Star Wars: The Last Jedi

I watched The Force Awakens again on Netflix before going to see the new one, and thought it was pretty awful, far worse than I remembered. Perhaps that's why The Last Jedi feels so great. It's like Rian Johnson got handed a shiny but badly-made new car by J.J. Abrams and managed to rewire it into something roadworthy. The new trilogy was never going to be brilliant (cough, neither was the original trilogy, and given the benchmark it set the prequels weren't that bad either). But I got the sense that Johnson finally made a Star Wars film that was worth re-watching.

It's still a bit of a mess, obviously. There are plenty of internal contradictions in the plot that have riled people up. Thankfully I don't give a hoot about such things, so long as the unlikely situations build to satisfying emotional or narrative payoffs. There were a couple of bait-and-switches in The Last Jedi that I was suckered into, and subsequently appreciated.

One was Poe Dameron’s arc, which is a rather straightforward one about the need for leaders to learn about humility and co-operation. The Admiral Holdo stuff was a bit forced, but in the age of Trump it was interesting to have not one but two heroic Hilary substitutes who earn the respect of impulsive hot-shots. The film could have been subtitled "the return of the centrist mums".

The other was Rey’s arc. Have to say I foolishly expected the revelation that there was some sort of family relationship between her and Kylo Ren, given their telepathic link. Turns out that was a ploy by Snoke, and that Rey has no distinguished parentage. The rather confusing sequence in the dark hole under the Jedi temple may have been an arty way to foreshadow this. Rey tries to see her parents in the mirror, but instead just ends up looking at her own reflection. Hoping your horrible parents were other people is no solution. At some point you have to grow up and rely on yourself.

There is a contrast here with Kylo Ren, who has a distinguished parentage, and like many a pampered prince becomes slightly unhinged when close to power. Being sent away to Jedi boarding school with your weird uncle would be enough to set anyone on edge, and then you have betrayals (by Luke) upon betrayals (by Snoke). Ren's way of coping is to lash out, and long to amass enough strength to prove his disappointed elders wrong. There's a touching moment with Rey when the loneliness of such a position is revealed. We owe a debt to Adam Driver for supplying a Star Wars villain who is actually interesting. Let's hope Episode IX in 2019 doesn't ruin all that good work.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Feel like the first line of the film must be a dig at Lucas – it's an awkward bit of dialogue in the context of the scene itself. No wonder he's a bit grumpy. Say what you like about the prequels, at least they were trying out something new. Episode VII just lifts the plot points and character arcs wholesale from Episode IV. You could almost call it a remake. Giving the fans what they want, but not what they need.

I'm one of those weirdos that rather likes the prequels, which may just be down to the fact that they came out when I was at prime Star Wars age (i.e. 10 to 15 years old). I still think the pile-up of lightsaber duel, laser shoot-out, pitched battle and space battle at the end of Episode I was an ambitious and well executed set-piece (even if the "I am Queen Amidala" stuff flew over my head). Plus don't forget podracing and Darth Maul. And Episode III had some cool church vs state, order vs liberty currents running through it. The problem wasn't that Lucas didn't have ideas, it was that he had no sense of character, making the love story in Episode II embarrassing to watch.

J.J. Abrams is a pastiche artist, but at least he can give his actors lines they can deliver without wincing. The Strong Female Character is becoming overused by male directors trying to do feminism (they need a personality as well, guys!). But Rey is still an improvement on the complete lack of prominent female Jedi thus far in the films. And the co-star is not only black but a renegade stormtrooper rebelling against fascist oppressors – although he is occasionally pushed into comedy sidekick mode.

Oscar Issac's reheated Han Solo and Adam Driver's one-man Darth Vader fanclub are also very watchable. And when Rey starts pushing into Kylo Ren's mind, and finally whups his ass at the end, it's difficult not to get a little bit excited. There's enough there for the new Star Wars to sink its claws into you for one more trilogy, but I'm hoping Rian Johnson can come up with something a little more novel for Episode VIII.

Looper

Why they don’t zap them into the middle of the ocean is not really explained, but as Bruce Willis tells JGL (an acronym now, my friends tell me) in the diner scene (heavy on Heat overtones) – we’ll be here all day if we start going into the mechanics of how it all works. There will be diagrams! he threatens. Let’s just leave it alone and attend to violent matters at hand, why don’t we?

And the advice is well worth taking, because this is a science-fiction film for only as long as it takes to set up the central metaphor of “looping” – the past impacting on the present and future. For a lot of the time, Rian Johnson is back in noir territory, and he has a curious and problematic way of defining this space.

The future is your typical crumbling metropolitan dystopia. If you overlap it with the one portrayed in Children of Men, it would be difficult to spot the seams. As Emily Blunt suggests, we have arrived here because we are in a motherless world. The men in the city all look lost because they haven’t had Emily Blunt equivalents to stroke their hair when they were growing up. Tellingly, the film has only three significant female characters: a cynical whore in the city, a loving wife in the country, and Ms Blunt, whose character arc spans both environments.

All this is noir to the very bone. Men need women to love and civilize them, otherwise they become rapacious beasts. Noir heroes worship a feminine deity which fixes their moral compass – the goddess is everywhere in chains, and must be protected as a knight protects his lady (parallels, sometimes explicit, with courtly love abound.)* It’s all up to the acetic outsider fighting the swelling tides of corruption and being swallowed up. And he can be fooled: the femme fatale escapes victimhood by exploiting her sexual allure to recruit champions that will defend her interests.

Looper’s femme fatale isn’t patronised or vilified, she is proud and independent enough NOT to take Joe Junior’s money and run. Even the silent loving wife has some spunk, giving Joe Senior the finger the first time she sees him. But they both fall into their prescribed roles pretty quickly, and Blunt’s character simply moves between the two options available. Joe Junior recognises that the traditional, family-orientated female role is proper and necessary if the world is to be saved, and the film is right behind him on this. The whore that sells her hair-stroking services is offering a balm that doesn’t cure the wound. She’s not interested in family, having alternative projects in mind, and so the city continues to rot.

It's all noir’s fault. This is what you get when you adhere to the conventions of the genre. But conventions are there to be played with, no? And we’re running out of excuses when it comes to lending a bit of edge to fundamentally unchanging gender roles. Why not make some more radical changes that widen the avenues women can take in noir? Why are none of the Loopers women? Why shouldn’t the superhero/villain be a girl? Will it really undermine the central (and politically innocuous) message that criminality is partly a product of your upbringing?

*What I love about Sin City is that it makes all these assumptions in noir so flipping obvious (cf. the wry references to Lancelot and Galahad). The arch tone of the books and film goes some way towards undermining the creepy sexual politics the stories revolve around.