Earlier today I finally had the chance to rewatch The Last Jedi (Movie Pass rules, y'all). I enjoyed it the second time, just as I enjoyed it the first. To me the movie is a well-made, exciting sequel to The Force Awakens that gets a lot of things right, though not quite everything. Not everyone agrees, though. Personally I think The Last Jedi is so divisive because it is somehow, paradoxically, both incredibly similar yet strikingly different from the Original Trilogy and The Force Awakens. I could say more, but this post isn't about my opinion of the movie as a whole.
One of the most common criticisms of the movie is of the story thread involving Finn and Rose going to Canto Bight in order to find a codebreaker to help them mess up the tracking device that has allowed the First Order to track the Resistance ships. A lot of people complained that this whole story thread was "pointless" because our two heroes don't succeed in delivering the code or otherwise doing something from that ship that ultimately helps them defeat The First Order.
Simply put, those people are wrong. However, that doesn't mean there isn't a serious problem with Canto Bight. There is. But we'll get to that in a moment.
The real problem, obviously, is how these intergalactic war profiteers choose to dress.
First, let's tackle the fact that Canto Bight is significant. The movie not so subtly explains that Poe's habit of repeatedly risking everything on incredibly risky plans to save the day is wrong. We've gotten so used to one in a million gambits succeeding in most blockbuster movies that we don't know what to think when they don't, and that's exactly what this movie is trying to get at. Finn and Rose failing means that the trip to Canto Bight is a lesson for the characters in service of the theme of the story.
Not just a lesson for Poe, either. The whole movie preaches the (very basic, yet very important) message that past failure is something to be learned from. This theme is the through-line of not just the Canto Bight story thread, but the entire movie. Luke is stuck drowning in his past failures, until he decides to learn from his past while stilling moving forward and undoing the wrongs he has caused. Kylo Ren wants to discard the past entirely, rather than learn from it, clearly on course by the end of the movie to repeat many of the same mistakes his grandfather did while he was Darth Vader (insert that saying about those not learning from the past being doomed to repeat it). Rey still holds onto the idea of her parents as space wizard royalty, unable to accept the idea that her past isn't linked to the stories of galactic wizards and space monarchs that she grew up on, until Kylo forces her to confront the truth.
Canto Bight therefore serves to reinforce the thematic undercurrent of the entire movie, as it serves as a failure for Poe, Finn, and Rose to learn from.
So, yeah, it's pretty silly to say that this story thread is pointless. That doesn't mean it's without problems, however. And I think this problem is something that a lot of people intuitively picked up on but didn't know how to articulate, hence the vague accusations of it being "pointless" when talking about it. The main problem here is a problem of character agency.
Damn it, not (secret) agent characters. Character agency!
For anyone unfamiliar with the term character agency, it simply means how much a character's choices and subsequent actions affect the plot. Not in the generic, big picture summary of a character (Poe Dameron fights the First Order as a Resistance pilot) but in the minute-to-minute minutia of the story. Let's stick with Poe Dameron as an example. We wouldn't say he has character agency because he is a fighter pilot. Rather, we have to track his actions scene by scene. In the opening sequence he destroys the turrets bombing the Resistance fleet, then goes against Leia's orders to retreat and destroys a giant spaceship at the cost of all of the Resistance's bombers (as well as many, many casualties). From there he clashes with Holdo over what to do with the fleet. He sends off Finn and Rose to their mission, then even stages a friggin mutiny, managing to hold control of the ship until the Canto Bight mission fails and Leia reclaims control of the ship.
I could go on, but I'll stop there. The main point is that Poe is constantly an active participant in the moment-to-moment happenings of the plot, whether or not his actions produce their intended goals. Nothing just happens to him, he is always making choices and acting on them in ways that have consequences. The same can be said for pretty much all the main players of The Last Jedi: Rey, Kylo Ren, Leia (when she's awake), even Luke, as his initial refusal to do anything is itself a choice that produces important consequences. Basically, character agency is about being an active participant in the plot. How each character participates tells us about who they are, and the effects their actions have are what (should) drive the plot forward.
The main problem with the Canto Bight story thread is that Finn and Rose don't really have character agency once they get there.
Now, everything leading up to the Canto Bight side quest absolutely does give them agency. Finn and Rose use their special knowledge as characters to figure out the existence of the tracking beacon and what they need to do to disable it, they choose to act on that knowledge to save the Resistance, they team up with Poe (who still hasn't learned his lesson on the dangers of betting it all on a risky gambit), they go to Canto Bight. So far so good. They're making big choices that both reveal about who they are as characters while moving the plot forward.
And even when we get there, it's not so bad because we get some good character moments. Finn, who lived a suffocating, contained life as a storm trooper is floored by how marvelous Canto Bight looks. Its glamorous, opulent atmosphere captivates him, but Rose tells him to look between the lines and see what that sort of opulence is built on: war profiteering, exploitation of the poor (including child slaves), and animal cruelty. She then goes on to say she wants to bring it on down.
Time to seize the means of (galactic star destroyer) production!
Then they get arrested when they are on the cusp of finding the codebreaker, and everything goes downhill. But it's really, really important to realize something here: getting arrested is not the problem. It's that they don't actively make meaningful choices for most of the rest of the movie. Rather, they become passive participants, merely along for the ride as things just sorta happen around them.
When they get arrested, they don't do a single thing to find Benicio Del Toro's hacker character. No interesting choices or actions that tell us about their characters or push the plot forward. Instead they miraculously stumble upon this hacker by complete luck and he breaks them all out (without any help from the two of them). After they turn the corner, they do nothing to evade capture from the guards because, surprise, BB-8 has tied up all the guards there! Which, aside from magically getting them out of danger in a way that doesn't offer Finn and Rose any difficult or interesting choices, makes no sense when BB-8 required saving from Rey in the first movie against literally just one junkyard scavenger when Rey first met him. So now Finn and Rose have both found their codebreaker and escaped without doing anything noteworthy at all to accomplish either goal. Nothing here shows us about who they are as people or contributes to everything going on around them. It's not at all earned.
Then, when they're going through the service tunnels, the only real choice they make is... free a bunch of animals instead of child slaves. Yikes. At least they made a choice that pushes the plot forward, I guess? After that they engage in a cringeworthy Prequel Trilogy-esque chase scene on those space chocobos and are almost captured... until Del Toro and BB-8 bail them out, again. On the ship Rose does exercise agency by choosing to give her pendant to Del Toro in payment for his services, showing the audience that as a character she is willing to part with things that mean a lot to her if it means protecting those she cares about in the present. More choices/active participation like that would've been nice.
But then, when Del Toro's character is breaking the shit out of some codes, they get caught. Again, getting caught is not the problem. But their subsequent escape is not a result of anything they do. They only get out because Holdo sacrificed herself to buy time for the escaping Resistance fighters. They they escape after Finn beats Phasma (who has been rendered pretty unthreatening to the audience after being unceremoniously thrown into the trash heap in The Force Awakens) by being lucky enough to have a rising platform catch him.
But at least Mission: Create A Character As Cool-Looking But Useless As Boba Fett was a smashing success!
So, to sum it all up, the only time Finn and Rose have any character agency between first getting captured by security on Canto Bight to rejoining the Resistance is (1)when they choose to free the space chocobos and ride them through Canto Bight (cringeworthy) and (2)when Rose gives Space Hacker her pendant (actual good character moment). In that entire span of time, those were the only two times Finn and Rose had meaningful agency. That's why so many came away feeling this part was pointless, even though it certainly wasn't on a thematic level, a plot level, or on a character level for Poe (and even Finn and Rose in the beginning).
The point of this post isn't to shit on the movie (which, like I said above, I very much enjoyed; I plan to write a post about an aspect I really liked tomorrow). Rather, I wanted to look at the part most people didn't like and analyze exactly why it didn't work. Sometimes in discussing movies, we focus on saying why something we loved was awesome or why something we hated was terrible. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but I think it can be helpful to also pick apart specific things we thought did or didn't work in any given movie, regardless of whatever opinion we have of it as a whole.
Thanks for reading!
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