trilogy would repeat the mistakes of George Lucas's "prequel" trilogy. The Force Awakens calmed fears, reminded viewers why the series worked in the first place, and introduced a more diverse set of characters that made the whole Star Wars thing feel fresh and fun again.


And yet, if The Force Awakens was a great variation on a theme, then The Last Jedi is another movement altogether in the symphony. There are images in this movie that provoke awe and delight, and creatures that feel lifted out of half-remembered childhood dreams. And though it briefly appears to lose steam in the middle, that's short-lived, with a third act harboring sequences that feel like a maestro conducting a concerto the size of the cosmos.

There is catharsis aplenty, something the Star Wars movies are designed for, encouraging us to cheer when our favorite characters show up on screen and letting us thrill to the chases and the romance and the vistas and the explosions and the lightsaber battles. (This installment has one of the most purely perfect lightsaber battles the series has yielded thus far.) But as written and directed by Rian Johnson, The Last Jedi doesn't just feel like a well-executed Star Warsmovie — it feels like a well-executed movie, period, one that keeps its eye on the relationships between characters, and how they communicate with one another, in addition to the bigger picture.

Some of this has to do with the fact that The Force Awakens did the heavy lifting by introducing (or in some cases reintroducing) these characters to us, so Johnson doesn't have to start from scratch. But one of Johnson's strengths as a writer and director has always been injecting humanity and intelligence into characters who live inside familiar genres; they're definitely characters, but they're people, too. He knows how to make us feel for them.

That means that a character like the loser General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson as a marvelous sad sap), locked in his eternal battle with Kylo Ren for dominance and the attention of Supreme Commander Snoke (Andy Serkis), is the butt of many jokes, but he also has a glimmer of the unwanted pet dog about him that lends a little pathos to our scorn.

It means we get a character like Rose, who trips believably over herself when she first meets Resistance Hero Finn, but quickly shows she's brilliant, and has a strong and courageous side too. It means Luke becomes more than a reclusive hero-in-waiting, coming to recognize the battle that's been raging inside of him and how it colors the way he interacts with the world, and with Rey.

Thanks to Johnson's impish sense of humor, the film is littered with jokes — some of the best obviously nod to various fan theories that have sprung up in The Force Awaken's wake — as well as allusions to other films and a truly wonderful menagerie of fauna ranging far beyond the already-beloved puffin-like porgs, all of which brings warmth and humor to a story that is, at its core, very serious.

But the best details are in the strong bonds that develop between characters, and the way those bonds show who each individual really is. When one character says that the only way to live free is to not join, it's the film's encapsulation of what constitutes a bad guy: Star Wars films are testaments to the idea that nobody, not even a Jedi Master, can go it alone without getting destroyed.

FULL: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/16/the-last-jedi-is-a-magnificent-next-step-for-the-star-wars-universe.html


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MSH WorldWide By Marcelo Santiago Hernández™.