Star Wars: The Last Jedi review: thrilling and genuinely startling

“We are what they grow beyond,” one old-timer observes to another in Star Wars: The Last Jedi (12A cert, 152 mins) as they watch a symbol of their shared past go up in smoke. The twosome – one of whom is a weary and grizzled Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) – are reflecting on the new generation of rebels fighting their age-old cause in ways they could have never expected.

Watching the torch being carried forward is “the true burden of all masters”, Luke’s companion continues – and if George Lucas was ever to watch the latest entry in the cinema-changing series he created, the line might strike a plaintive chord. 

Writer-director Rian Johnson’s film certainly feels like Star Wars: it even has a supporting cast made up of British character actors and gorgeously CG-augmented rubber creatures, including porgs, a kind of hyper-marketable cross between a puffin and a young Justin Bieber.

But it’s not a Star Wars you’re entirely sure Lucas would or could have ever made himself. Rather than playing the hits, as JJ Abrams’s franchise-reviving The Force Awakens did two Christmases ago, it flexes its fingers before riffing over old chord progressions in ways that will leave fans beaming with surprise. 

Johnson, the director of the winding neo-noirs Looper and Brick, doesn’t share Abrams’s heart-on-sleeve delight in homage and pastiche – and Star Wars’s biggest open secret is that it has always been homage and pastiche, even the original ones. The way this film uses Luke is entirely different to Abrams’s nostalgic deployment of Harrison Ford’s Han Solo in The Force Awakens, for instance: while it’s an unbridled joy to see Hamill return to his defining role, the character is now a surly hermit, scarred by secrets. 

But Johnson does seem to share Abrams’s view of that famous galaxy far, far away as a vast and marvellous mechanism, whose movements are so ingenious that it’s enormous fun just watching its parts tick intricately from one configuration to the next. 

In doing so, The Last Jedi mounts some genuinely startling narrative twists and feints, while charting an onward course for the franchise that has you itching to discover what comes next. That’s smart business practice, but it’s also exemplary blockbuster filmmaking.

After a rocky two years at Lucasfilm, packed with directorial firings that suggested a lack of certainty of purpose at the studio, the new Star Wars film would inevitably be judged both in terms of its blunt-force entertainment value and how well it bodes for the franchise’s long-term health. Johnson’s film earns full marks on both counts.

How much of the premise to share without risking death threats? It feels safe enough to say that things pick up almost exactly where The Force Awakens ended, and the film assumes you’re already revving your engine at the starting line, and will have no problem keeping up. The brave orphan Rey (Daisy Ridley) has tracked Luke to his island hideaway, lightsaber in hand, with questions about his fallen apprentice Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and her own mysterious past.

The half-monstrous, half-elegant, all-scary Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis) is still bent on wiping out General Leia (a suitably stately final turn from Carrie Fisher) and her dogged Resistance, whose numbers have never been at a more precarious ebb. That’s largely thanks to Snoke’s fascistic First Order, led by the merciless General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson), who issues orders like “obliterate the fleet” with the look of a man who’s just found a rancid haddock in his pillow case.

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Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern), Leia’s steely and silvery-purple-haired deputy, has a cloak-and-dagger plan to turn the tide of struggle. But ace pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) covertly launches a flashier counter-initiative, dispatching ex-stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega) and a plucky and principled security guard called Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) to the casino resort of Canto Bight – think the Mos Eisley cantina crossed with the French Riviera of To Catch a Thief – where lurks a sneak-thief who can slip a raiding party on board the First Order’s flagship.

Those two prongs might sound like Abramsian callbacks to The Empire Strikes Back, which had the young Luke studying at the knobbly green knee of Master Yoda, while Leia and Harrison Ford’s Han Solo followed a trail of crumbs around Cloud City. But this is Johnson’s film, and he takes pains to warn you otherwise: even after Rey pitches her old-fashioned comeback plan to Luke, he gruffly cautions “This is not going to go the way you think.” 

Guess what? It really doesn’t. Alpha-swashbuckler antics that would have paid off in the 1970s and 1980s just don’t find purchase. As signalled by the arrival of Rose and Holdo centre-stage alongside Rey and Leia, they’ve been superseded by a more feminine style of heroism based on strategy, endurance, lateral thought and lightning judgement. (In one of countless one-liners that seem laser-engineered to trend on Twitter, Rose describes the Resistance ethos as “not destroying what you hate, but protecting what you love.”)

Johnson’s screenplay staves off pomp by undercutting itself at every opportunity, joking about laser swords and levitating rocks, while the familiar Force cosmology – the eternal struggle between dark and light – is coaxed in some unexpected directions.

During Rey's Jedi boot camp, Luke describes the Force as a kind of potential energy created by oppositions in nature: bad news for midi-chlorians, but good news for the plot, which is built around those kind of elemental clashes. 

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From Rey versus Kylo Ren to Luke versus the First Order to Laura Dern versus a Star Destroyer –  that’s one you’ll want to see on the big screen – these confrontations aren’t just thrilling and beautifully staged, but have an eeriness and loneliness that reminded me of Ralph McQuarrie’s unearthly Star Wars concept art from 1975.

Lucas was able to use and develop much of what McQuarrie envisioned, but there was little space for those minor-key qualities amid the bustle of the first three films. The Last Jedi leans into them. It’s less Star Wars as you’ve never seen it than Star Wars as you’ve never felt it.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is released in on release now