That was something that was really, really important to me. That’s part of what I enjoy in movies. It’s part of what I enjoy in Star Wars. I think about Han and Leia and Luke wisecracking their way through the Death Star. The movies always had that sense of humor. Especially coming into the middle chapter, it has a stigma of always being darker. I knew it was going to get darker in some spots just because of what we had to do. It was really important to me, to, at the very outset, make a bold statement of, we’re going to have
fun here also. Relax, you can laugh with it also, this isn’t just going to be a dirge.
Johnson also mentions being nervous about audiences’ reactions to the joke in the film’s opening sequence and using that as a means to tell moviegoers that his film will be
fun, not just dark and gloomy.
That was the one thing I was most nervous about [the premiere] because we never tested these movies. This was the first time I’ve watched it with a crowd bigger than 10 or 15 people. The one thing that you can never know until you put it in front of a big crowd of strangers is if the jokes play or not. So I was very relieved when we got the laughs. Oh, that very first scene.
That was really the one that was just, I was holding my girlfriend’s hand very tightly when that came up. Then I relaxed when the audience got it and started rolling with it. It’s so important to me because that sets the tone and the expectation that, oh, O.K. there are going to be laughs in this movie.
The Last Jedi is certainly an original tale that only borrows elements from past films, instead of rehashing them as
The Force Awakens was criticized for doing, but it’s not without flaws. A common complaint among those who disliked Lucasfilm’s latest Star Wars outing was the sophomoric humor and starting the film off with an atypical joke for the overarching saga. While Johnson has his reasons for adding in that type of humor throughout
The Last Jedi, providing levity arguably where they didn’t need to be any, not all audiences seem to be sharing his enthusiasm for the jokes.