Rian Johnson’s middle chapter throws away the lightsaber and half the audience’s expectations, and its scenes with Mark Hamill, Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver are the best this series has had in decades. Its casino subplot is not, and it runs 152 minutes.
Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed, inherited a stack of questions from J.J. Abrams’s The Force Awakens and is not much interested in most of them. He says so early, when Rey holds out the lightsaber and Luke takes it, weighs it, and throws it over his shoulder. It is the boldest thing this series has done in decades. It is also a film with three plots and interest in two of them, and at 152 minutes it has room for all three.
The island is the reason to see it. Rick Heinrichs gives Luke a village of stone beehive huts on a green rock in the sea, and Steve Yedlin shoots it in rain and low grey light. Mark Hamill plays Luke as a man who decided years ago that he was wrong about everything and has grown fond of saying so. He is funny and he is sour, and we were moved more than we expected by a character we had last taken seriously at the age of nine. What did it was Hamill’s face when he sees the lightsaber, before he has said a word.
Better still are Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver, whose Rey and Kylo Ren find they can see and hear each other across the galaxy without wanting to. Johnson stages them as if the two were in one room, and Bob Ducsay cuts them like an ordinary two-hander, so that a hut in the rain and a black cabin on a warship become the same space. Driver plays Kylo as a grieving adolescent in a grown man’s body; he smashes his helmet against a wall and spends the rest of the film with nothing to hide behind. We have never wanted a villain in this series talked out of it before, and here we did.
Then there is the rest. The Resistance fleet, under Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), is running from the First Order at a speed the First Order can match, so the film’s big chase is a line of ships not moving while a fuel gauge falls. Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) spends it arguing with his superiors. Finn (John Boyega) and Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) leave for a casino planet so that Heinrichs can build a gold-and-marble gaming floor and Michael Kaplan can dress a hundred gamblers, and none of it bears on anything that follows. We were bored, and then cross about being bored. Tran is warm and likeable and is handed a speech about war profiteers where a character should be; Boyega is left to run about.
Andy Serkis’s Snoke sits in a room Yedlin lights entirely in red, wearing a gold dressing gown Kaplan might have cut for a Bond villain, and he is more fun than the part deserves. Domhnall Gleeson plays General Hux as a stooge, and the film opens with a joke at his expense, a prank call kept on hold, that tells you how seriously Johnson takes the First Order’s dignity. John Williams’s score works harder than it has in years, bringing the old themes in under new scenes without leaning on them.
The comparison everyone reaches for is The Empire Strikes Back, and it is the right one: Johnson has borrowed its shape, the hero off with a hermit while the rest of the cast runs. What he adds is his own habit, from Brick and Looper, of setting up what an audience expects and then declining to provide it. That habit produces the best scenes here. It also produces the second half’s turns, which we will not describe, and which split the audience we saw it with.
Fisher, in her last performance as Leia, is not in it much, and she has one moment towards the end of the first act that stopped the cinema we were in dead. She looks tired, and the film lets her. See it on a big screen if you can, for the island and the red room and the two people talking across space. At home, the casino is a good moment to put the kettle on.
