Red Sparrow is a 2018 spy-thriller film directed by Francis Lawrence who worked with Jennifer Lawrence (the star here) on a couple of the Hunger Games movies, but this is a very different beast. Jennifer Lawrence plays Dominika Egorova (in, it has to be said, a not entirely convincing Russian accent), and Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenarts and Charlotte Rampling star as the film's secondary characters. This one is a pretty big departure from what Lawrence has done in the past, although it has to be said that she's making some pretty bold career choices. I'm not the first one to say that, and for a good reason: it's true. After last year's Mother! it appeared as if she was trying purposefully trying to appear in more "mature" films, and believe me, it doesn't get much more mature than Red Sparrow. The film plays out like one of those schlocky exploitation from the seventies, in that there's sexual violence, sex, violence, torture, and all manner o
I'm sure you all know what the Last Jedi is, and who the key players are, so I won't really get into it here. Besides that, I don't really want to spoil the film for anyone who hasn't seen it. All I'll say is that it picks up right after the ending of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It opens with a pretty impressive space battle, and that's pretty much all I'll say.
The Last Jedi is a pretty strange one. It works as a standalone film, in the way that if you haven't seen any other Star Wars films (which I haven't), you can understand pretty much everything that happens here, and you will care about the characters and become engaged in the story. And what a great story it is - Rian Johnson's script is fantastic. It absolutely crackles with energy and is extremely witty in parts. You can tell that Rian Johnson is somehow who cares a lot about the Star Wars universe too. He knows the characters inside out, and it shows.
There is one small narrative flaw which I don't really want to go into in too much detail, but it involves two characters going off to do a different planet to do...something, and it's sort of just thrown in as a diversion from the main story. It's not boring, exactly - it just feels shoehorned in. But eventually, it does tie into the overall story, so it's quite a minor flaw.
One thing I need to talk about is the action scenes in this film. They're actually few and far between, but the ones in The Last Jedi are so exciting. The choreography is absolutely fantastic, and they feel so visceral. They're just stunning, and the thing I love the most about them is that you can actually tell what's going on, which is so rare for a massive blockbuster like this.
I've been a fan of Rian Johnson's for a long time (Brick is a great film, and the director's debut), and this just feels like one of his films through and through. Clearly, he hasn't been influenced too much by studio pressure.
I think The Last Jedi is going to please a lot of hardcore Star Wars fans (although inexplicably the audience score on rottentomatoes is strangely low), and apart from Blade Runner 2049, I think this is the best blockbuster of the year. If all of the films in the Star Wars franchise were this good, they'd have gained a new fan.
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