JEDI HARD

Opening this week:

Star Wars: The Last Jedi--After a lively space battle at the opening to get us warmed up, the latest from the franchise picks up right where The Force Awakens left off. Scavenger-turned-warrior Rey (Daisy Ridley) has caught up with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), now a recluse on a windswept island on some distant planet. She's been sent by his sister Leia (Carrie Fisher) to fetch him back into the struggle between The Resistance and the brutal "First Order."

While she pleads with Luke to get back in the game, Rey is also in psychic touch with Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), Leia and Han Solo's wayward son who is still in the service of the dreadful First Order overlord Snoke (Andy Serkis). Elsewhere in that galaxy far, far away, the last ragged remnant of the Resistance is trying to elude the First Order's ships, with the help of a desperate plan by former stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega), his new friend Rose (Kelly Marie Tran), hotheaded space ace Poe (Oscar Isaac) and others. This involves a detour to a Monte-Carlo-like casino planet, and then sneaking aboard the First Order's warship, none of which goes smoothly.

As with The Force Awakens, much of the pleasure in The Last Jedi comes from the attractively non-generic actors, saddled with cringe-inducing dialogue but at least allowed some welcome freedom to be funny at times. Through the character of the commoner heroine Rey, the story also takes a mild stab at acknowledging the dynastic bias that has been such a persistent part of the Star Wars series, and the attitudes on class that it would seem to imply. These movies are more fixated on the inherent importance of bloodlines than a documentary on the Royal Family, and the treatment of the revelations about Rey's lineage would have seemed quaint in the '30s.

But much amusement also comes, as with all Star Wars movies, from the marginal verisimilitude--such casually observed fauna as the elephant-seal/dinosaur-like creatures which provide Luke with sustenance, and the toad-like maintenance workers that keep up his domicile. The obligatory adorable creatures this time, by the way, are the porgs, beakless, wide-eyed seabirds with nesting-doll-shaped bodies.

I liked all of this, and I thoroughly enjoyed The Last Jedi. But as so often with big blockbuster movies it seemed too long to me. Since this is such a perennial cranky complaint from me, I was relieved to hear others saying the same as I left the screening. It isn't just a question of a tired backside; director Rian Johnson, to whom the script is solely credited, puts together one of those big climatic finales typical of the series, crosscutting between several strands of action and building to a noble act of self-sacrifice, and then...it turns out it's not the end at all. There's another whole act still to go, and another big climactic confrontation. And a very good confrontation it is, but by then we've had our emotional release. And also, our backsides are tired.

Despite the Gotterdammerung title, The Last Jedi is not slated to be the last of this Star Wars trilogy. It was, alas, the final film of Carrie Fisher, who has an imperturbably majestic mien here, and whose absence will be sorely felt in the series.

Even so, the best thing about the movie is Hamill. As Luke in the original films, he was sweet and likable but callow to the point of insubstantial; it was like Richie Cunningham at the center of a space opera. In The Last Jedi, with his scraggly hair and graying beard, his raspy voice and haunted, haggard eyes, he has a bearing that can fairly be called Shakespearean.

Ferdinand--Fox Animation and Blue Sky Studios are bravely opening this animated feature for kids the same weekend as The Last Jedi. Maybe the theory is that they'll get the spillover audiences if the Star Wars flick sells out.

In any case, it's a sweet film. It's an adaptation of Munro Leaf's 1936 children's book, with superb illustrations by Robert Lawson, about the gentle-souled bull in Spain who doesn't want to fight, he just wants to sit under his favorite cork tree and smell the flowers. Leaf and Lawson's tiny, beautiful classic (sometimes condemned for its hero's nonviolent nature) was already turned into a very faithful, Oscar-winning 8-minute cartoon short by Disney, Ferdinand the Bull, in 1938.

Turning it into a feature is another matter, of course. The story had to be embellished, and to some extent vulgarized. It's spun out into an escape thriller, as Ferdinand (voiced by John Cena) and his "calming goat" Lupe (Kate McKinnon) try to help the other bulls crash out of their corral, having figured out what will happen to them wether they win or lose in the ring.

It took me a while to warm up to this over-plotting, but happily the movie is willing to go silly. About the time that Ferdinand and his pals were engaging in a dance-off with the uppity German horses in the next stable over, I started to crack up. Said bulls are voiced, by the way, by the likes of Anthony Anderson, Bobby Cannavale, David Tennant and, of all people, Peyton Manning.

By the end, Ferdinand had won me over with its generous heart. Which, I must confess, did not stop me from having a hamburger the following day.

BEST SPACE SCENARIO

Opening this Thursday:

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens—The three Star Wars “prequels,” from 1999, 2002 and 2005, all started in the standard manner for the series, with the preface “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” followed by the blasting John Williams fanfare and the title. But then that crawl of yellow text would start, and it was a bunch of gobbledygook about trade alliances and congressional debates that would have seemed dry, complicated and confusing on C-SPAN.

The expository crawl for the new entry, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, starts with the line…

Well, wait a minute. As we were leaving the press screening, the PR folks asked us for our reactions. One of the ushers, headed in to clean the theater, was holding his hands over his ears as he passed us, terrified that he’d overhear some “spoiler.” So if you’re of this guy’s mindset, maybe you’d better stop reading until after you’ve seen the flick. I’ll do my best not give away any specific plot points, but perhaps you’d rather go in completely uncontaminated.

OK, now: The opening crawl for The Force Awakens begins with the line “Luke Skywalker has disappeared.” It goes on to explain that Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) has dispatched “her most daring pilot” to track down a clue to her brother’s whereabouts.

Now we’re talking. Much like in the original 1977 Star Wars, a hero has disappeared, and the good guys have to find him. It’s the sort of simple, fairy-tale set-up that’s implied by that “Once upon a time” opening line.

And it’s this approach that makes The Force Awakens so much more fun than the “prequel trilogy.” In those films, there would be shootouts and spaceship dogfights and light saber duels, but it was hard to know what was at stake at any given point—at times I almost wasn’t sure who I was supposed to root for. The spectacle was great, but the storytelling was muddled. It certainly didn’t seem like the feeling a Star Wars movie should give you.

With The Force Awakens, however, director J. J. Abrams, working from a script he co-wrote with Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt, gets about as close, probably, as it’s possible to get to bringing us the feeling that the originals gave us back in the ‘70s and ‘80s—that sense of a new mythology, and a set of shiny new toys. The cinematography and set designs and props have a subtly retro look—one robot has a head that looks a lot like an old-school drive-in movie speaker—that links them convincingly to the original trilogy’s universe.

The actors have a retro look, too. The story, set decades after the end of 1983’s Return of the Jedi during a period in which the Empire is trying to re-assert itself as the “First Order,” allows for the presence of original cast members like Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford and, buried under Wookie fur not noticeably gone gray, Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca.

But even the youngsters in the cast, like Daisy Ridley as a scavenger girl on a desert planet, John Boyega as a stormtrooper gone rogue with conscience, or Oscar Isaac as the aforementioned most daring pilot, seem to echo the gee-whiz young characters of the early films. There’s even a spherical, chirping-and-whistling robot, and a villain with a rumbling voice behind a dark helmet and mask.

All of the actors are proficient, but the standout—a little surprisingly, considering his supposed great indifference to these films—is Ford, who brings lightness and warmth to the middle-aged Han Solo that I don’t think he had back in the ‘70s. When he and Fisher’s Leia exchange their crooked, ruefully nostalgic smiles, it’s very charming.

There are innovative new characters, like a tiny, wizened, thousand-year-old barkeep (wonderfully performed, behind motion capture, by Lupita Nyong’o) who looks like a talking kumquat with coke-bottle glasses, but even she serves as a somewhat Obi-Wan-like mentor presence for Scavenger Girl. There are new creatures, too—a hornbill-like bird pecking at a helmet, an enormous boar-like beast at a water trough, tentacled horrors running amok on a cargo ship. But they, too, recall the barely-glimpsed fauna in the early movies.

This applies to the whole of Force Awakens. It starts on a desert planet, follows the search for a cute robot entrusted with vital information, involves mentors and pupils and family connections and a super-weapon and Jedi mind tricks and cringing underlings bringing bad news to scary bad guys and crosscutting between space battles and personal confrontations. It’s almost less a sequel than a series of variations on the original trilogy’s themes. That’s the shrewd and sensible method that Abrams, Kasdan and Arndt have used: Everything’s new, but everything’s old as well.

On the way to the screening, I saw, no kidding, an electric traffic sign on a Phoenix highway that read “AGGRESSIVE DRIVING IS THE PATH TO THE DARK SIDE.” For better or for worse, that’s how ingrained in mainstream culture this once-nerdy mythos has become. Oddly, the movie uses a variation on this metaphysic: The previous Star Wars films were heavily concerned with the allure of the Dark Side, but this film is about the seductions of the Light, the risks and perils of giving in to one’s better impulses. This, I think, it’s what gives the movie its vitality. It might be called A Franchise Awakens.

GRUE MOON & BLOCK PARTY

As Barry Graham points out, this month marks the 109^th anniversary of the premiere of A Trip to the Moon, the pioneering sci-fi film from the great Georges Melies (Turner Classic Movies shows a collection of Melies shorts Monday at 7:45 am Phoenix time). September also marks the release of Apollo 18, a less charming lunar excursion.

Apollo 18, like Cloverfield & Trollhunter, uses the Blair Witch conceit: The premise is that we’re seeing classified footage of an Apollo mission, supposedly scrubbed for budgetary reasons but actually conducted in secret under the auspices of the Department of Defense. The stolid astronauts who land at the lunar south pole soon discover that—gulp—they aren’t alone…

Apollo 18’s opening was rescheduled several times, & Dimension didn’t screen the film for critics (in Phoenix, anyway), so I confess I wasn’t expecting much. The studio’s caution was understandable. I’d be surprised if it became a hit with a wide audience—even at less than an hour and a half, it’s too claustrophobic, oppressive & one-note. But on its own narrow terms, it works, for me at least. The two lead actors (Lloyd Owen & Warren Christie) even though they’re Welsh & Irish, respectively, flawlessly capture the aw-shucks machismo of American astronaut cadences, & the look of ‘70s-era film & video footage is lovingly recreated.

There’s nothing remotely new about the film in terms of sci-fi content, but the director, Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego, generates a strong atmosphere of desolation & dread, & there are some pretty well-timed jolts. There’s even a whisper of political disillusionment worked in.

On the other hand, maybe you’d prefer an earthbound alien invasion…

“Pardon my French,” says the nice middle-aged lady, “but they’re fucking monsters.” She’s speaking of her neighbors, the teenage street punks who haunt the title block in Attack the Block. “Fucking monsters,” echoes the young nurse (Jodie Whittaker) who’s just been mugged by the misunderstood lads in question.

The judgment may seem fair enough, but when literal monsters—shaggy, ferocious quadrupeds from outer space, with blue luminescent fangs—unwisely choose this same block of council flats in South London to drop onto out of the sky, the street kids turn out to be the planet’s first & possibly most effective line of defense. That’s the joke of this headlong, highly exciting sci-fi/horror comedy, written & directed by Joe Cornish.

The alien landing takes place in the middle of Bonfire Night, & goes unnoticed among the fireworks, except by the kids, who arm themselves with ninja swords & bottle rockets & the like, & take to their bikes. The nurse is eventually drawn into a truce with her muggers to fight the common enemy.

Whittaker gives a fine performance, as do Nick Frost as a weed dealer & Nick Treadaway as an upper-crust stoner, but the movie really belongs to the young ne’er-do-wells. Once their faces are out of their hoodies, they’re an engaging, even endearing rabble, & the most glowery of them, Moses (John Boyega), is a born leader. The actors are terrific, but Cornish doesn’t sentimentalize the little sods too much; he even lets them indulge in maudlin sociological self-pity when the nurse challenges them on their criminality. Their fast chatter—unsubtitled & sometimes unintelligible but comprehensible by context—& their swiftly-formed alliances give Attack the Block some of the quality of The Thing From Another World.

The creature effects, though extensive, have a minimalist quality that’s spookily effective—you haven’t seen these aliens before—& the musical score, by Steven Price, Felix Buxton & Simon Ratcliffe, is wonderfully old-school. With Attack the Block, Brit cinema does for the alien movie what Shaun of the Dead did for the zombie movie: Take an American form back to basics &, in a lighthearted but by no means unemotional way, reinvent it.