How The Last Jedi Killed Star Wars And Why That's A Good Thing

iii: a glowing sword in the starry night

This is Part 3 of a three-part Substack piece. Links to Part 1 and Part 2.

AFTERMATH

After The Last Jedi’s controversy, many franchises would have ended, but Disney had to finish their trilogy, because Star Wars is always trilogies, it must rhyme. Disney had the forgettable spinoff film Solo already made, which had the misfortune of going to theaters six months after The Last Jedi. It performed horribly. It set up a potential series of Han Solo spinoffs but those were totally scrapped. All other spinoff films were put on pause. Disney ended their sequel trilogy with The Rise of Skywalker, Episode 9, and have not returned to theaters since. 

That movie tries to course correct the aspects of The Last Jedi that made people mad. Down to its title The Rise of Skywalker is a course correction. Luke barely appears in this movie, but the title uses his last name to plead to its audience “we love Luke, we’re not trying to emasculate him, please don’t be mad at us anymore.” Luke’s famous lightsaber that The Last Jedi shattered is pieced back together. Kylo’s smashed helmet is pieced back together. 

A very representative course correction is when Rey tries to throw away her lightsaber into a fire, and Luke’s force ghost snatches it out, saying “a Jedi’s weapon deserves more respect”, as a direct answer to when Luke chucks his lightsaber over his shoulder in The Last Jedi. This new moment is also an undermining of Luke’s character in Return of the Jedi, when he casts aside his lightsaber as a dramatic act of nonviolence in the same way that Rey does now. But they had to correct the scene from The Last Jedi because people hated it that much. 

With Snoke dead, the movie revives famed Star Wars villain from both other trilogies Palpatine as a new puppetmaster villain. They barely explain how he came back from the dead. Oscar Isaac’s famously poorly delivered line “Somehow, Palpatine returned” is evocative of just how little they cared. Palpatine does explain to Kylo in the opening of the film that he “made Snoke'' and shows Snoke clones being grown, as a half-explanation to the hatred people had of not knowing who Snoke was, but this doesn't make any sense. Snoke was a real person with a distinct personality, not a meat-puppet of Palpatine. 

The plot of the movie is a safe action-adventure. The three main characters, Finn Rey and Poe, tour around some random planets chasing some artifacts. They have fun adventures together like people were upset they didn’t last time. There’s no place for a lightsaber duel in this movie, but since people were mad that there wasn’t one last time, Rey and Kylo meet and fight in the watery ruins of the Death Star from Return of the Jedi with nothing at stake. 

Rey is revealed to be the granddaughter of Palpatine, which contradicts the narrative and thematic arc of The Last Jedi and doesn't make sense with Palpatine being over 100 years old and an evil man who never had children. My speculative belief is that Rey Palpatine was thrown in as a last-minute change because in test screenings people told them the movie barely had any plot, and they needed to throw a twist in. Rey Palpatine doesn't change anything. No characters besides Kylo and Palpatine acknowledge it, and it’s only brief dialog when they do. 

Kylo turns back to good after a confrontation with the ghost of his father. Together Kylo and Rey confront Palpatine and defeat him, again. Upon Palpatine’s death, his entire fleet of ships instantly crashes, in an even more extreme version of the end of Return of the Jedi. Everything Finn and Poe were doing in the concurrent physical combat, sacrificing everything they had, was totally irrelevant. Good triumphs and wins the war on the shoulders of two individuals in a confrontation with one individual. Rey dies in the confrontation with Palpatine but Kylo uses the Force to transfer his life to her. He dies in her place, but Rey and Kylo kiss one time before he does. 

The coda of this movie is Rey’s return to Tatooine, the birthplace of Star Wars hitherto unvisited in this trilogy. She sees the famous double sunset from the very first Star Wars. An old lady asks what her name is and she says “Rey Skywalker”. Her taking the name “Skywalker” is supposed to tie into the film’s title Rise of Skywalker, but it’s a cheap imitation of the moral arc about belonging without bloodlines that The Last Jedi used and actually earned. 

This movie was meant to mend the bridges with those who hated The Last Jedi, but those people were still mad. No one likes an embarrassed apology, even if they agree with it. People weren’t mad enough to be as vitriolic about this movie, because it’s boring, but they still did not stop talking about The Last Jedi. It didn’t make a ton of money, but it didn’t perform abysmally. It’s a movie that for people who don’t care about Star Wars could pass for a serviceable action-adventure. 

I admire this film’s thematic dedication to desecrating corpses. Resurrecting Palpatine, piecing together Kylo’s smashed helmet and Luke’s shattered lightsaber from the prior film, intentionally reverting narrative elements of the prior film, Kylo reviving Rey. The actress Carrie Fisher died after The Last Jedi with her character Leia still alive, and Disney pieced together unused footage of her and wrote a script around her throwaway lines treated them as deep wisdom from a mentor. You don’t see too much grave robbery nowadays but The Rise of Skywalker was willing to do it. 

When The Rise of Skywalker came out, I was embarrassed by the movie but I wasn’t actively upset. I like The Last Jedi and I knew that I can always return to that film. I wanted to be ethically consistent in that I truly believe people who hate The Last Jedi can always return to Return of the Jedi and get that film’s moral arc without it being tarnished by later installations. I still believe that The Last Jedi stands on its own, but as time has gone on, I’m a little more sad about The Rise of Skywalker. The sequel trilogy’s conclusion leaves up for future generations a depressing and embarrassing apology letter for The Last Jedi, a movie that never needed to be apologized for.

After The Rise of Skywalker Disney retreated to television. I believe the fans have been generally happy with their work there. Shortly before Rise of Skywalker, Disney released the first season of The Mandalorian, the first Star Wars TV show. The show is set after Episode 6, and about the titular armored warrior who fans call Mando because his real name is dumb, member of legendary Star Wars expanded universe order Mandalore. He is protecting a baby alien of the same species as ancient Jedi Master Yoda, who people call Baby Yoda because his real name is dumb. The two of them go on random small adventures. I was on my phone most of the time when I watched The Mandalorian because the episodes are not that interesting but I guess it doesn’t have to be that interesting if you love seeing an armored Mandalorian fly around doing anything. Baby Yoda is cute, my mom loves him, the show was well-received. Disney did another season the next year. 

The second season is more of the same, with added cameos from Star War expanded universe characters. The second season finale ends with Star Wars fan apology porn. Prime Luke Skywalker shows up and slaughters with his green lightsaber hordes of robots that to the mortal members of the Mandalorian’s team were totally unkillable. Luke isn’t even a character in this show, it’s irrelevant to anyone in the plot’s story. It’s solely in there as a direct apology to people who were upset they never got a badass Luke moment in The Last Jedi. 

After that scene I stopped watching the Star Wars TV shows because it was too embarrassing. But I live in the world so I still soak in some of it. The next show was The Book of Boba Fett, another famous Mandalorian who appears as a minor character in the original trilogy. He’s the guy who holds Han Solo in carbonite between Episode 5 and 6 and people in the 80s loved him because he has cool armor. From what I can tell this show is half a shallow Boba Fett narrative and half cameos of other characters. Luke, the Mandalorian, Baby Yoda, an expanded universe bounty hunter named Cad Bane, and an expanded universe Jedi named Ahsoka who is getting a TV show soon, all of them show up. It’s like a Marvel end credits scene when you see Blorko’s face for the first time but half the show. 

Their next show was Kenobi, which brought back Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen, reprising their prequel casting as Obi-Wan and Anakin respectively. It shows how Obi-Wan spent his time between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. In the wake of the sequel trilogy, the prequels have been increasingly seen favorably, especially by Last Jedi detractors who believe in the high drama of Revenge of the Sith.

I think the reclamation of the prequels is a demographic phenomenon. Males who were six years old when Revenge of the Sith came out love that movie as a part of their childhood. The Last Jedi came out when they were eighteen, and as adolescent males we’re contrarian to new things, so they hate the new trilogy and find appreciation for the media of their childhood, the prequels, because the new trilogy makes them remember it. One could argue that Star Wars has often faced criticism upon its release because of this constant demographic change in its fans. Children to grow up to receive new Star Wars that threatens their childhood fantasy, and then retreat back to that old fantasy, as they now do the prequels. The Obi-Wan show is made for r/PrequelMemes users, soaking up the value of the emotional Obi-Wan vs. Anakin duel that ends the prequel trilogy by making a six hour show about their torment in its aftermath. I’m glad to see George Lucas’s work getting recognized but this is corpse-siphoning, not fresh media. I’m not the kind of person who quotes the Mustafar duel between Obi-Wan and Anakin at band practice so I passed on watching this.

Finally, Disney made a show called Andor about one of the two main characters from their own 2016 spin-off film Rogue One. It reuses the central Empire vs. Rebels conflict of the franchise. People say it’s good, but for me it’s a boy-who-cried-wolf situation and I’m not about to get fooled. I’ve been told it’s serious Star Wars, without lightsabers, focusing on the themes of overcoming a fascist Empire. For one, I like lightsabers, but more importantly I don’t need authoritarianism porn. Disney has inserted a lot of authoritarianism into Star Wars, scenes of stormtroopers harassing civilians in a dystopian world, and it always reminds me of the authoritarianism in The Hunger Games, authoritarianism for the sake of narrative and for the sake of purporting to have social commentary. The original Star Wars Empire was about evil, not authoritarianism. Maybe it’s silly that it’s about evil, because pure evil doesn’t exist, but since Disney isn’t saying anything meaningful about authoritarianism I don’t feel any need to defend it. 

HOW THE LAST JEDI KILLED STAR WARS AND WHY IT’S A GOOD THING

I sometimes feel tremendous gratitude for The Last Jedi liberating me from caring about Star Wars. I smile when I remember its triumphant conclusion to the story of Luke Skywalker, how he becomes a symbolic apotheosized hero that keeps hope alive for the galaxy in his last act of sacrifice, and how the kids recreate his last moment with action figures, like I played with Star Wars action figures as a kid. It’s a movie I’m happy exists, even if it changed much of how I used to care about Star Wars. 

I haven’t talked much about my own experience with Star Wars yet in this piece. I was born in 1997 and my dad was born in 1971. He grew up on the original trilogy and loved it, and wanted me to love it. In the detritus of my childhood, I have Star Wars toys from when I was a baby, before I was sentient, given to me by my dad. It’s been with me since birth, an heirloom. I was a kid when the prequels were coming out, and I loved them as a fantasy world. Star Wars will always be one of the primary fantasies of my childhood, and childhood is when fantasy matters most. I played with Star Wars action figures, and I listened to an audiobook of The Phantom Menace children’s novelization to fall asleep, and I dressed up as Star Wars characters for Halloween, and I played the Star Wars Battlefront video game, and I read Star Wars expanded universe books, and I’d draw my own imagined Star Wars scenes with markers in now incomprehensible images where you can just see lightsabers. It meant a lot to me. The sequel trilogy was announced when I was in high school and I watched the first trailer for The Force Awakens with the friend from childhood with whom I attended the Revenge of the Sith premiere at age 7. 

When Disney announced the new Star Wars, and even after The Force Awakens, I played the Star Wars narrative fantasy in my head like I was a kid again, or like I was a listicle writer. Hypothesizing where the story would go, who Rey’s parents were, would Kylo turn to good, would they return to any of the planets from the originals or prequels. I don’t think it was a problem, it's the media I loved as a kid and I wasn’t obsessed with it. But The Last Jedi freed me from the Star Wars fantasy in terms of caring about its literal narrative. This is the same way that the detractors of the movie say it killed Star Wars. If you loved it or if you hated it, The Last Jedi makes it hard to care about where the narrative goes next, in its total deconstruction of the literal text of what came before. I still care about the original movies as symbols, for how they made me feel. But I’m relieved to not have that narrative care rattling in my brain anymore, except as a fond memory of childhood. At some point you have to grow out of the fantasy, not continuously reference it. 

We’ve talked about how The Last Jedi subverted the Star Wars fantasy, but we haven’t talked about why. A secret is that Disney in recent years is not in the business of making fantasy films, except by accident. They’re capable of making interesting thematic moral films, because Disney is immensely concerned with the perception of their morality, but a fantasy has to be visceral, has to love itself for its own sake, not what it means. And Disney does not do that. 

An obvious example is Marvel. The original Marvel films were fantasy, but Disney didn’t buy Marvel until 2009. They were capable of growing it into an empire, but the original root fantasy of Robert Downey Jr. being really cool as a tech guy who makes flying armor suits was made by someone else before they bought it. Disney Marvel is a pile of nested references masquerading as fantasy. There’s talented people working on it, who often make beautiful and striking images, but at the core there’s no wonder. 

A less obvious but more revealing example is that Disney’s central princess films are also no longer fantasies, they’re moral films. Like The Last Jedi, modern Disney princess films are deconstructive and reconstructive “subversions” of the traditional princess narratives. I haven’t watched all of them, but it’s universally true of the ones I’ve seen.

• Frozen appears to be their first attempt at this genre. Instead of love between a princess and a male that saves her, it’s about love between two sisters. And it jokes about how naive earlier Disney princess movies were, like when Snow White marries the first man she meets, who she only kissed while unconscious and never spoke to otherwise. Anna gets married to the first man she meets and he betrays her. She must be saved by her sister, who is always there for her. Frozen 2 is a postcolonial narrative, that turns Anna and Elsa’s unseen grandfather into a greedy colonizer who oppressed natives, whose deeds they must correct, a subversion story of royal duty.

• Moana has its titular female hero searching for the great lost warrior named Maui, a hero on an island somewhere in the ocean, and when she finds him it’s similar to Rey finding Luke Skywalker on his island. Maui is washed up and has no interest in saving the world again. He exists as a joke to affirm that Moana is the hero to save the world this time.

• Encanto sets as its centerpiece the familial conflict between mother and daughter, a mother who resents her daughter Mirabel for not quite possessing magical powers. This is counter to the grandiosity of other Disney films where parents are irrelevant and the children inherently possess intrinsic value, often through magic. Mirabel learns that she does have value, and then learns how to show her value to her mom. 

Every Disney princess film now is fresh but they’re not fantasies in an unrestrained wonder sense. They’re calibrated films that know what message they want to deliver and how to deliver it as a subversion of what came before. What’s funny is that actual babies can understand them. My little cousins like these movies. They wouldn’t talk about them in the same words that I use, but they follow the plots, understand the emotional moments. Adults can’t understand The Last Jedi through their rage at the media of their childhood being flipped on its head, but kids follow the emotional arc of substantially more subversive Disney movies.

The George Lucas Star Wars films were fantasy. The Force Awakens was not a fantasy. It was like Marvel, a pile of references in the shape of a fantasy. The Last Jedi was totally different. It wasn’t a fantasy either, but it explored the fantasy root of the original six fantasy movies, even explored what it meant that The Force Awakens was a pile of references to them. It evaporated any chance that they could continue their reference fantasy afterwards, but it was an incredibly interesting movie on its own.

Disney had an accidental fantasy across the Star Wars sequel trilogy, which was the Kylo and Rey love plot. On Tumblr they called it Reylo. It’s a love fantasy like Twilight or Jane Austen, about a tall male who understands the evil in the world but also its dramatic heights, who is compelled by a younger naive and pure girl who he gradually shows the world, empowering her to join him. It was very popular after The Force Awakens as an internet fanfiction. There’s a book called The Love Hypothesis that’s popular on TikTok that began as Reylo fanfiction. I was happy but shocked that they fulfilled it in The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. The audience for the Reylo fantasy is completely different from the audience who loved the original trilogy Luke fantasy of being a lone noble knight who saves a war and rebuilds a better world, or the prequel fantasy of a child training in a huge living honorable Jedi Order and protecting a diverse galaxy. This is a small fantasy for girls, while the rest of Star Wars was a big fantasy for boys. 

But this is an exception. Reylo is not the central narrative of the sequels. Disney is largely afraid to make a fantasy in the sequel trilogy. They often don’t don’t name their planets, they’re scared to give backstory to new characters, and they were too scared to set up a new conflict other than Empire vs. Rebellion. It’s understandable. It’s risky to sell a new fantasy when you don’t know how many people will relate to it. But, remarkably, they made one movie that understood what George Lucas did, under different terms than George Lucas understood his own work. It saw problems with Star Wars but loved the way Star Wars made people feel, and successfully talked about it. 

The Last Jedi was the best thing that possibly could have happened in the Disney Star Wars era. Had The Last Jedi not been made, Star Wars would have died a slow and painful death, like Marvel, one boring movie at a time, overstaying its brand name welcome more and more until people stopped caring and the weight of all the garbage made it impossible for them to ever care again. The Last Jedi and the vitriolic hate it received saved Disney Star Wars from that fate. In their rage at being seen and subverted, the fans killed their own love, but it was a sharp death rather than a long bleedout. 

I don’t think Disney intended to make a movie that slaughtered the Star Wars fantasy. I think they wanted to make something fresh compared to The Force Awakens, and liked Rian Johnson’s vision for a Star Wars film that deconstructed the masculine oedipal heirloom tropes that define the earlier films in the series. Again, they already do this in their other movies for kids. They’re not trying to kill the fantasy, they have a product to sell and fantasy has value, but they don’t want YouTubers with English degrees to dissect their movies as setting problematic standards for young girls. They ran the same playbook for Star Wars. What could go wrong? 

The difference was that Star Wars is a more ingrained fantasy as a literal narrative. Princess stories are for kids, without as much adult crossover as Star Wars has. Kids don’t care about the literal narrative of a princess story, their imagination can take a narrative to different places if they don’t like it. There’s no expanded universe of literal narrative for Disney princess stories. They do sell princess books for kids who really love the stories but they’re not expansions that tie together different eras. Star Wars has the largest expanded universe of literal narrative in the world. It is relentlessly cared about as a literal narrative, by adults and kids. Adults sadly don’t have the imagination to handle narratives that they don’t like, especially if it threatens their identity.  A thematic poke at Star Wars was far more dangerous than Disney calculated, and they punctured their four billion dollar investment. 

Star Wars is dead in the meaningful sense of artistic relevance, and relevance to kids as a fantasy. No kid cares about Star Wars, which is the true mark of a failure for a fantasy franchise. But strictly speaking, or rather financially speaking, Star Wars lives on. Like Palpatine in The Rise of Skywalker, it subsists on dark forces that stave away death, siphoning money through Boba Fett spinoff show tie-in Funko Pops, waiting for its moment to return in full force. Despite its tragic current state, Star Wars is not unsalvageable. Marvel will die under the weight of its own garbage, but Star Wars will pump out forgettable TV shows until it returns to theaters for a second chance. Disney spent too much money for anything else to happen. 

If The Rise of Skywalker proved anything important, it’s that Disney listens to the criticisms its fans put on the internet, so I’ll say what they need to do differently if they want Star Wars to be good next time. If it’s going to be anything that sticks in the minds of kids it has to be done with real bravery. That’s the difference between what George Lucas made and what Disney made. It’s not about CGI vs. real sets, as long as you care about the world that you create. It’s not not about getting actors that are human and relatable, HBO’s House of the Dragon is successful without relatable characters, since it has passion for the characters as characters, like the Star Wars prequels did. It’s not even about calming down with references, you can do references if they’re in service of something fresh that you care about. Star Wars, to be done right, in a way that captures its audience, needs to be a fantasy that the creators care about and buy into. 

People often mock the Disney sequel trilogy as an unplanned thematic seesaw, which is true, because of how they spent an entire movie explicitly apologizing for The Last Jedi, but it’s not why the trilogy was bad. In truth, the concept of a planned sequel makes no sense. Planned sequels are either an unfinished original, like In Search of Lost Time, or a planned set of experiences to get people to buy your product as many times as possible, like Marvel. Real art lays it all on the table every time. An authentic sequel can only come where there is something new from the outside that the first installment didn’t take into account, which means it inherently cannot be planned. The first six Star Wars films were authentic sequels, somehow. Despite being sequels, the fact that George Lucas totally made it up as he went along meant each film did something new and fresh. Either incorporating new visual technology, or taking the Star Wars universe to new cultural places, or aiming it at new audiences, every time it was new and fresh. It’s amazing the passion he had for his fantasy, expanding it to new audiences in new ways.

That the future of Star Wars is unknown to Disney is a good thing. It means that there’s still a chance that it can be a fantasy. Laser swords are eternally cool. Star Wars planets can be anything you imagine. You can do anything with this universe, you don’t have to appeal to manchildren with Millenium Falcon tablecloths. Sure, they’ll buy your merchandise, but if you make something new and cool, kids will want merchandise of it too, and they’ll be alive for longer. Make a movie about the feeling you get when you hold a glowing stick in the night. That’s all it needs to be, and I can’t be more specific because the rest of it has to come from whoever makes the fantasy. 

While I believe Star Wars can be saved, I don’t think it matters if Star Wars is saved. It was a fantasy of another generation, a fantasy of George Lucas. It belonged to me as a kid too, shaped my childhood imagination, but we don’t have to inflict our own fantasies on our children. Star Wars is an oedipal story about a son living up to the legacy of his father, but The Last Jedi points out how reductive that is, how unfair to the children. The next generation always deserves a real fantasy with a real sense of wonder. Star Wars can be that, but the kids will find something else if it isn’t. 

If Star Wars ends here, it’s a fine death, noble and ugly at once. The Last Jedi was a cut letting loose the innards of Star Wars, laying them out to be seen by the world. It could have rebuilt into something greater after the dissection, but instead it bleeds from the wounds. If it dies, it’s a death where it understands itself, which very few receive.