I saw The Last Jedi on Sunday and found it something of a curate’s egg. I enjoyed it overall but found the parts I care most about in a movie - the storytelling and characters - not so great.
Recently I’ve finished a number of books where at the end, I felt the author took on too much. That space constraints had prevented certain characters and situations gaining the necessary depth to be truly satisfying. The Last Jedi gave me that same feeling. There were four major arcs - and they rarely interacted on the screen - and gods knows how many little side arcs.
One of the better pieces of advice I ever got was from MD Presley (he of the most recent interview), who urged me to keep things simple. Juggling that many arcs will never be simple. Something will lose out. Judging from the reactions I’ve read so far, it was Finn. People reckon his arc was a bit pointless and only there so he had something to do. That’s not the desired effect.
Personally, my problem with Finn’s arc wasn’t that it was pointless (although I’d agree it’s the most easily chopped piece of the plot). My problem would be that it came with the most drama for the sake of drama.
Its common storytelling advice to keep making things worse. Pile on the trouble and let the characters dig themselves big holes to get out of. Like many storytelling maxims, there’s something to it, but its possible to make the story worse with it too. Too many stupid decisions and the audience lose sympathy. Too much tragedy and drama and they grow numb, or get uncomfortable, or worst of all, start guessing the plot twists too early because tragedy demands a response.
Once that happens, devastating battles become formulaic preludes to individual heroics. Do or die moments become prolonged athletics montages prior to the bit where they do. We don’t share characters’ anguish because it’s like dealing with your most embarrassing uncle when drunk. You just want them to stop making a scene. And when you’re in that cynical frame of mind, all the cool stunts and moments of heroism stop being cool.
There’s many criticisms an action-adventure can shrug off as being something the audience doesn’t care about. Being uncool isn’t one of them. Personally, The Last Jedi frequently missed the mark there because cool ideas were buried behind layer after layer of tension-sapping drama. I can only presume the boy who fell asleep on me would mostly agree with that.
Of course, one of the better safeguards against this is the use of characters the audience are rooting for; emotional investment is the best cosmetic any story can have. Here be spoilers - go to the fourth picture if you wish to avoid them.
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| This is a character who people root for |
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| And this is how to do drama |
The Last Jedi doesn’t use this. None of the characters we have met and loved before this installment bite the farm as a result of direct enemy action. The closest we get is Leia’s brief coma - for a moment I thought she was dead and it really hit, then we learned otherwise and I felt cheated. Some will count Luke’s death, but I don’t know whether that’s a result of expending energy to distract Ren, or simply feeling it was his time to go. Or a mix of both. In any case, it happens a long time after I decided whether the action was cool or not. Oh, and Akbar goes off-screen. Sorry dude.
So what do we get? Two of the bigger good guys introduced in this film die. One dies after twenty or so minutes of being a grossly incompetent and needlessly provocative leader, and then five minutes of twiddling her thumbs while people die instead of making the sacrifice that saved further losses. If I wasn’t completely meh on her due to the former, I mightn’t have noticed the latter quite so much.
The other has a cooler arc - from lowly fangirl tech to courageous survivor refusing to lose her principles for vengeance is cool. Just not cool enough to distract me from the fact that her death felt completely superfluous to the plot. It wasn’t the logical conclusion of events, it was the act of a director looking for a tearjerker moment. He didn’t get it from me, which is kinda sad, as the character deserved better. Maybe if she’d been more established, I’d have felt differently.
As it is, I can’t remember either’s name.
So those are my problems with the film.
What are my lessons?
The first would be to be very cautious about having too many major point of view characters. I’m thinking three is the number at which a storyteller should stop and ask themselves “Do I really gain anything from having more and am I really good enough to pull it off?”. Sometimes the answer to that is Yes. Some of the most beloved stories out there answered Yes to that question. But too many characters, too many arcs, and the writer is no longer juggling balls but chainsaws.
The second would be to, after each turn of the screw, ask myself “Can the MC still win?” as well as “Did I make it sufficiently worse”. If you keep putting the character in situations where only a Deus Ex Machina will save them, the tension will snap and all that is left is a minefield of jaded expectations. The Indiana Jones movies are, if memory serves, fantastic examples of a character failing often without requiring plot armour.
And the third is that every character sacrifice - or lack of sacrifice - needs to be audited for meaning and build up. Character death is frequently a make or break moment for a story, particularly when used as an emotional climax. GRR Martin showed us all how to do it. This movie doesn’t.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed it and not just for the visual spectacle. I’ll probably be back to watch it in 3D, which I wouldn’t if the story was just plain flat. But it was uneven and distracting. Hopefully I can make use of what I saw to make my own stories less so.
p.s. If you want to read another blog on Star Wars and storytelling, TE Bakutis has a pretty sweet article on Rogue One right here. He also has an interview coming up here later this week with a cool announcement in it. So watch this space.
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