Why this Catholic didn't like the Last Jedi

[Yes, there are spoilers in here...]

Like much of America, I recently saw The Last Jedi, and I have to say that I liked it less than any Star Wars movie so far... even less the prequels. (I’ll pause to let the prequel-haters regain their composure.) I love the Star Wars saga, I loved The Force Awakens and I wanted to love The Last Jedi. But I pretty much hated it. In short, the movie embodies our modern disregard of doctrine and discipline, rejecting the fictional Jedi religion that we’ve come to love.

The Force Awakens in 2015 was the kind of movie that inspires me to greatness - Rey, a girl from nowhere, discovers within her a power which she can use to stand up against the evil First Order. It was obvious to all that The Force Awakens was recycling plot elements from the original trilogy, but I nonetheless left the theater with a desire to “fight the good fight,” to do battle against evil in the world, seen and unseen. The Jedi religion of Star Wars is more akin to Buddhism or Zoroastrianism than to Christianity, but The Force Awakens was the kind of movie that could make people of faith think to themselves, “God is at work within me, and I’ve got a place in this this battle between light and darkness.”

As Rey went off at the end of The Force Awakens to the island of Ahch-To, I couldn’t wait to see her learn the ways of the Jedi. Like many fans, I expected her to become an apprentice of Luke Skywalker, just as Luke had learned the Force as an apprentice of Yoda. Luke’s location on Ahch-To was significant: It is the site of the very first of the Jedi temples, which have gained a certain mystique in the growing Star Wars canon. The Jedi Temple on Coruscant, where the Jedi Council presided in the prequel trilogy, is no doubt the best known of the temples, but I got an even greater sense of the importance of these sacred sites when watching the animated Star Wars Rebels with my sons. In Rebels, which takes place between the prequels and the original trilogy, we saw Jedi Kanan Jarrus at a temple on Lothal training his apprentice Ezra Bridger, effectively inducting him into the ways of the almost-extinct Jedi. As The Force Awakens ended, there was no reason to doubt that Rey herself would be trained in the ancient religion, mastering the ways of the Force that was so strong within her.

Instead, The Last Jedi shows a complete contempt for the discipline and doctrine of the Jedi. From the moment of Rey’s arrival, Luke Skywalker shows no interest in apprenticing her. His reluctance, of course, is key to the plot, showing his inner conflict in the aftermath of Ben Solo’s defection to the dark side. If Rey is not trained in the Force, he reasons, she will not be able to become an agent of destruction like Kylo Ren / Ben Solo. He resolves to burn down the ancient Jedi temple, which houses the sacred books of the Jedi order.

As if to save the ways of the Jedi, the ghost of Yoda appears before Luke Skywalker. Instead of stopping Luke, however, Yoda torches the tree temple himself, saying to him, “Time it is, for you to look past a pile of old books. Wisdom they held, but that library contained nothing that the girl Rey does not already possess.” I’ve never wanted to slap a Muppet so badly in my life. (Yes, I know, anger leads to the dark side, but Yoda himself no longer seems to care about such things.) The rest of the movie was ruined for me with this one scene, even though we later saw that Rey had swiped the ancient books from the tree, saving them from destruction.

So why is this scene a big deal? First of all, it was completely out of character for Yoda to act as if Rey was ready to confront the threat of the dark side after one meditation lesson with a half-hearted Jedi Master and one time-lapsed scene of swinging a light saber at a rock. In The Phantom Menace, Yoda protested that Obi-Wan Kenobi, who had presumably studied from early childhood, still hadn’t trained long enough to leave Qui-Gon’s apprenticeship. In Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, Yoda and the Jedi Council repeatedly refuse to name Anakin Skywalker Jedi Master, because he has not yet mastered his anger and his pride in the use of the Force. In a turning point in The Empire Strikes Back, as the new apprentice Luke Skywalker prepares to flee Dagobah to save his friends, Yoda warns, “If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil.” Because of his incomplete training, Luke loses his hand in battle and is prematurely burdened with the truth that Darth Vader is his father. Still, in Return of the Jedi, Yoda tells Luke in his dying words, “Pass on what you have learned, Luke...”

Dying. Friggin’. Words.

But Yoda in The Last Jedi seems to say, “Got this, Rey has! Who needs stuffy old training anyway? Down with the patriarchy of the Jedi Order! You do you, Disney princess!” Even when Luke shows an effort to save the burning Jedi Temple, as if he might want to pass this ancient knowledge on to Rey after all, Yoda prevents him, as if the Jedi religion simply must die.

This is about more than character continuity or even the integrity of the Star Wars universe. To me, this is a serious example of how modernity is largely unable to see the value of the wisdom of the past. The values of self-mastery, discipline, and patient apprenticeship have been replaced by a cheap message of unmerited-affirmation and effortless-empowerment. Instead of instilling its characteristic sense of the sacred and reverence for religion, the latest installment of the Star Wars saga epitomizes our modern desire to be “spiritual, but not religious,” a desire have all the feels of faith without the demands of doctrine, discipline, or discipleship.

I was further frustrated that The Last Jedi seemed unwilling to depict a battle between true light and true darkness, leaving us instead with various shades of gray (thankfully, not fifty). Snoke was dark, but not mysterious enough to be really taken seriously. And Luke was more powerful than ever, but showed more fear and anger than ever - the very vices that Yoda had warned against in days past - further reinforcing the idea that self-mastery is optional, as long as you have good enough CGI. Then there was Kylo Ren, more victim than villian, whose perpetual inner conflict makes me wonder if he’ll be overcome in Episode IX not by a band of heroes, but by a skilled therapist. The battle between Ren and Skywalker felt more like a petty squabble between people with a troubled past than an epic struggle for the fate of the universe. Is this moral ambiguity really the “balance in the Force” we’ve been waiting for?

The only “enemies” that the The Last Jedi seemed to want to take seriously were the weapons dealers on the casino-planet Canto Bight, who make money from both the First Order and the Resistance. The new Star Wars universe has rightly heightened its concern over social evil like systematic oppression, but does it still care about about personal moral evil? Does the Star Wars universe still believe in a struggle between absolute good and evil, between light and darkness, or is the battle between the First Order and the Resistance, as thieving code-breaker DJ says, “just business”?

Perhaps The Last Jedi was so frustrating to this Millennial Catholic because it is too similar to the fate of religion in our own galaxy. Much of the Baby Boomers generation, like the troubled Luke Skywalker, long ago cast off the doctrines and disciplines of religion in general (and Catholicism in particular) in favor of a morally relativistic, do-it-yourself spirituality. This has left my Millennial generation, like Kylo Ren and Rey, perpetually looking for ourselves, but rarely finding ourselves, because the wisdom of the past has been largely burnt to the ground, even in many religious circles. The Last Jedi seems to celebrate this, instead of mourning it for the loss that it really is.

To be fair, the character Rey in The Last Jedi was never an unwilling student of the light side of the Force. She went through the trouble of seeking out a Jedi Master, but found a man who had lost faith. In a clear rebuke of the Star Wars mythology of the past, director Rian Johnson’s decisions proclaimed to Luke and his audience, “I find your lack of faith very trendy.” With the sacred texts in Rey’s hands, however, perhaps Episode IX can restore a sense of the importance of religious tradition and training. “Save us, J.J. Abrams! You’re our only hope!”