Things are once again fraught in that galaxy far, far away—but have they ever been otherwise? As in the last Star Wars movie, they’re fraught in a familiar way. Like the Rebel Alliance of 40 years ago, the new good-guys collective called The Resistance, led by General Leia Organa (onetime princess Carrie Fisher), is being heavily oppressed by the First Order, a league of space barbarians in no way unlike the Galactic Empire of old, apart from being commanded by a desiccated potato head called Supreme Leader Snoke (a mo-capped Andy Serkis). Can the rebels disrupt the Order’s evil scheme of, you know, conquering the entire galaxy? It’s not much of a question, but let’s say, Who knows?
Writer-director Rian Johnson, new to the Star Wars factory, kicks things up more than a notch from J.J. Abrams’s welcome-back series reboot, The Force Awakens. Abrams’s movie was essentially a reprise—and a pretty good one—of Star Wars‘ greatest hits. Director Johnson is a more irreverent guy (see his 2012 time-travel movie Looper), and his sequel—”Episode VIII,” for those keeping count—is quite a bit wittier. We get a lot of the series’ trademark swoosh-boom space action, but it doesn’t feel like a haphazard CGI dump—now it has some structure, and for the most part it’s smartly staged. There are also a few beautiful scenes—on a remote water planet, in Snoke’s gleaming black-and-crimson lair. And Johnson has worked up some amusing dialogue as well (a commodity on which Star Wars creator George Lucas was famously short). He gets a couple of out-loud laughs—especially at the expense of Domhnall Gleeson’s operatically snotty Snoke subordinate General Hux—but he’s careful about it: no one wants to turn the Star Wars franchise into a joke, least of all its Disney overlords, writes Kurt Loder in his latest review for Reason.
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