“This was always going to be a tricky balance—long-awaited fan fulfillment versus something genuinely fresh”
“I suggested at the time that final judgment on the movie would depend in part on its sequels: If they branched out in new directions, The Force Awakens’s flaws would be easily forgiven; if, on the other hand, “we again find our heroes lassoing AT-ATs on a snow-covered planet”—à la The Empire Strikes Back—it would be a bad sign for the franchise.”
“Well, the writer-director Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi does feature another battle with AT-ATs on a snow-covered planet. Also: another Imperial/First Order effort to wipe out a rebel base with staggeringly powerful, space-based weapons; another subplot about a Jedi traveling to a distant planet to be mentored in the Force; another alien-filled cantina (actually, a casino this time around); another infiltration of an enemy vessel to turn off a crucial piece of hardware; another light-saber battle between former master and pupil; and a crucial scene that bears notable resemblance to the Luke-Vader-Emperor climax of Return of the Jedi.”
“Yet Johnson tweaks these callbacks far more cunningly than his predecessor, J.J. Abrams, did his own in The Force Awakens”
“He flips their sequences, he toys with their meaning, and—in that crucial scene especially—he sets up certain expectations and then confounds them.”
“Does the movie, like its predecessor, rely on familiar tropes a bit more than it should? Yes, I think it does. Is it, at a solid two-and-a-half hours, considerably longer than it needed to be? Yes, that too. But it’s still a pretty damn good movie, arguably the best the franchise has offered since Empire.”
“The Last Jedi probably does the best job of any Star Wars film of capturing the allure of the Dark Side and the spiritual turmoil that would lead to—and also result from—its embrace.”
“This was, of course, the central goal of George Lucas’s prequel trilogy, at which it failed utterly, in part because Hayden Christensen, who played Anakin Skywalker (soon-to-become Vader), was a terrible actor.”
“The same is not remotely true of Driver or Ridley, who share many of the strongest scenes in the film, even if they are frequently communicating with one another psychically from across the galaxy.”