Star Wars: The Last Jedi was, for lack of a better word, divisive. Despite critical acclaim and making 1 billion dollars at the box office, a large portion of the fanbase hated the movie and felt betrayed by the filmmakers. The rage of the fans was so intense that there was a fan-made petition to remove the movie from the official canon. Although the movie is hated by many, it still has valuable life lessons that the audience could take in. Here are 5 lessons learned from Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
1. Respect the chain of command
Admiral Holdo was a character who made her appearance in The Last Jedi. She was a rebel hero and a wartime friend of Leia Organa. After an attack run by the First Order, Leia is knocked unconscious and Admiral Ackbar dies, leaving Admiral Holdo as the highest-ranking officer after Poe Dameron was demoted for reckless behaviour. Her actions were misunderstood at the time and seemed to show her as an incompetent leader who didn’t know what she was doing. Throughout the movie, several Resistance ships are lost and all the forces are gathered in one ship. Poe then starts a mutiny against her and it is almost successful, but Leia stops him. In the end, we find out that Holdo had a plan to have everyone land on the nearby planet Crait, where there was an old abandoned rebel base. Poe understood from this ordeal that being the hero isn’t always about blowing things up, and being a leader requires one to be a good follower. Holdo withheld information from Poe and everyone else because it wasn’t her obligation to tell anyone what the endgame was. In the military, soldiers follow orders without question, trusting that the commanding officer knows what they are doing. Poe didn’t respect the chain of command, and had little regard for authority, which is what put them in the predicament that they were in. If he had listened to Leia in the beginning, they would have had a better fighting chance against the First Order.
2. War isn’t black and white
One of the most hated parts of the film was the side quest that Finn and Rose go on. Though that section of the story is often regarded as a waste of time, it serves to develop Finn’s character and show the viewer, as well as Finn, that there is more to war than just beating the other side. Rose shows him the true villains behind war. It wasn’t the First Order. It wasn’t the Resistance. It was the people who supplied them with the weapons that they needed to fight each other. The New Republic and the Empire’s remains could hate each other all they wanted, but the only reason that there was so much death and destruction was because of people who profited from such, and they were the weapon-makers. This continued the plotline about Finn breaking free from brainwashing and giving him more autonomy, as well as a full view of what exactly was going on.
3. Let Go of the Past
One thing The Last Jedi was very well known for (and hated for) was how it emphasized on moving on from the past, letting it go. As Kylo Ren says, when trying to convince Rey to join him, “let the past go. Kill it if you have to.” The whole movie serves to show us that everything we knew about the past has to be left in the past, because there were new problems that had to be solved in different ways than before. While history and legacy played a huge part in the events of the movie, they were born of the need to return things to the way they were before the events of the sequel trilogy. The First Order’s plan was to bring back the Empire. Rey was fixated on finding out who her parents were. Luke was traumatized over the events of the past. Kylo moved past the past in the first few minutes of the movie, growing beyond his Darth Vader fanaticism and becoming his own person by the end of the movie. He and Luke managed to move beyond their past and that was when they found their calling. Kylo became the Supreme Leader and Luke became the one who brought back hope to the galaxy when he saved the Resistance, using the most impressive Force trick we had seen on screen up to that point. One’s past can hold one back if they choose to dwell in it, and we learned that in The Last Jedi.
4. Your Heroes Won’t Always Live Up to Your Expectations
Luke Skywalker’s characterization in The Last Jedi was a bitter pill to swallow for the majority of the fandom, and probably the thing most of them agree was the worst thing about the movie. The original trilogy had an upbeat Luke, smiling after the success of redeeming his father and saving the galaxy, celebrating with his friends, only for us to see a disgruntled hermit in his next big appearance (not including his appearance in The Force Awakens because it was a cameo). He went from a man who would not give up on his father even after all the atrocities he had committed in the name of the Empire to a man who was willing to end his nephew’s life because he sensed that he would go down that same path, and was haunted by the horrible decision he had made to try and end his nephew’s life. Rey idolized him, and when she went to him, she hoped to find a man who was ready to face down the First Order, but instead found a broken man who had given up on everything. He himself had learned of the truth behind the fall of the Jedi and their history, allegedly from the Force ghosts of Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and his father; Anakin Skywalker. Seeing that the people he himself idolized were all flawed and made grave mistakes that led to their own undoing, then seeing that he himself had committed the same mistakes, broke him, and Rey came to see that the man everyone else idolized and the galaxy practically worshipped, was flawed, just like everyone else. She eventually gave up trying to convince him to return to the fight and went herself. This was a shock, not only to Rey, but to the fans, as they saw Luke in the same light, even inventing theories about his feats throughout the sequel trilogy. (One very popular theory is that he was the one who pulled the downed Stardestroyer on Jakku in TFA out of the sky.) The audience was in for a shock to see that he was not the godly being they had expected to see, and their reaction was mirrored in Rey’s reaction. Talk about a gut punch.
5. You Don’t Have to Come From A Special Bloodline to be Special
The final lesson in this list is the most important one of all in the movie: you don’t have to come from a special bloodline to be special. Since before the release of The Force Awakens, there were several theories about who Rey was related to. The most common theory was that she was related to Luke Skywalker, with other possibilities being Han Solo, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn and Palpatine. All of those theories were debunked in this movie, and it was revealed that she was simply Rey. She didn’t come from anywhere. She was a nobody. Her parents were nobodies too. Though fans were disappointed with this decision, feeling that it was a poor creative decision and hollow, only serving to provoke and anger people, it sent a very strong message about what it took to be special. Rey wasn’t powerful because she was a Skywalker. She was powerful because the Force willed her to be so. The Skywalker lightsaber, the lightsaber that belonged to the chosen one, called to her because she was strong enough to fight back against the coming darkness. It goes to show that any one of us can be special and have the potential to be great at things, and it doesn’t depend on where we were born or who we were born to. We can forge our own path and make a name for ourselves.
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