Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Essential on continuity and the most argued-about film in the franchise. It is worth being clear about what the argument is, because it is not really about quality.

Rian Johnson took the questions the previous film opened and answered most of them with a refusal. Rey's parentage is nobody. Snoke is killed halfway through with his history unexplained. Luke Skywalker is a failed, bitter old man hiding on an island who tried to kill his nephew in a moment of panic and has been living with it since. For a large part of the audience that last one was a betrayal of a character they had waited thirty years to see again. For another large part it was the only interesting thing anybody had done with him.

The film's actual argument is that the saga's inherited structures are a trap: that the Jedi texts are not sacred, that lineage does not determine worth, and that the war-profiteering class sells to both sides. That is a real position for a Star Wars film to take and it is taken deliberately. The throne room sequence and the final confrontation on the salt flats are among the best staged in the nine.

The flaws are structural and separate from the controversy. The Canto Bight excursion occupies forty minutes and achieves nothing, and the central chase runs on a fleet that cannot be caught and will not be left. At a hundred and fifty-two minutes it is the longest in the saga. Watch it and form your own view; almost nobody who has is neutral.