Reviews and reactions to The Last Jedi—a film released seven months, and also an eternity ago—have become well-worn by this point. But beneath heaps of praise, as well as tiresome accusations of feminist cabals destroying the Galaxy Far, Far Away, a curious middle ground has emerged—the notion that The Last Jedi, while a perfectly competent film, was a bad follow-up to The Force Awakens.
To be clear, Episode VII and VIII are very different films, but I’ve been irked by how often “TLJ ignored TFA” is accepted as fact. Other writers have addressed TLJ’s solutions to TFA’s supposed “mystery boxes”, but I find discussions surrounding TFA’s new Big Three much more interesting. While much of the common wisdom around this film holds that TLJ jettisoned the character arcs of TFA to tell its own story, evidence shows the opposite is true.
More than I expected on first viewing, TLJ sticks to TFA’s character arcs with near reverence, often relying on subtle moments from TFA to ground interactions. And on the flip side, after watching TLJ, TFA’s characters feel incomplete without the resolutions provided by the trilogy’s second volume. Read More
