Part One: Humour and Consistency
Disney-Marvel has own, albeit predictable sense of humour. Scenes are set in motion, the tension rises, and then is cut short by a quippy one liner that’s just enough out of place to rouse at least a small giggle.
Though predictable, the variation in characters, delivery, and even the occasional brilliant comedic flare by a particular director *cough, Taika Waititi, cough*, makes the jokes generally palatable and never completely maddening. What adds to this acceptability is that fact that the Marvel universe has been set up to work with this kind of humour – since the first Guardians of the Galaxy at least. Thus, even when the one-hundredth on the nose one liner is spoken, it doesn’t feel out of place in the universe, even if it isn’t that funny.
The Last Jedi contains this exact kind of humour. However, none of the preceding Star Wars movies did. But wait, surely that’s better, right? After all, it pushes the franchise in a new direction. Wrong.
Firstly, the humour is derivative – it’s literally lifted straight out of the Marvel handbook. But secondly, and more importantly, The Last Jedi contains many characters that have been in at least one of the previous films. And with the exception of Poe, none of them have ever shown a hint of being the type of person to drop a one liner or be the object of some ludicrous slapstick humour (I’m looking at you, Finn, with your leaky suit). So to have them suddenly change from being a serious character to one that constantly spouts punchlines feels jarring and out of place in the Star Wars universe.
Don’t get me wrong, Star Wars has always contained humour. But there is something very different about the kind of try-hard nature of the jokes in The Last Jedi as compared to the subtler humour of the original trilogy, and even the two other recent instalments. And no, I’m not counting the prequels. They suck.
Case in point: remember that bit from A New Hope when Han blasts the microphone and says, “Boring conversation anyway”. His line is a throwaway, meant to add a smidge of humour to a situation that is still tense and dramatic. Now imagine if that had been shot in the Marvel style. Han would have shot the mic, turned to Chewie, shrugged, and gone, “What? It was a boring conversation anyway.” And you know what, that’d have been fine. Sure, it would have killed the momentum, but it would have been a nice bit of character development. The problem is, you can’t do five films that feel like A New Hope and then switch it up ten movie-hours in. It’s just totally inconsistent.
To both films’ credit, the humour starts to fizzle out as the tension really ramps up. Or at least I it does. Vast swathes of The Last Jedi are smudged together into one homogenous blob of disappointment in my mind.
Anyway, the humour is only one piece of this puzzle, so let’s move on.
