Star Wars: The Last Jedi, In This Corner of the World, film reviews
Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a spirited continuation of the never-ending space saga launched by George Lucas in 1977.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a spirited continuation — sometimes spectacular, often humorous — of the never-ending space saga launched by George Lucas in 1977. It is an artistic creation that has changed lives, for millions of fans around the world and for Lucas himself. He sold Lucasfilm to the Walt Disney Company for $US4 billion in 2012.
This is Episode VIII in the franchise and the second part of the sequel trilogy that started in 2015 with The Force Awakens, directed by JJ Abrams. Rian Johnson is in the chair this time, though Abrams is back — for now; Disney does director-hop a bit — for the as yet untitled Episode IX due in December 2019.
Star Wars movies are difficult to review because many devotees dislike even the most minor revelation about what happens on screen. My advice to any such reader is to look away now, see the movie, then come back here and see what I thought, if you want to. I try not to reveal significant plot details of any film, but as this review is aimed at a general audience, I warn that spoilers follow, the sort that also exist in the trailer or the promotional posters.
Johnson is a 40-something director with sci-fi cred. His best-known movie is the Bruce Willis-led Looper (2012), a box-office success about time-travelling hit men. He was four when Star Wars first burst on to the big screen. “The first movies I was making in my head were set in this world,” he said in a recent interview.
He pays homage to that world, though, with clever comedy along the way, verbal and physical. There are deft references to the earlier films that fans will appreciate. Many of the old characters, human and otherwise, make appearances — though I will not name them.
(Having mentioned the homage, if Disney had a corporate-wide bout of insanity one day and handed a Star Wars movie to a madly maverick director — Terrence Malick, say — I would be first in the queue to see it. The 1977 original was path-breaking after all.)
The Last Jedi starts more or less where The Force Awakens left off. There are four plot lines and I think Johnson, who also wrote the script, struggles to bring them together in a cogent narrative. First, as we see in a tense battle scene at the start, the Resistance, led by General Leia (Carrie Fisher), seems to be losing the war with the ruling First Order, the successor to Darth Vader’s Empire. Leia’s hot-headed main fighter pilot is Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac).
Second, orphan scavenger turned warrior Rey (Daisy Ridley), who found Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) on an isolated island at the end of the previous movie, is trying to persuade him to come back, reclaim the Force and fight. He is a grumpy hermit who tells her to go away. Ostensibly he is the last Jedi of the title, though it becomes more nuanced than that.
The third and perhaps central story centres on Ben Solo, aka Kylo Ren (a dark Adam Driver). He is the son of Leia and Han Solo (whom he killed last time) and nephew of Luke Skywalker, whom he now strives to kill. He has two masters: First Order Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis and CGI, the best character in the film) and himself. The grandson of Vader is still struggling with the dark and light within himself. Snoke’s articulate dressing-down of the taciturn Kylo early on is a cracking scene.
Fourth, rebel storm trooper Finn (John Boyega) and a new character, a spaceship mechanic named Rose (Kelly Marie Tran), go on a mission to disable a tracking device. This introduces a shady space-age safecracker (Benicio del Toro, who effortlessly wins every scene he is in). There are also storm trooper cameos by a trio of princes: William, Harry (yes, Princess Di’s sons) and British actor Tom Hardy.
Personally I think the shifts between storylines are jumpy and unconvincing, and that some of the resolutions to high-drama moments are too obvious for the Star Wars universe. I think The Force Awakens has a deeper contemporary resonance, with its echoes of Nazism and the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. More broadly, I don’t think this movie takes the Star Wars story or the development of the characters much further ahead.
None of that means it isn’t an enjoyable film. It is action-packed (though too long at 150 minutes) and I laughed a lot. Some of the imagery is superb, especially during a battle on a salt plain towards the end. And because this is Fisher’s final outing as Leia (she died 12 months ago) there are moments that thrum with tenderness. She, her second-in-command (Laura Dern), Rey and Rose continue the female warrior theme that Star Wars has rightly embraced. “It’s not fighting what we hate,’’ Rose says at one point, “it’s saving what we love.”
In This Corner of the World does not look to the future, as Star Wars does, but to the past, and it is scarier as a result. This slow, quiet, animated film from Japan, based on a manga by Fumiyo Kono, is set in the 1930s and 40s, mainly in the naval port of Kure, but also in nearby Hiroshima. When the title of the movie is said by the main character towards the end it represents anything but the comfort those words ordinarily may suggest.
This is a long animated movie, at 130 minutes, yet that fits well with the story told. We all know what happened in Hiroshima at 8.15am on August 6, 1945, and waiting for it is hard, particularly while watching people, mainly women and children, who have no idea what is coming.
Writer-director Sunao Katabuchi is deliberate with dates and times. Sometimes days flash by, the dates listed, as the people in Kure hear air-raid sirens, descend into shelters and wait and hope as the bombs fall. This is the permanent tension of war.
The main character, Suzu, we first meet as a girl. It’s the early 30s. Her family lives in Hiroshima. They make their living farming edible seaweed. She likes to daydream and draw. She has an older brother and a younger sister. There’s a boy she likes. When, a few years later, she paints the waterfront, the wave tops presented as jumping white rabbits, she hands it to him. But they are not to be together. In the early 40s she is promised to a young man from Kure, an arranged marriage. She moves there and lives with him, his parents and his sister.
As the war intensifies, they have to deal not only with bombs but with food rationing, black markets and suspicious military police. Suzu’s mother-in-law says something so simple that it’s painful to hear: “I wish we could all live happily.” Suzu nods: “I wish so, too.”
The animation is sharp and clear in the outline of the characters but soft and muted when it comes to their surrounds. It is beautiful to look at. The best description I can think of is that it’s like a watercolour painting that moves.
Sometimes this is in surprising, tenderly emotional ways, such as when Suzu’s husband lies over her in a trench during an air raid. It looks like they are in bed together. Or when a heron lands near Suzu in mid-1945, when Kure is being heavily bombed: “Fly away as far as you can.” The natural habitat, particularly the birds and insects, is important. There may be a war on, as one character says, but butterflies still fly.
The intense bombing of Kure and then the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima are what we knew was coming. The latter is handled with delicacy at first. We see it as do the people in Kure, the flash, the cloud. But ultimately this is no place for delicacy and some of the scenes towards the end are heart-wrenching. “I couldn’t recognise my own son,” a mother says, referring to what we see as black splatter on a wall.
This is not an animated movie for young children. There will be loads of those in the next few weeks as the school holidays kick in. But In This Corner of the World is remarkable.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (M)
3.5 stars
National release
In This Corner of the World (M)
3.5 stars
National release