Andrew Rilston was Right, I was Wrong!

Rey is clearly Leia's doughtier.

And just in case you think I bought that "reveal",  no I am not being sarcastic.

First Thoughts on The Last Jedi

There is a nice little 120 min Star Wars movie in there...unfortunately you have to wade through half an hour of pointless stupidity to get to it.

Who is The Last Jedi?

Is it Luke, Rey, Finn, or perhaps Osoka Tono?
I think it is probably Luke. I do not think Rey or Finn become Jedi. To understand why, we must ask why Luke is on Auck-To. Conventional foolishness suggests that he is there just moping around, depressed that Kylo destroyed his new generation of Jedi. However I think this is problematic; First, it would be very out of character for Luke to just mope around wile the galaxy goes to the dark side, and if he just wanted some hermetic place to mope around, there must have been at least a few billion such places in the galaxy that did not have a map leading to them.
Luke is at the first Jedi temple because he is looking for something…looking? Or perhaps found something he has hum?
There is a set photo from Pinewood studios, where TLJ is being filmed; showing an enormous set of an island similar to the one Rey finds Luke on the end of TFA. However, instead of steps leading up to a Jedi temple, they lead up to a large dead, or perhaps dormant, Tree. It is hard to imagine building such an enormous set for an inconsequential scene. The tree must be important. Could it be the very embodiment of the living Force itself? Dormant for eons since the Force first went out of balance? Is Rey there to heal it with the cyber crystal shard she found in the basement of an old woman with peculiar eye sight? Well, that might be a bit blatantly plagiaristic even for Star Wars, but I think we may be on the right track.
The original trilogy was a morality story about a farm boy who seeks connect with his dead father, finds out he is actually alive but evil, and strives to bring him back to good side. As such, Return of the Jedi was a good end to the story; with everything on a trajectory for happily ever after with Luke reconstituting the Jedi order.
The prequels, however, did not introduce Anakin as an unusually strong, idealist, crusading Jedi, who happened to fall to the dark side; but rather a long prophesied Chosen One, messiah figure destine to bring balance to the Force. At first this just seemed like narrative larceny - using unearned mythological language to make one of the characters seem more important than he is - as Anakin does not follow and discernable Chosen One arc (he is really just an above average Jedi, who happens to be at the right place at the right time), and no one seems to have any real notion of how exactly he is supposed to bring balance to the Force. Obi Wan does suggest that the chosen One was to "destroy the Sith", but if that is the case, someone really should have told Mace Windo, who, when going to confront a suspected Sith lord specifically did not take Anakin with him (I know, would that that were the worst problem with the prequels). Anakin did, of course, eventually destroy the Sith when he gave Sheave the shaft at the of ROTJ, but did that bring balance? It is difficult to see how this could be the case as all he really did with this was restore the status quo from the beginning of Ep.I, with the Jedi in the midst of an apparent millennial hegemony with the Sith thought to be extinct. Yet it was in this state that the Jedi were looking foreword to the coming Chosen One bringing balance. Also messiah figures don’t generally come to make minor repairs or cleanout one little problem. They typically come to bring a complete metamorphosis, a total transformation, tearing down the whole house to build a new one in its place.
So if we are to take the "balance" story arc seriously ROTJ can no longer be an adequate end, enter the ST. The first dialog of TFA (after a three movie hiatus) connects back to the balance arc with words  "without the Jedi there can be no balance" - words that will likely turnout to be ironic - so now the saga is one big balance mythos. Now the gold standard for the balance mythos in film, as I alluded to earlier, is The Dark Crystal (although if you prefer a 40 minuet version of the mythos, check out Star Trek: The Enemy Within). In the Dark Crystal the Skeksis are unquestionably the bad guys and the Mystics are the good ones. However, the mystics do not seek to overthrow the Skeksis and rule in Mystic hegemony, but rather the Mystics realize that both they themselves as well as the Skeksis must cease to be in order for the truly balanced being to return and insure in a new golden age. The prophesied catalyst for this were the gelflings, a male and female (gender balance is a common motif in the balance mythos). The male gelfling, though razed by the mystics was distinct from them as they realized that his destiny lay along a different path from theirs. The female gelfling knew nothing of the mystics and was raised by adoptive parents in another part of the world (sound familiar?) So in this analogy Anakin would initially be the catalyst destined to not only bring about end of the Sith but the Jedi as well, in order to make way for a new balanced order to bring a new golden age to the galaxy. So what happened? Well, the Mystic analogs in this case, the Jedi, like typical established elites of the currant system, failed to grasp the true purpose of the catalyst/messiah figure (a prophecy that misread could have been?) and instead ended up trying to co-opt and even undermine him by training him to be a Jedi against the counsel of their oldest and wisest member. Why did they think he was meant to be a Jedi? At least partly because Qui Gon thought "finding him was the will of the Force". But wait, Qui Gon did not find Anakin, Padme did. So perhaps the Force thought it was more important for Anakin to get involved with Padme than the Jedi? What were the fruits of Anakins involvement with Padme? As I recall it was twin children, a male and female, and the fruits Anakins involvement with the Jedi? A few decades of galactic tyranny and bloodshed...hum. It actually seems that the person who may have come the closest to putting Anakin on the right track was actually chancellor Pallpatien, when he told him to "embrace a larger view of the Force". It seems rather ironic that though Yoda harped on the dark siders for "spreading lies, deceit" and "creating mistrust", it actually the Jedi who seemed to need interesting "points of view" to justify their words, while the Sith lords seem to be the ones who just tell it like it is.
Moving on to the OT, the Mystic analogs are down to just Obi Wan and Yoda, with Luke and Leia as the catalyst. So how did they make the same mistake again? It is noteworthy that Obi Wan just told Luke to "learn about the Force" becoming a Jedi was actually Luke's idea, and Obi Wan's expression when he announced it was anything but ecstatic. Still, they did train Luke as a Jedi, caped by Yoda's now enigmatic last words "when gone am I, the last of the Jedi will you be". In any case they apparently did not have access to whatever Luke has found on Auch-To. Which brings us to the ST. Luke is now the lone Mystic analog with Rey the winged gelfling (but don’t worry, I am sure she has a male counterpart) and now Luke has the whole picture of what must be done to bring the balance, but not by a Jedi. Rey and her cousin will be the catalyst, to finish what their grandfather started.

Rant One – A Star Wars…something

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   
 “Who ordered that”, I ask myself after watching Lucasfilms latest Star Wars offering, Rogue One. I mean Rant One – A Star Wars…somethingwe do have a definitive pronunciation of “Whills” now (nothing on AT-AT though) but was that worth a whole movie?  I just wonder if there were any people coming out of the cinemas in 77 saying, “you know what I would really like to see now, a movie about those rebel spies – the ones that stole the plans to the Death Star during the Rebels’ first victory over the evil galactic empire.” … Victor? Victory did you say? Ok, lets see; the Rebels lost one capital warship, several support vessels, a few landing craft (with troops) and a full squadron of X-wings, against the Empire’s loss of two capital warships and a somewhat significant base on the planet – I guess that counts as a “victory”, but given the relative resources of each side, a few more Rebel “victories” like that one and the Imperials wont need the Death Star.  
The story of Galen Erso and his daughter, and how he intentionally designed the weakness the Rebels eventually end up exploiting, into the Death Star was ok. But it was more or less relegated to the background, while the fan-boy fest-o-gasm waltzed across the screen like a special addition dinosaur. Could someone please tell me what Bevis and Butthead were doing in this movie? They totally strike me as the kind of devout Force followers who would be on Jeda in the first place. Not to mention, if I had the death sentence on twelve systems I would of course hang out in a city under imperial occupation – full of check points, curfews and lockdowns - I mean where else would I go? Then there is R2 and 3PO just hanging out at the Yaven base for no apparent reason except to disrupted the continuity between Ep. III (where the last line of dialog was spoken by C-3PO on the Titan V) and Ep. IV (where the first line of dialog is spoken by C3PO on the Titan V). But we don’t actually get to see all of them, they were cut off at the knees for some reason…rather like IG8 not being able to complete the traditional “I have a bad feeling about this” line, and none of the familiar motifs in the score being completed. Perhaps they thought it would make the movie too “Star Warsy”., since it is not an episode after all. Fair enough, but then why put it in there at all? Why go half way? Prior to the movie’s release, there was a bit of consternation among some fans about the news that the movie would not have an opening scroll. But surely all can agree that that is better than having a scroll that ended mid sentence half way through the second paragraph? And just in case we needed one last reminder that it was not a Star Wars movie, human dialog ten seconds from the closing credits (personally, I do not think we needed that).
Oh, and there is also Darth Vader’s castle, built on top of a giant volcano (which I would think would be the last place Darth Vader would want to build his castle),  I am sure it will be significant in some future movie, but served no real purpose in this one. Darth Vader himself was rather shoehorned in to this movie, as its main focuses are power politics and constructing a technological terror – neither of which are Vader’s forte – they are much more Pallpatien’s gig (and last I checked Ian McDermott is still alive and well) but I guess Sheave is not as powerful when it comes to selling T-shirts and coffee mugs so Jones got the call. And what was the point of that ridiculous chase scene at the end?  I mean besides giving the fanboys their lightsaber/telekinesis fix. Was there really any reason for Vader to go lone wolf?  This was not a confrontation with his old master or checking out some potential new Jedi threat. These were just some rebel soldiers; why not let a squad or two of stormtroopers handle them? And if he is going use telekinesis to toss guys around the cabin and pull weapons out of their hands, why does he not just pull the guy holding the Death Star plans over to him? I guess because then David Powers would be retroactively out of a job.  
And, of course, there is CGI Tarken. Now, it does make sense for Tarken to be in this movie, however, he was not really necessary, and it is a bit ironic that as TFA made an overt effort to return to the practical effects of the old days, its successor is now using CGI to portray the most fundamental element in storytelling since humans have been telling stories, namely the human person. Though it has been a quarter century since scientists developed the technology to bring dinosaurs extinct for millennia back to life on the big screen, and that technology is now being used on humans, Dr. Cramner’s observation is more relevant than ever - “they were so obsessed with whether they could, they forgot to ask whether they should”. The answer to the last question is now clearly a resounding No.
May Carrie Fisher rest in peace, Not in pixels.      
                                                                                                                                                                                     aJ,