Star Wars: The Inner Child's Lament

SPOILERS! Seriously, stop reading now if you don't want to know what happens in the movie.


A lot happens from the time a movie is green-lit to the day it hits the big screen, so it's no great sin if a creative misstep happens along the way. In the world of creative missteps, however, Star Wars: The Last Jedi is more a two-footed blind leap off a cliff.

That cliff is on Ach-To, the planet where Rey finds Luke, Jedi-in-exile and legendary embodiment of all the goody-two-shoes peace, love and happiness in the universe. His was the 30 year backstory we were waiting for. Luke was the sole disappointment of The Force Awakens and the giant, dangling carrot on a stick luring fans, super and otherwise, back to theaters. While we do find out why he's exiled himself, there's precious little meat on the bones of that reason. What we get is a Luke so out of character from his former self there's little reason to care what he's done or what he's going to do. Okay, the bit with Yoda was awesome, but only because his was the only callback of a legacy character that was treated with any regard for all the development that came before. Mark Hamill deserved a better storyline and so did the audience.

Speaking of deserving better, did Daisy Ridley even need to be in this film? You could say her acting was stiff, but she wasn't given any reason to act. Rey wanders around Ach-To for a long weekend being ignored by Luke before leaving to literally do some heavy lifting for the Resistance. Her big rescue scene near the end of the film is anti-climactic for a number of reasons, but mostly because (a) the boulders are visually out of place for the surrounding environment, (b) they look look like a third grade class made them, (c) a few blasts from a laser probably would have cleared them, and (d) the scene is so poorly filmed it might has well have been cut straight out of a Wonder Woman episode from the 1970s.

Which leads me to the major overriding issue I have with The Last Jedi -- quality.

The quality of the dialogue, never a strong point in Star Wars films, is atrocious. The dialogue might as well have been improvised by grade school theater students. Anti-diarrhea commercials have more natural flow of language and Mexican soap operas have more subtlety. The central characters seem to repeat the same conversations over and over with dwindling enthusiasm, while lesser characters lend nothing to the overall. No one is ever going to win an Oscar for a Star Wars performance, but holy guacamole you can at least give them something to work with.

The quality of the story-telling is atrocious. If I wasn't struggling with ADD going in to view The Last Jedi, I sure as heck was coming out. Most scenes last no longer than a few sentences before we move to a new set or cut to a different plot line. It's almost as though director Rian Johnson was afraid we'd get bored if we stayed in one place too long, but that's what we want. We're going to a party to meet a bunch of old friends and we want to hang out with them for a couple hours. Instead, every time we begin to strike up a conversation with Luke, Leia, Rey, Finn, Poe, Snoke, or Kylo Ren, we're shuffled on to the next person like we're speed-dating. It's difficult for me to believe the same man who directed Looper is responsible for this unfocused mess.

Most significantly, the quality of the plot is atrocious. Plot is the interrelated sequence of events that leads the audience to the climax of a story. As plots go, there apparently wasn't one. Nearly all choices made by the characters lead nowhere and the holes in basic logic are so ginormous that even Jack, Chrissy and Janet couldn't have missed them. Why didn't Laura Dern tell anyone she was planning to evacuate the remaining Resistance fighters in cloaked ships? How does Benicio Del Toro know Dern's plan when Poe and all his fellow mutineers clearly don't? How does Finn recover so quickly from having his spine severed without acquiring some cool, character-defining tech gear? Why does Poe change from a savvy squad leader in The Force Awakens to a reckless thrill-seeker happy to sacrifice a few dozen people to take out a single enemy ship? Why wouldn't Hux simply request another ship to approach the fleeing Resistance from the other direction, or zip ahead of them and blow them to smithereens? How in holy hell does a spacecraft slow down when it runs out of fuel? I'm as happy as the next audience member to suspend my disbelief from time to time -- we are talking about a serialized space opera, after all -- but space is a frictionless vacuum. A ship out of fuel would continue to move at a constant speed until it hit something.

There are more issues than bad dialogue, sloppy story telling and incomprehensible plotting, but the fundamental problems with those three are enough to qualify The Last Jedi a misfire and a mess.

There are reasons to see a movie a second time. To understand everything about it, yes. To fully appreciate layers of detail, yes. To see how you were misdirected throughout the film to be set up for a twist ending, yes. Those are all valid reason why you should need or want to see a movie a second time. What you shouldn't have to do is see a movie twice to prove to yourself it might not be as bad as you think it is.


© 2017 Mark Feggeler

Frankenstein on the Orient Express?

Kenneth Branagh broke my heart back in 1994.

Just 176 years earlier, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley crafted the perfect romantic horror novel – Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus. Shelley gave us gorgeous settings, slowly developed the obsessive madness of her primary character, established the greater humanity and ultimate heartbreak of Frankenstein's creature, crafted burgeoning romance and subsequent tragedy, and intentionally kept us completely in the dark about the science of reanimation to dissuade future generations from repeating the horrendous mistake. Branagh's 1994 movie, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, did none of that. In place of all those graceful subtleties, Branagh gave us bombastic acting, manic storytelling, graphic gory nastiness at every turn, unnecessary and ineffective alterations, and a detailed (and disgusting) understanding of the reanimation process.

Granted, I am a purist when it comes to film adaptations of literature, but I'm willing to forgive creative license if the end result proves itself worthy. Branagh at least tried to be more faithful to the source material than James Whale did in 1931 with his iconic and truly awful Frankenstein that so many people consider to be the classic retelling. The big mistake Branagh made was to focus too much on the gothic horror elements of the story and not enough on the greater tragedies of the human spirit. The resulting movie is a grotesque version of a tale originally balanced on a razor's edge between horror and beauty.

When I first saw the poster for the new Murder on the Orient Express hanging in our local movie theater I was intrigued. The Agatha Christie novel is another one of my all-time favorites. Although the 1974 movie starring Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot was masterful, perhaps forty years on it was time for an updated presentation to lure in modern audiences. The poster listed a treasure trove of excellent actors including Brannagh, Pfeiffer, Dench, Colman, Depp, etc., etc., etc. And then it named the director – Kenneth Branagh.

Groan... Intrigue and dread. Branagh had already mercilessly vivisected one of my literary idols. Was Agatha Christie to fall victim to the same treatment as Mary Shelley?

Commercials showed chase scenes. There are no chase scenes in the book. The trailer shows a bridge and Poirot majestically walking ahead of the train. There's no bridge in the book, Poirot does nothing majestically and he never leaves the train. Branagh is shown to be a dapper, handsome Poirot with a ridiculous mustache. The only thing right about that is the mustache, to an extent.

When the time came for the movie's release, my feelings were mixed. I wanted to see it, but I didn't. Sunday at the Sunrise Theater in Southern Pines, I took my seat in the balcony and steeled myself for disappointment.

Divergence from the novel occurs immediately, telling you this isn't your mother's Orient Express. There are enough similarities between written page and celluloid to let you know Branagh respects the former enough to develop the appropriate atmosphere in the latter. In doing so, he successfully avoids the fundamental problem with his Frankenstein debacle. It feels right, even if details of character and plot are not. The general sense of humor is right, the beautiful scenery is right, the underlying motivation for the murder is right. Again, I'm not against creative reinterpretation if it's done well. Minor changes are easily forgiven because Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express is pretty, fun and loyal enough.

The only time Branagh really fails is at the denouement. When Poirot parades out the solution of the crime to the implicated passengers, the entire process feels rushed. Certain important details have not yet been uncovered, recent fisticuffs are still too fresh to have been forgiven, and a proper investigation of facts has not been completed. It's almost as though filming had reached a point where Branagh said "Right! This has gone on long enough. Let's wrap it up!" without properly building to the emotional payoff we expect from Agatha Christie's climactic expositions. The hamminess of classically-trained Shakespearean theater acting that had simmered below the surface throughout the film bursts forth and threatens to derail the entire show.

In the end, even though Branagh's Poirot gets the job done and Branagh himself provides a piece of slick entertainment, I'll have to stick with Albert Finney for authenticity.