Laura Dern Deserved Better in 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi'

FYI This post contains spoilers, and if you haven’t seen 'The Last Jedi' yet, I highly recommend finding the time to do so ASAP!

But my initial response to The Last Jedi was confusion. The film’s two and a half hours—the longest runtime in Star Wars history—were full of both cinematic victories and defeats, and I wasn’t sure if the good outweighed the bad. For every Rogue One-esque emotional high, there seemed to be a corresponding "yousa in big doo doo" clunker. The "Marvel funny" humor felt fine up until BB-8—the smol, round R2D2—saves Finn and Rose from a battalion of stormtroopers and collapsing star destroyers by piloting another, bigger robot that has legs. (Who does this droid think he is—Baby Groot?) My wariness evolved into a full-body eyeroll when Rose and Finn were shoehorned into an absurd romance.

Despite these flaws, The Last Jedi is a new take—and a brilliantly compelling one because it burns all the idols of the old franchise.

The Force Awakens left audiences on the green islands of Ahch-To, where Rey finally finds Luke Skywalker and offers him his long-lost lightsaber. Without skipping a beat, our first look at Luke in The Last Jedi is when he takes that lightsaber from Rey and throws it over his shoulder and off a cliff. It’s this same attitude—an earned haughtiness and shirking of expectation— that director Rian Johnson is flexing continuously throughout the film.

Where The Force Awakens depicted Supreme Leader Snoke as an indestructible and mysterious villain who might be part of an ancient and powerful order even older than the Jedi or Sith, The Last Jedi kills him immediately without exploring any of his background. (A brilliant move, in my opinion. We don’t need backstories for everyone—in fact, we know almost nothing about the history of Han Solo, one of the greatest Star Wars characters of all time.) And where the last installment artfully built up the mystery of Rey’s parentage, the new one offers a democratization of the Force, revealing that Rey does not come from a bloodline of Jedi like the Skywalkers, but instead, has anonymous, crappy, and likely dead parents. Time and time again, we’re presented with a seemingly predictable story arc, only to have Johnson playfully throw it away like a Jedi Master who knows better but can’t tell us why just yet.

I applaud this satisfyingly cavalier approach, but it doesn’t work for one particular character in The Last Jedi: Laura Dern’s Vice Admiral Holdo.

Dern plays Vice Admiral Holdo, a purple-haired war hero who in the novel expresses that she finds Leia’s attraction to "humanoid males" to be "limiting." After a First Order attack leaves Leia in a coma of sorts, it’s up to Holdo to lead the Rebel forces safely out of Kylo Ren’s reach.

There aren’t many explicit clues that Holdo is queer in the movie, but those of us susceptible to queerbaiting and practiced in the art of shipping saw some familiar signs:

• She has purple hair.
• There is a moment where Poe says that given the legends about her, Holdo is "not what [he] expected." (He thought she was a man.)
• She is immune to Poe’s charms: "I’ve dealt with plenty of trigger-happy flyboys like you. You’re impulsive (takes a flirty beat to lean in) dangerous (pause for effect) and the last thing we need right now. So stick to your post and follow my orders."
• She and Leia finish each other’s sentences and hint at their lengthy friendship, suggesting a closeness that, in a queer female storyline, would blossom into a tragically unrequited love.
• She and Leia share a lingering handshake.
• She all but sacrifices her life for Leia. (Yes, she technically sacrifices herself for all the Rebels, but Leia is their leader and she does tell her: "You taught me how.")

She is so cryptic about her plans—or so committed to looking dumb or evil—that once someone (Rose) is able to break down the First Order’s tracking technology, the crew (primarily Poe) keeps the information from the seemingly untrustworthy Holdo and mutinies against her. This is extremely frustrating to even children in the audience: Why won’t Holdo simply talk to Poe? Does she care at all whether the rebels live?

It’s revealed that—although she chose not to share this information with anyone onboard the ship for no apparent reason—Holdo equipped transporter ships with cloaking devices that would allow the rebels to escape undetected. At this point, Leia wakes from her coma and stun-guns Poe for daring to question Holdo’s idiotic choice to keep her smart plan a total secret.

Once the rebels are prepared to enact her plan, however, Holdo tells Leia that they must flee without her, for she must sacrifice her life to stay behind and pilot the gigantic, empty ship. (This makes sense in theory but felt dumb onscreen—she isn’t shown doing any piloting, instead simply staring out the window to say: "Godspeed, rebels.") Leia defends Holdo's secrecy by explaining she simply wasn't concerned with looking like a hero—a flimsy and myopic excuse. No rebel cared whether Holdo seemed heroic—they just wanted to know she had a plan to keep them alive!

After a meandering plot implausibly leads to Benicio Del Toro alerting the First Order to Holdo’s secret escape ships, she decides to save them by sacrificing herself and flying the cruiser into Snoke’s ship (named The Supremacy lol) at lightspeed.

Her moment of impact is stunning and unlike anything else in the Star Wars universe: black-and-white stills flash on the screen in silence before the score swells back in. But Holdo’s death leaves many questions: Why didn’t she tell Poe or anyone else her plans? What is her relationship with Leia? Why did she immediately volunteer to die standing quietly on her ship?

While it’s admirable that Johnson tried to invert our expectations of Holdo, she could have seemed less like the stereotypical tragic queer girl destined for death with a few simple fixes:

• Give us a motive for Holdo’s secrecy. If she had suspected that the rebels were being tracked through hyperspeed because there was a spy in their midst, it would have made total sense that she wouldn’t want to say anything.
• Explicate and expedite her suicide cause so it was clearer she was dying as a noble sacrifice. Perhaps she was originally planning a hyperspace jump to another system to draw the fleet away? There are endless possibilities we can imagine for someone choosing to spend time on a starship alone in the face of certain death. Why were we given none of them?

Vice Admiral Holdo did not die in vain: her key scene might contain the most beautiful imagery in all of Star Wars. But Laura Dern deserves better than a queerbaiting character we spend most of the time disliking.