Why Star Wars: The Last Jedi being 'Marvel funny' is a really good thing

So we've seen The Last Jedi now. There were oohs, there were aahs. There were 'Is that..?'s. There were hands over mouths, there was laughter. There was, at one particular scene, just collective, unprompted applause. As we left, the cinema was buzzing with smiling faces and a job well done. It was fun. It's a fun film.

With all actual, detailed reviews being embargoed till yesterday (December 12), however, we were only permitted to send vague first impressions to our social feed after the advanced screening we watched on Monday. So I fired this off on Twitter, then went to sleep.

Booting up the next morning to the '99+' notifications symbol is usually followed by a gulp, and sure enough my feed had been deluged with lots of people with one, very strong opinion: they really don't want Star Wars to be funny…

"Oh please f**king god no"

"This is not what we want or deserve"

"Star Wars is cancelled"

"I got a baaaaad feeling about this"

"Not this funny crap again"

"This sounds atrocious"

"That's it, I'm not watching the new Star Wars"

"Marvel movies suck"

"The tiny interest I had in seeing this just died"

"Marvel, funny, Star Wars, gag... Cinema is dead, bury it"

"We're f**ked then, aren't we?"

"Nooooooo"

"Don't touch my Star Wars okay! Humour is okay, but Star Wars was and will always be an action drama genre, not action comedy."

I'll spare you the hundreds more.

I know this is a social vacuum, and there were some very funny GIFs and responses among the strong opinion, but I've long been wondering who actually watches Marvel movies if 'everyone' seems to hate them so much.

They all make billions of dollars and are held up as THE example of how to do a movie blockbuster while everyone else supposedly flounders around trying to repeat its success. But no, apparently 'Marvel is cancer'. (That's a quote, although not mine.)

Now every time a Star Wars film comes out, there's ridiculous bluster. We're all guilty. Is it not time to just accept that Star Wars will always be a product of its time, and simply enjoy it on those terms?

Whereas the original trilogy was informed by the mainstream boy's-own buddy flicks of the '70s and the minimalist and austere science fiction of 2001 and Alien, the prequel series arose as CGI and Pixar was on the rise, with kids not blinking an eyelid at completely computer-generated characters and children with zero acting skills. They were different for a reason. The Last Jedi is no different.

Let's remember, that's what Star Wars are at their heart: kids' films. I know every so often you need to remind yourself of it, as they generally do such a great job of cloaking it, but if you're over 18, you're not the primary target market for these movies – a point made cleverly but quite explicitly in The Last Jedi's final scenes.

The fact that it continues to work so well for grown-ups at all is a feat of Simpsons-esque genius that Disney and Marvel seem to keep pulling off, but have been doing for so long now that people seem to take it for granted.

Related: What the critics are saying about The Last Jedi

It really wasn't that long ago that Deadpool was being declared an X-rated superheroic comedy masterwork. I would argue that Iron Man and Guardians of the Galaxy are not just exciting adventures and excellent births of franchises, but two of the best comedies in mainstream cinema of the last decade.

Yet now apparently Marvel can't do comedy?

And make no mistake, that's what Disney is balancing with Star Wars now – it has one huge, multibillion-selling modern movie franchise in the Avengers, with a tried and tested formula for fun and, let's not sugar-coat it, fun-time dollars.

If the initial Star Wars reboot sowed the seeds, with Force Awakens and Rogue One segueing us into the SCU, a Star Wars Cinematic Universe, The Last Jedi is another step on in the Avengers-isation of Star Wars.

So yes, there are a large number of one-liners – indeed, the film's opening exchange is actually one long Bart Simpson phone prank, made all the funnier by Ade Edmondson having a major part. Obviously for kids he's just a scary British guy – like Johnny Briggs' dad in the originals – but for those of us who grew up on The Young Ones and Bottom, it's a lovely nod and far more rewarding than knowing that Daniel Craig was one of the stormtroopers.

There are people falling over that are clear slapstick prompts for audience guffaws, too. Indeed, Luke tells a joke that's up there with Han's finest. I KNOW!

The reaction is particularly odd as director Rian Johnson has been very upfront about the gag count in the press for the film. Speaking to iO9, he said:

"There's a lot of humour in the movie. I mean, we have jokes. We have flat-out jokes in the film... I think the part of the fan base that's closer to my age, you tend to start thinking of what you'd want in a Star Wars movie in terms of the opera of it, and the seriousness of it. That's a big and important element of it and I think we definitely served that in this movie, but it's important to then remember, you know, Salacious Crumb [Laughs], and it's important to remember the other side of these movies, which is fun."

And that's the point. This is still resolutely Star Wars. The original trilogy was really funny. You could argue Star Wars invented 'Marvel funny', and is only now reclaiming it after years in the 'why so serious?' wilderness.

Sure, most of it was Han being a goof, for which John Boyega has happily taken the baton, but there's some great physical and clever humour in those films. Let's not forget Obi-Wan's 'These are not the droids you're looking for' was a comedy skit. But The Last Jedi is also full of emotion, stunning set-pieces and a consistency of narrative.

Like most modern blockbusters, including Marvel's, The Last Jedi is also too long and could easily have a fair bit of the middle cut out. It has so many characters that it spends a lot of time finding something for all of them to do (which it does, to be fair, but at the expense, for this viewer, of caring about them much).

It also has the current blockbuster issue of needing to be every movie all at once, so rather than this be the Empire arc of the series, it's actually all of the original trilogy again, with the slow start and dark finish of the 1980 classic corrected for easier standalone digestion.

But of the few issues I have with The Last Jedi, the humour isn't one of them. I laughed a lot. So sue me. I think if we go on the genuine LOLs either side of me for much of the film, I think a lot of you will laugh a lot, too. It's a fun film.

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