The Last Jedi’s Canto Bight Sequence: A Defense

Rose and Finn at Canto Bight

“Failure, the greatest teacher is.”

- Yoda


I love Star Wars: The Last Jedi. I wrote a non-spoilery review soon after seeing it, and in another post on my favorite movies of 2017 I promised to write a defense of a particular part of the movie. In both posts I mentioned the extreme nerd rage directed at the film. Having watched The Last Jedi again recently, I find this rage even more perplexing.

For most of the last two years it seemed the nerd rage subsided a bit, but I’ve noticed a resurgence with The Rise of Skywalker premiering in a few weeks and the recent release of The Mandalorian on Disney+. Random dudebros of the internet are rage-refusing to see the new movie and denying that anything post-1983 is real Star Wars. Memes are going around about The Mandalorian and/or Baby Yoda saving the franchise (presumably from the calamities of films including Solo and The Last Jedi). Star Wars has a particularly toxic subset of fans for whom this rage is nothing but thinly (or not so thinly) veiled racism and misogyny, but I don’t think that explains all of the hate even if it explains a lot of it. (For the record, I love Baby Yoda as much as life itself and think The Madalorian is fine so far, but not quite as much fun as Solo and not nearly as thought-provoking as The Last Jedi).

I figured it was finally time to watch The Last Jedi again and then fulfill my promise to write a defense of one of its most derided parts: the Canto Bight sequence. I’ll follow this up with a future post about why I think The Last Jedi is the most philosophically interesting of all the Star Wars films.

Spoilers ahead! (But if you haven't seen it, you're probably not reading this post, anyway, so I'm not particularly worried.)



The Canto Bight Sequence

Finn, one of our heroes from The Force Awakens, meets Rose, a new character played by Kelly Marie Tran. (A lot of the hatred directed toward Rose is simply racism and sexism, and Tran herself was subject to intense harassment online.)

Finn and Rose concoct a plan to disable a tracking device on one of the First Order ships so the Rebel fleet can escape. They need a codebreaker, and a phone call with another favorite, Maz Kanada, informs them that the codebreaker they need is at the Canto Bight casino. Rose describes it as the worst place in the galaxy.

So, Finn, Rose, and BB-8 travel to Canto Bight, which turns out to be an upscale casino and race track where the galaxy’s upper crust come to live lifestyles of the rich and famous. Just as they see the codebreaker they’re looking for, Rose and Finn are imprisoned ostensibly for illegal parking, but really for not being rich. In jail they meet a scruffy thief, DJ (Benicio Del Toro), who, along with BB-8, helps them bust out of jail. They also have some help from the giant horse-goat-rabbit creatures called Fathiers, who are the creatures being mistreated at the race track. They also meet some unlucky kids who are similarly mistreated.

Rose, Finn, and the Fathiers bust up the casino and the Fathiers run into the wild while DJ and BB-8 rescue Rose and Finn in a luxury ship. They make it to the First Order ship and DJ helps them until they are caught, mostly through the efforts of a delightfully grumpy First Order droid. Later DJ sells them out to the First Order. It seems that all hope is lost and their mission was a complete failure, as they have not only not disabled the tracker but are about to be beheaded at the behest of Finn’s old nemesis, Captain Phasma.



The Complaint

There’s more to the movie, of course, but this is enough to get a sense of why many fans complain. Two of our central characters seem to spend a good chunk of the middle of the movie accomplishing absolutely nothing. Some have pointed out that this is particularly troubling as they are two of the highest profile people of color in the film and their actions don’t seem to advance the plot. So, the complaint is that the whole Canto Bight sequence is a pointless detour.



The Defense

But is it pointless? On the surface, this complaint seems to overlook the things they do straightforwardly accomplish: they bust up a harmful casino, freeing innocent creatures from bondage, and they do find, as Finn says, a codebreaker.

Slightly more deeply, if you pay attention at the end of the film, at least one of the kids is Force-sensitive and all the kids are inspired by meeting real Resistance fighters. The seeds of rebellion have been planted at Canto Bight just by our heroes having been there. It also affords The Last Jedi, for perhaps the first time in Star Wars history, a chance to at least raise the question of whether all this constant warfare is a good thing, especially considering how the business of selling arms to both the bad and good guys is linked to the massive economic inequalities in the galaxy.

For the deeper significance of all this, and why I think the Canto Bight sequence is despite appearances one of the key plot points for the whole message of The Last Jedi, we need to consider Luke and Yoda’s lessons from other parts of the film.

One of Luke’s lessons for Rey is that the Force is part of everything and cannot be owned, even by the Jedi. We are simply part of reality; we are not its masters. The universe unfolds with no regard for our expectations, theories, or plans. To borrow a bit of contemporary folk wisdom: it is what it is. This lesson is pretty deep stuff. It makes me wonder if the Daodejing, especially given its non-anthropocentric worldview, is one of the Sacred Jedi Texts.

But as Yoda’s Force Ghost says later, the texts do contain wisdom but they don’t contain in in the sense of holding it all away from the outside world. The wisdom of the Jedi is not owned by the Jedi. Or anyone. Reality is bigger and messier and more beautiful than that.

The wisdom here seems to be a common theme in another classic Daoist text, Zhuangzi. All human (or Wookiee or droid) perspectives are inherently limited. When you become too attached to your own perspective on the world, you are closing yourself off from the beauty of the unexpected. The universe may not always give you what you expect, but if you learn a bit of Zhuangzi’s and Yoda’s wisdom, maybe sometimes it will give you what you need. This is also perhaps a reflection of the Buddhist insight that our desires and expectations can cause suffering.

But what does this have to do with Canto Bight? Everything! Rose and Finn have certain expectations for how their mission is going to go, expectations that are quickly overturned. But they do eventually get back to their friends, and they leave some beneficial effects back on Canto Bight with the Fathiers and the kids, effects that may down the road turn out to be part of that messy, beautiful, unexpected universe. Freeing the Fathiers, in particular, is a metaphor for freeing ourselves from the cages of our own preconceptions. Like the Fathiers, reality cannot be contained.

Sometimes you have to stop fighting change and go with it, whether than means letting the old Jedi Order pass away or doing what you can with what you’ve got on Canto Bight.



The Haters Strike Back

But, the haters will object, this is just bad writing! You can’t set up the audience’s expectations and then willfully thwart them! This violates the rules of storytelling!

My response: What exactly is being upset here? Your expectations for how a Star Wars film has to go? Some theory you have about how writing or storytelling are supposed to work? Did you learn nothing from Luke and Yoda about expectations?

The brilliance of The Last Jedi is that this lesson is as much for the audience and it is for the characters.

I’m not saying creators should just mess with audience expectations for no reason. But I think it’s obvious that The Last Jedi has very good reasons for doing so. And once you understand these reasons, it works well as both a work of art and a philosophical lesson.

And this lesson is nowhere clearer than the Canto Bight sequence, a lesson that it seems many Star Wars fans have not yet learned.