Star Wars: The Last Jedi #2 - Marvel Comics

STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI No. 2, July 2018

Whilst Gary Whitta’s treatment for Issue Two of “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” valiantly tries to portray all the sense-shattering shenanigans of the “2017 American epic space opera film written and directed by Rian Johnson” with its depiction of the First Order preparing "to crush the rebels once and for all” courtesy of Snoke’s formidably-sized fleet, its arguably lifeless storyboarding and ‘by the numbers’ plodding pace must have made many of its 22,281 readers wondering just why they bothered purchasing the official “Marvel Worldwide” movie adaptation. In fact, due to this publication’s battle scenes set around the Resistance Cruiser the Raddus lacking much in the way of sound effects, momentous motion or more than a pair of attacking Tie Fighters, it is actually difficult to even glean just why General Organa’s flagship was so disastrously damaged by enemy “torpedos inbound”, or how in the preceding panels Po Dameron’s X-Wing is literally blown to smithereens whilst still inside its hanger bay without Leia’s forces apparently ever firing a single shot in anger..?

Certainly, this brief summarisation of the wider conflict, somewhat amateurishly-pencilled by Michael Walsh, makes Admiral Gial Ackbar’s shocking death debatably all the more ignoble, as its brevity seemingly shows “the foremost military commander of the Rebel Alliance” panicking in the face of only three enemy fighters to the point where he commands “all craft full ahead! Concentrate rear shields” so as to supposedly neutralise their threat, and subsequently then sees his opponent fatally penetrate his presumably undefended bridge with a couple missiles; “It’s been an honour serving with you all.” Such ludicrously-poor decision-making is hardly the sort of strategic thinking one would expect from a Mon Calamari who lead “a small under-equipped navy” to successfully defeat the might of Darth Sidious’ Galactic Empire.

Fortunately, the “English-born American screenwriter” does manage to at least inject a few “added parts that we didn’t see” on the ‘Big Screen’ into this twenty-page periodical’s script, most notably Organa’s steel-willed determination not to have her “lifetime spent fighting, resisting, surviving” suddenly ended in the vacuum of outer space. This particular ‘insight’ is pure Carrie Fisher’s character, and it’s resultantly easy to hear the Saturn Award-nominated actress’s voice defiantly shouting out the line “The End? Like Hell” as she briefly considers whether this is indeed to be her fate, and emphatically decides to utilise the Force to float “back to the ship” safely.

Writer: Gary Whitta, Artist: Michael Walsh, and Colorist: Mike Spicer