What is the true mark of success for a Hollywood blockbuster ? Its critical score, via Rotten Tomatoes? Its global box office take? A decent tilt at the Oscars in the year following its release?
Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi has passed muster in all three of the above categories. And yet there remains the nagging sense, nearly six months after the movie’s release, that the eighth episode in the long-running space opera may ultimately be seen as the most divisive so far.
Unlike Black Panther and this weekend’s Avengers: Infinity War, the two other Disney-produced films that have delivered the really big bucks at the global box office over the last six months, The Last Jedi was greeted with derision by large parts of its core fanbase. Never has the audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, an overlooked feature of the site, looked so relevant. While Black Panther (96% from critics) has a 79% “audience score”, and Infinity War (84% from critics) has a 93% “audience score”, The Last Jedi (91% from critics) was liked by just 47% of those who registered their opinion on the site.
Both Infinity War and The Last Jedi drew on ultra-geeky sources for much of their storyline. The Russo Brothers’ superhero epic took its inspiration from the cosmically nutty 1991 comic book series The Infinity Gauntlet, while adapting it heavily to fit the characters who have already been introduced to audiences over a decade of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The Last Jedi famously took its key twist – Luke Skywalker’s arrival on the mineral planet of Crait in temporarily invincible form – from a little known Star Wars tome titled The Jedi Path.
There are other parallels between the two movies, with many noting the Marvel-style humour that was present throughout The Last Jedi. The difference between the two films, and perhaps the reason why Johnson failed to keep hardcore Star Wars acolytes happy (while the Russos are currently basking in the afterglow of post-movie audience rapture), is that Infinity War rarely sends up its most preposterous excesses. There are more than enough laughs amid the misery of Thanos’s assault on the galaxy, but the Russos resist the temptation to lampoon the mad Titan himself, his gauntlet, or any of his deeply silly minions. All are treated with a reverence that will have helped to keep fans of the comics, and the wider MCU, feeling like their much-loved source material is being respected.
The same cannot be said, and this is only a criticism depending on your point of view (for the record, I liked the movie) for The Last Jedi. The key scene here is when ghost Yoda brings lightning down on Ahch-To’s library of ancient Jedi books.
“The sacred Jedi texts!” Luke shouts, as the tomes go up on flames. “Read them have you?” chides Yoda, pointing out that Daisy Ridley’s Rey has become hugely powerful without access to such ostentatious resources. It’s a superbly comic moment, a hilariously radical revision of accepted Star Wars tropes, but also one that risks undermining any sense of wonder fans might have had left after the slick but ultimately lightweight The Force Awakens.
Why bother to whet our appetites for revelations about the Jedi and their origins, as teased in trailers for Johnson’s film, only to disappoint us with such a curveball? In a moment, every ounce of enigma surrounding the brigade of space monks and their ancient way of life is torpedoed – not by a non-believer like Han Solo, but by Yoda himself.
The lesson here for Johnson, who is directing a new trilogy of Star Wars movies, is that comedy is fine – the original trilogy also had its funny moments – but that lampooning those aspects of a much-loved saga that made fans fall in love with it in the first place is probably best left to the inevitable Lego Star Wars crossover movie. The equivalent move in Infinity War might have been for Thanos to have clicked his fingers, only to discover that the myriad cosmic gems he spent so long collecting from various members of the Avengers were fakes, and that we had all been worrying about nothing.
Anyone who has seen Infinity War’s brutally crushing finale, with half the galaxy’s heroes going up in smoke in an instant, will know that would have been a cruel way to waste an audience’s time. We need to be invested in Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, in Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther, in Chris Pratt’s Star Lord, for us to care when they are flicked into the void. And while Marvel has at times been content to chuckle at the sillier sides to all these superheroes, the studio has always been carefully to retain our sense of awe at the MCU’s essential machinery.
For when comedy descends into lampoonery, the last laugh is ultimately on studios. Infinity War looks likely to become one of the top five movies of all time at the global box office by the time it leaves cinemas, thanks to impressive word of mouth. The Last Jedi, hampered by antipathy from hardcore fans, eventually limped to an underwhelming $1.3bn, despite a stellar opening weekend.
There is a danger for the film-maker, it seems, in too much postmodern mickey-taking. For you risk seeing half your audience disappear before your eyes.
