So the latest Star Wars film came out on DVD a little while ago and maybe you haven’t seen it? Perhaps you’re not that big a fan, but feel like you’re missing out because your friends keep talking about it? Well worry not, I’m here to provide a no-nonsense recap of the film’s events. Read this article and you can keep up with your Star Wars-obsessed friends even if you aren’t into science fiction and would rather wait until its out of the theaters.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi opens by ripping off paying homage to The Empire Strikes Back as the Empire’s First Order’s Fleet arrives at the Rebel’s Resistance’s base right as they are trying to escape. Fortunately, the Resistance’s token white guy Poe Dameron is able to distract the space Nazi’s with a Tyler Perry-esque “your mama” joke before blowing up all the laser cannons on the star destroyer because an X-wing is too small to shoot at or something or whatever. By doing this, Poe Dameron both 1) allows the Resistance to make a bombing run on the First Order’s “Dreadnought” class star destroyer and 2) adds gravity to space so that Resistance Bombers can literally drop bombs that just fall like rocks. Unfortunately, this second point turned out to be counterproductive as the Resistance loses every single one of its bombers. A fate that could have easily been avoided had they had the foresight to add some sort of propulsion device to those bombs. Oh well. Meanwhile, Rey has found Luke Skywalker, or as Mark Hamill refers to him, Jake Skywalker. Mark Hamill’s rebooted and modern character has nothing to do with the optimistic, never-say-die character who would leave his own mentor and endanger the galaxy just for an opportunity to save his friends. Instead, he plays a grumpy old man who prefers to milk space cows and mope around waiting to die like he was in some Lars von Trier film. Rey informs Jake Luke that Han Solo is dead, which of course Luke would have already known given he’s a Jedi and can sense that kind of stuff. For a brief moment Luke pretends to care before giving up again and sulking like the degenerate loser that every kid in the 70’s and 80’s who saw Star Wars and imagined being Luke Skywalker obviously assumed Luke would turn into. Meanwhile, the First Order has found the Resistances’ “fleet” (which despite blowing up the Super-Duper Death Star in the previous film, has been reduced from the dominant force in the galaxy to all of four ships). A CGI space battle ensues where Kylo Ren hesitates to kill his mother Leia from afar even though he murdered his father Han up close. But don’t worry, some random First Order pilot blows up the bridge and ejects Leia in space. This directorial decision made sense, however, since unfortunately Carrie Fischer died in real life and can’t return for the final film. Oh wait, nevermind she force flies through space back into the ship. Fortunately, this scene doesn’t look absolutely, farcically, belly-laugh-inducing ridiculous. Not. At. All. The Resistance ships have enough light speed fuel or whatever to jump to light speed one more time, but the First Order will be able to track where they go. So they hold off on jumping and fortunately, their ships are just a little bit faster, so the First Order just trails behind them waiting for them to run out of regular fuel. They do this even though in space you wouldn’t need to continue to burn regular fuel because without any gravitational pull or friction, the ships would simply continue moving at whatever speed they were previously moving at with the Resistance continuing to gain ground on the First Order. Unfortunately, Poe’s antics of somehow adding an atmosphere to the entire galaxy have come back to haunt the Resistance again. Not only do the First Order’s laser shots arc through space like artillery shells, but ships slow down when they run out of fuel. Despite being faster, the Resistance ships don’t gain any ground on the First Order as the movie’s second of four acts boils down to the equivalent of a steam boat chase. Don’t worry though, this extraordinarily convenient set of affairs is not the result of ridiculously lazy writing, Rotten Tomatoes guaranteed me of that. Fin decides to forget how he already fulfilled his character arc of going from cowardly to courageous in the previous film, The Farce Foresakens, and like a video game you forgot to save, he reverts back to coward status. He attempts to escape from the doomed Resistance fleet but is captured by a new character brought in because the writers felt the film wasn’t quite bloated enough yet. Meanwhile, on the bridge, Leia is unconscious after her Wicked Witch of the West routine and the writer’s decided to kill off one of the greatest memes of all time, Admiral Akbar offscreen. So command falls to Admiral Gender Studies who promptly tells the crew that the plan is to do nothing and wait to die. This is a ploy though, she actually has a secret plan to escape to the ice planet Hoth to an ice planet with red salt named something or other, but decides not to tell anyone so the movie can have its run time pointless bumped up to a bladder-nuking 2 hours and 32 minutes. I think I blacked out for a few minutes at this point, but when I came too, Rose and Fin had become friends and along with Poe, decided to embrace toxic masculinity and commit high treason against Admiral Gender Studies. They call up Sassy Orange Yoda who tells them to go somewhere to get or find a McGuffin to prevent the First Order from tracking them or something. Fin and Rose then steal a ship and jump to a Casino Planet in search of Mr. McGuffin. At first, Fin likes it, but then Rose tells him to look closer. He uses his space binoculars to find that the people on the Casino Planet abuse CGI alien monsters. Fin, being a CGI Alien Monster Rights Activist decides to open an Al Qaeda cell with Rose. Together they murder dozens of presumably innocent people, including, in all likelihood, janitors, waitresses and cooks that were just trying to put food on their family’s table. They eventually get arrested but run into a Poor Man’s McGuffin, who might be able to do what the real McGuffin could… maybe. They pass through a few view video game tropes to successfully break out of prison, get an extra powerup and get back to their ship. They then take Mr. Poor Man’s McGuffin back and sneak aboard the enemy ship. But they get caught by the First Order. They then realize that this all side adventure was completely superfluous to the plot because Admiral Gender Studies had a secret plan. Unfortunately, Poor Man’s McGuffin betrays Fin and Rose and tells the First Order about Admiral Gender Studies’ plan (which he had no way of knowing about, but whatever). The First Order starts ruthlessly obliterating Resistance escape pods. Despite causing hundreds of deaths through their own stupidity, none of the characters show any signs of remorse. Back on the Jedi planet, after getting one or two pointless lessons, Rey finally gives up trying to get Luke to become a character in this film and decides to go see if Kylo Ren can flip her to the Dark Side. She meets up with Kylo and he skips ahead a little to The Return of the Jedi and he takes her to the main bad guy Snoke. This part was something many fans had anxiously awaited as there were a plethora of fan theories about who exactly Snoke is. What is his back story? What is his motivation? How did he meet Kylo Ren? How did he rebuild the Empire? Kylo Ren then murders Snoke. Kylo and Rey talk about Rey’s parents and then Kylo Ren has a vision of who they were. This was also anxiously awaited by fans as there were also numerous theories about who Rey’s parents were. Why did they abandon her? Is she related to Kylo Ren? To Luke Skywalker? Kylo Ren then informs Rey that her parents were nobodies. Anyways, during the first climax of the film, Rey leaves Kylo because he’s an incompetent baby-face and Fin and Rose escape the star destroyer with the help of a lot of computer animators before Admiral Gender Studies commits suicide terrorism to save the remainder of the Resistance. For the second climax, everyone shows up on Hoth 2.0 fighting a snow battle against ATAT walkers, which Rian Johnson, showing how creative and original a filmmaker he is, has moved to the end of the film instead of putting it at the beginning like in The Empire Strikes Back. A Mini-Death Star/Nano-Super-Duper-Death Star gun is going to blow up the barrier to the Resistance base. Fin tries to repeat his character arc in The Farce Foresakens by sacrificing himself to save his friends and destroy the Mini-Death Star/Nano-Super-Duper-Death Star gun. Rose foils his plan to have an arc by impossibly ramming her craft into his in a collision that almost certainly would have killed them both. Fin somehow survives though and pulls Rose out of the rubble of her broken craft to ask her “WTF!?!?” Just after Admiral Gender Studies sacrificed herself to save the Resistance and just before Luke Skywalker would sacrifice himself to save the Resistance, Rose tells Fin he shouldn’t sacrifice himself to save his friends because they need to win “with love” or something like that. It was hard to tell exactly what she said as I couldn’t hear anything through the tears of laughter. At this point, Luke finally decides to get off his ass and help out. He adds an expansion pack to allow Jedi’s to create an avatar and goes down to have a pointless chat with his sister (oh yeah, I forgot to mention Leia woke up to stop Poe’s pointless coup de’tat). Then Luke’s Avatar goes out of the base to delay Kylo and the First Order for about 5 minutes. Despite the fact that Luke can’t be hurt as an avatar, he ends up dying for some reason. Why didn’t he just go to the planet and sacrifice himself in person? Academy Award-deserving writing, that’s why. Regardless, Luke has redeemed himself by teaching Rey that the force is “more than lifting rocks” and providing a momentary distraction. The Resistance is still stuck in the base though, but luckily Rey uses the force to life some rocks and they all escape on the Millennium Falcon. As they fly away from Hoth 2.0, everyone celebrates without apparently realizing that the entire Resistance has been reduced to 12 people, three droids and one very old ship. Don’t you fear though. We then return to the Casino Planet and it shows several young survivors of Fin and Rose’s terrorist attack have become radicalized. It appears that the seeds of the rISIStance have been sown. The end.
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