Star Wars Trailer Review: THE LAST JEDI

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Star Wars: The Last Jedi - or, just another night at the Medford City Council when the Bob & Joe Show returns!

Trailer review by Joe Viglione 10-10-17

JV is Chief Film Critic of TMR Zoo and Community Media Medford

Trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYRy5bCsWF8

In two months and five days from my writing this The Last Jedi will hit the screens and bring in over a billion dollars.  That’s assured unless Kim Jong-un finds some super powers to go along with his thermonuclear obsession. https://www.facebook.com/OfficialKJU/  You can join Kim’s FB page there, I’m not interested.   But everything a little despot hopes for is wrapped up in the trailer for The Last Jedi and here’s where we all have our interest piqued – a trailer is supposed to be stunning, supposed to grab you, and this one does.

It’s about four and a half minutes and opens with menacing high tech.  This long-time Star Wars fan (and who isn’t?) sees a glitzy new, fresh and exciting look at what dazzled the world in Episodes 4, 5 and 6.  Which one has to do to keep the fans from needing a good cleansing after the truly horrible 1, 2 and 3 desecration of one of the greatest series in the history of filmmaking.  Mechanized modern-day Metropolis, the strength of George Lucas re-imagined Flash Gordon, Flash Gordon to the extreme. Why reinvent the wheel when you can re-focus a tried and true formula?  Lucas’ gift and insight became a gift to the world, and we look at the components of a trailer

Though the new character development is missing, our heart strings tugged by the images of Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill, seeing Chewy – as great as it is – feels like Worf sent from Star Trek: The Next Generation into Deep Space Nine.  Essential in that the new characters of Deep Space Nine had little or no traction in the Star Trek Universe outside of the hardcore hardcore base and the vision-less powers that be needed to bring in Colm Meaney (Chief O’Brien – 52 episodes The Next Generation, 173 of Deep Space Nine – did they make that many???) and Michael Dorn (Worf, 175 episodes TNG, 102 episodes Deep Space Nine) to give the series some kind of anchor.   Sad thing is, they could have integrated fuller remnants of Next Generation out at Deep Space Nine, the obvious somehow escapes science fiction writers of today who have the road map Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, Isaac Asimov created…but can’t seem to adjust their set to the Outer Limits…or Twilight Zone…or original Star Trek sagas.  “"No one just wants to see a retread of Obi-Wan Kenobi," Hamill said to USA Today. "We've seen the benevolent Jedi master training people."

“Untamed power …and beyond that” is the dark theme, a hint of the exploration of the “dark side” – the devil’s playground, with cinematic awe and shock, an upcoming roller coaster ride – the futuristic negative zone inherent in current human nature, taken to the extreme.   What Terminator, the Matrix and Star Wars, all series, and all very popular, do correctly is to not take these stories down the rabbit hole of a mud bath (think John Travolta in Battlefield Earth, TV series Babylon 5 which actually did pull in some original Star Trek writers as I advised above – D.C. Fontana and Harlan Ellison – according to Wikipedia, but – clearly – not enough of their genius to pull B5 from out of the depths – “Other writers to have contributed scripts to the show include Peter David, Neil Gaiman, Kathryn M. Drennan, Lawrence G. DiTillio, D. C. Fontana, and David Gerrold. Harlan Ellison, a creative consultant on the show, received story credits for two episodes.^{[65])   (Wikipedia)}

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The spacecraft appear sleek, modern – upgrades for a new time, much deserved, and director Rian Johnson will have to follow guidelines from both Disney and Lucas Film, the franchise much too important to experiment with.   The Kinks said it well, “Give the people what they want” – and as long as Jar Jar Binks is kept in exile, along with the Ewoks, the heart of Star Wars will continue to beat on the correct path.