Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Jason Fry

Okay here we go... Since this is a book review blog, I won't go into reasons why the film was terrible, but it's important to understand why the novelisation could not hope to rise above a one star rating. The plot of the film (and novel) is illogical in ways even the weaker of the films in the saga never were. Jason Fry was the hapless writer selected to pen the novelisation, a cruel and unusual punishment meted out by the cannibalistic cabal of Kathleen Kennedy. In a fawning and spineless flurry of acknowledgements, Fry pays homage to his indomitable overlords, thanking Rhian Johnson for a 'fabulous story' and Kennedy for assuming George Lucas' mantle. Despite Fry's grave undertaking, he rises to the challenge with a strong opening, injecting the narrative with more depth than required of such a tediously derivative plot. However, Fry's attempts to salvage the situation is doomed to failure. Broken beneath the ridiculous narrative, he eventually gives up, opting instead to provide a blameless, perfunctory coverage of the worst Star Wars film to date.

The story takes place soon after the events of The Force Awakens, which in itself was a highly unoriginal retelling of the original film. Rhian Johnson was determined to subvert audience expectations every step of the way, undermining the mythic tropes of the original trilogy in a misguided attempt to appeal to an authority shy generation of entitlement. The main narrative is a direct mirroring of The Empire Strikes Back, with the remaining Resistance fleet engaged in a long haul chase by the warships of the First Order. Heroes come and go from the chase at will to pursue their own side adventures, effectively killing any sense urgency we were supposed to feel. The franchise's own rules of the universe are constantly broken in favour of setting up a cheesy one liner, and astoundingly, Fry even inserts the crude, made-for-cinema comic moments. Suffice to say, they do not work on the page. For that matter, they fell short in the cinema too, raising laughs from only the most socially conditioned American audiences.

The most common complaint of the story was how the character of Luke Skywalker was handled, even eliciting criticism from Mark Hamill himself. The legendary Jedi master is in self imposed exile after losing his apprentice Kylo Ren to the dark side. He has become a bitter, beaten old misanthrope, rendering all his previous heroic deeds meaningless. The main theme at play here is destroying the past, burning the sacred Jedi texts and toppling the ancient regime in order to make way for plucky nobodies. The toxic agenda of Disney to make feeble concessions to a socially conscious and progressive, yet depressingly infantile audience obsessed with identity politics, easily digestible soundbites, and effort free handouts is embarrassingly transparent. A final scene where a stable boy raises a broom like a lightsaber adequately sums up the nauseating message. I need to stop writing now...

Rating 1/5